La Bohème - Schedule, Program & Tickets

Text Giuseppe Giacosa & Luigi Illica after Henri Murger

Opera in four scenes


Musical direction
Eun Sun Kim

Staging and stage
Franco Zeffirelli

Costumes
Marcel Escoffier

Rodolfo
Benjamin Bernheim

Mimì
Rachel Willis-Sørensen

Marcello
Boris Pinkhasovich

Schaunard
Michael Arivony

Colline
Peter Kellner

Musetta
Slávka Zámečníková


Contents

The literary basis for La Bohème, which premiered in Turin in 1896 under Arturo Toscanini, is a highly successful episodic novel by the French author Henri Murger. Here the composer Giacomo Puccini rediscovered the atmosphere of his own nostalgically transfigured student years: »Here I found everything I was looking for and love: originality, youth, passion, humour, the tears shed in secret and love that Brings joy and sorrow.« Together with his librettist, he condensed the loose sequence of images of the original plot to around two hours, designed plastic character portraits of his young Parisian city heroes, who he also allowed to act in musically precisely outlined social spaces, and thus brought all facets of the material to sound. The story of the terminally ill Mimì, who is able to experience the happiness of a great love in the midst of poverty and illness, soon became a long-running hit on the international schedule. This is also the case in Vienna: the opera has now been performed around a thousand times in the Haus am Ring, making it one of the most successful works of all.


Subject to change.