A glimpse of the life of Parisian youth at the end of the nineteenth century, La bohème by Giacomo Puccini made its debut at the Teatro Regio in Turin on February 1, 1896, on the podium the 29-year-old Arturo Toscanini. Puccini looks at the latest Verdi, outlining a dramaturgically and musically very free structure, with an easy succession between arias and recitatives that allows him to paint a picture of profound realism in which four boys are protagonists struggling with the inexorable fleetingness of time.

Teatro Comunale di Bologna production

DIRECTOR’S NOTES

La bohème is a work for actors-singers, all based as it is on the word; it is absolutely not spectacular. A great work of art: for this reason it is always worthwhile to return to question it, to work on it; something that doesn’t happen with other titles. If at first La bohème appears a bit impervious to new points of view, and seems to be just what it is, examining it in detail reveals an admirable construction. Everything is so precise and meticulous: words, music, dramaturgy, a perfect (not mechanical, however) mechanism. And to think that after the first performance, in 1896 at the Regio in Turin, some contemporaries, especially among the critics, were perplexed, they felt a lack of melody and an absolute prevalence of declamation, an excess of chatter. What nonsense! The libretto is a marvel: much worked on the verbal front, it is always kept in the foreground. The four friends lead a life that is expressed through a virtuosic use of the language; Mimi seems naive and simple, but with her natural intelligence she makes fun of their intellectual poses, their verbal refinements. La bohème is crossed by a strong current of self-irony, something that is rarely found in Italian opera.

Graham Vick

Extract from the interview A matter of life or death
by Jacopo Pellegrino to Graham Vick

PRESENTING PARTNER

CAST

COMPOSER