Giacomo Puccini
La Bohème
LIVE IN HD
Overview
With its enchanting setting and spellbinding score, the world’s most popular opera is as timeless as it is heartbreaking. Franco Zeffirelli’s picture-perfect production brings 19th-century Paris to the Met stage as Puccini’s young friends and lovers navigate the joy and struggle of bohemian life. Soprano Juliana Grigoryan is the feeble seamstress Mimì, opposite tenor Freddie De Tommaso as the ardent poet Rodolfo. Keri-Lynn Wilson conducts the November 8 performance, which will be transmitted live from the Met stage to cinemas worldwide. This live cinema transmission is part of the Met’s award-winning Live in HD series, bringing opera to movie theaters across the globe.
English StreamText captioning is available for the Met’s transmission of La Bohème here. A transcript of the transmission will also be available to view after the live performance.
Production a gift of Mrs. Donald D. Harrington
Revival a gift of the Metropolitan Opera Club
The Met is grateful to C. Graham Berwind, III for sponsoring the refurbishment of the La Bohème sets
SUNG IN
ITALIAN
Timeline
Timeline for the show, La Bohème
ESTIMATED RUN TIME
3 HRS 30 MINS, WITH TWO INTERMISSIONS
Cast
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World premiere: Teatro Regio, Turin, 1896. La Bohème, the passionate, timeless, and indelible story of love among young artists in Paris, can stake its claim as the world’s most popular opera. It has a marvelous ability to make a powerful first impression and to reveal unsuspected treasures after dozens of hearings. At first glance, La Bohème is the definitive depiction of the joys and sorrows of love and loss; on closer inspection, it reveals the deep emotional significance hidden in the trivial things—a bonnet, an old overcoat, a chance meeting with a neighbor—that make up our everyday lives.
Creators
Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924) was immensely popular in his own lifetime, and his mature works remain staples in the repertory of most of the world’s opera companies. His librettists for La Bohème, Giuseppe Giacosa (1847–1906) and Luigi Illica (1857–1919), also collaborated with him on his next two operas, Tosca and Madama Butterfly. Giacosa, a dramatist, was responsible for the stories and Illica, a poet, worked primarily on the words themselves.
PRODUCTION
Franco Zeffirelli
SET DESIGNER
Franco Zeffirelli
COSTUME DESIGNER
Peter J. Hall
LIGHTING DESIGNER
Gil Wechsler
COMPOSER
Giacomo Puccini
Setting
The libretto sets the action in Paris, circa 1830. This is not a random setting, but rather reflects the issues and concerns of a particular time when, following the upheavals of revolution and war, French artists had lost their traditional support base of aristocracy and church. The story centers on self-conscious youth at odds with mainstream society—a bohemian ambience that is clearly recognizable in any modern urban center. La Bohème captures this ethos in its earliest days.
Music
Lyrical and touchingly beautiful, the score of La Bohème exerts an immediate emotional pull. Many of its most memorable melodies are built incrementally, with small intervals between the notes that carry the listener with them on their lyrical path. This is a distinct contrast to the grand leaps and dives that earlier operas often depended on for emotional effect. La Bohème’s melodic structure perfectly captures the “small people” (as Puccini called them) of the drama and the details of everyday life.
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