The story of La bohème is acquainted to most opera followers as a tragic love story between two {couples}. Director Kristine McIntyre thinks this opera can also be a few completely different form of love. Discover her ideas on this timeless story within the Director’s Notes beneath.
Study extra about La bohème, on stage on the Ellie Caulkins Opera Home from February 22-March 2.>>
La bohème is a love story. Most clearly it’s about Rodolfo and Mimì, who fall in love in Act One proper earlier than our eyes. And it’s additionally about Marcello and Musetta, with their off-again, on-again romance that one virtually wants a scorecard to observe. However actually, it’s a love story about youth – a few explicit time in a single’s life and the closest group of associates you’ll ever have. It’s a few time so treasured and fleeting that even when you are dwelling it, you’ve the sense that it’s going to by no means come once more.
The title refers back to the way of life of the nineteenth-century artists and freethinkers who had been consciously dwelling exterior the main-stream, who selected to not be a part of the rising center class and as a substitute pursue lives centered round artwork and concepts. And whereas many have written about it since, we owe our conception of Bohemia virtually totally to at least one man: Henri Murger.
In 1851, Murger printed Scènes de la vie de bohème, a sequence of loosely related tales primarily based on his life in Paris, the place the distinctive mixture of intellectuals, College college students, and artists made Bohemia attainable. All of them lived in the identical areas, went to the identical cafés, and had one factor in frequent: they had been all poor. You can not discover Bohemia on a map of town, he wrote, however it’s “bordered on the north by chilly, on the west by starvation, on the south by love, and on the east by hope.”
Puccini and his librettists, Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica, could by no means have lived in Murger’s Bohemia, however they actually had super sympathy for its inhabitants. They gave us an opera that celebrates youthful exuberance and joie de vivre and contrasts it so successfully with poverty, distress, and the trials of every day existence. That is the darker aspect of Bohemia, a spot identified all-too-well by the ladies within the story, and it’s by no means distant. Time in Bohemia is brief. Colline is the primary to reach at its borders, and we sense that the others will quickly observe. So stay life when you can, construct your castles within the air and attain for the moon, particularly when it casts its mild on the stunning younger lady standing in your garret.
Notes written by Kristine McIntyre, Stage Director for Opera Colorado’s 2025 manufacturing of La bohème.
