Their two other housemates Colline and Schaunard return. Rodolfo and Marcello, two of the four artists living together in this cramped space, are desperate to keep warm going as far as to burn Rodolfo’s latest play. The curtain rises on a dismal garret in Paris on Christmas Eve, the late 1830s.

The Act I Garret © Tim Trumble/Arizona Opera We hope you come to adore it as much as we do! In Brief It’s an easy opera to love, packed with those big tunes and an outstanding balance of the intimate and the spectacular (the curtain up on Act II is regularly an applause getter in many productions).

It also contains some incredible non-narrative scene-setting music, the openings of Acts II and III in particular masterclasses in producing atmosphere through sound. You’ll come to recognise his use of small musical motifs that though not highly structural, cunningly evoke characters and themes throughout the work. It offers all the hallmarks of his canon, soaring tonal melodies in lush orchestrations combined with a dissonant undertow, a hint of darkness never far away. The narrative, set around the late 1830s in Paris, has aged remarkably well with a youthful universality that has endeared it to the opera-going public more or less continuously since its 1896 premiere.īohème was Giacomo Puccini’s fourth opera and is generally considered to be his first fully mature work. It is a triumphant blend of grim reality and soaring romanticism.

La bohème is a warhorse of the operatic repertory, one of the most frequently performed around the world, and for excellent reason. Adolfo Hohenstein's 1896 poster for La bohème

La boheme opera youtube