San Francisco Opera Opens Summer Season with LA BOHÈME

San Francisco Opera’s 2025 Summer Season opens June 3 with one of opera’s all-time classics, Giacomo Puccini’s La Bohème in director John Caird’s “elegant staging” (Mercury News). Ramón Tebar conducts the San Francisco Opera Orchestra and two brilliant casts in nine performances through June 21. John Keene, the Company’s Chorus Director, prepares the San Francisco Opera Chorus.

Based on French writer Henri Murger’s autobiographical Scènes de la vie de bohème, Puccini’s opera follows the lives and loves of a group of impoverished Parisian artists. Nearly 130 years after its world premiere in Italy, La Bohème is among the most popular and frequently performed operas in the repertoire. San Francisco Opera opened its inaugural season in 1923 with La Bohème, conducted by Company founder Gaetano Merola.

Caird’s staging, inspired by the pictorial world of Belle Époque artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, is a co-production between San Francisco Opera, Houston Grand Opera and Canadian Opera Company and was first presented here in 2014 and revived in 2017. The presentation showcases the work of production designer David Farley, lighting designer Michael Clark and is directed in revival by Katherine M. Carter.