![]() Their naturalistic acting makes a notable contribution to the scene.Īnd then there are all the people backstage. The supernumeraries have been so well directed. The sheer number of people milling around on stage is incredible. ![]() The Met has spent a fortune on cast, sets and costumes. ![]() The second act in the streets and in the Café Momus has so much going on. There are times when I feel I could go on watching La Bohème for ever. Their voices soar in their solos and duet. Fabiano (perfect for the role) sings with such ardour. Rodolfo, his eyes always fixed on Mimi, has such charm, such tenderness. Puccini gives Rodolfo and Mimi’s first meeting the full romantic intensity. The garret, firmly placed in the roofs and chimney tops of the Latin Quarter, looks like it has been lived in by the four boisterous artists. This performance conducted by Marco Armiliato, and starring Michael Fabiano as Rodolfo and Sonya Yoncheva as Mimi dates from 2018. It is so much more romantic, so much more emotionally involving and it feels like it’s happening in the 1830s. It is vastly superior in every way to Richard Jones’s production for London’s Royal Opera House, which I saw online but three days ago. 40 years on, it is still in the repertoire, having lost none of its theatrical bravado and realistic detail. I sometimes feel I could go on listening to La Bohème for ever.įranco Zeffirelli directed and designed a brilliant production for The Metropolitan, New York in 1981. Puccini, in his sweeping and rapturous score, unashamedly milked the artists’ exuberance and pathos for all they were worth. Murger and Puccini sanitised the Bohemian life, making it more acceptable to a sentimental public. The libretto is based on Henri Murger's autobiographical novel Scenes de La Vie de Bohème, first published in 1848 and dealing with his youthful artistic struggles, which had taken place some twenty years earlier. ![]() Giacomo Puccini’s La Bohème, one of the great tearjerkers and one of the most popular operas in the repertoire, is the quintessential statement on friendship, lovers’ quarrels, dire poverty, consumption and death among the artists of Paris’s Latin Quarter in the 19th century.
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