La Bohème

Musical direction: Marco Armiliato
Production and stage: Franco Zeffirelli

The literary model for La Bohème, which premiered in Turin in 1896 under Arturo Toscanini, is the highly successful episodic novel by French author Henri Murger. In it, composer Giacomo Puccini rediscovered the atmosphere of his own blissfully nostalgic years as a student: »Here I found everything I was looking for and loved: origin, youth, passion, humour, tears shed in secret, and love that brings joy and sorrow.« Together with his librettists, he condensed the loose sequence of pictures of the original plot to a two-hour play and created tangible character portraits of his young Parisian urban heroes, whom he then had act in social settings that were precisely outlined by music, thus lending sound to all the facets of the material. The story of the terminally ill Mimì, who is allowed to experience the happiness a great love brings in the midst of poverty and illness, soon became a staple on international repertoires. The same is true for Vienna: the opera has been performed roughly a thousand times at the State Opera and is thus one of the most successful works ever.