La Bohème at Shanghai Grand Theatre

One of the operas performed most frequently all over the world, Giacomo Puccini’s La bohème will have its grand premiere in 2012 at the Salzburg Festival – its brilliance already ensured by the star cast led by conductor Daniele Gatti. “With the second opera premiere of the Vienna Philharmonic, I would like to break a spell which seems to have decreed that Giacomo Puccini is anathema to the Salzburg Festival – a fact I have never understood. Ever since this Festival was founded, there has been only one Tosca and one Turandot production, and none of his other works were ever put on the program,” Artistic Director Alexander Pereira states.

Puccini and his librettists gave a musical and dramaturgical treatment to the tales of Henri Murger, who had memorialized the life of Parisian artists and Bohemians in the serialized novel Scènes de la vie de bohème in the mid-19th century. However, the work hardly has a plot in the stricter sense. As in a film, scenes, images and impressions flit past the viewer. Like snapshots, momentary images record the pact of friendship between four young individualists in the metropolis of Paris: Rodolfo writing, Colline philosophizing, Marcello painting, and Schaunard, who has turned towards music. Into this artists’ idyll, Rodolfo introduces fragile Mimì – who, however, does not seem cut out for the life of the bohemians…


The main goal of Italian stage director Damiano Michieletto is to find a contemporary form for the story and to capture the attitude towards life of young people today: those who stand up for their passions, pursue their visions and dare to seek out new paths in art – even if they fail grandly.