La Boheme

Depending on the order situation, the penniless poet Rodolfo and his three witty artist friends sometimes live in extreme need, but then again in abundance and fall into a lavish mood. When her neighbor Mimì stops by one day, Rodolfo falls in love with the fragile young woman at first sight. But faced with Mimì's illness, the harshest reality quickly overtakes the life artists.

In a loose sequence of scenes, Puccini and his librettists not only portray a tragically ending love story, but also portray the bohemian subculture in nineteenth-century Paris — with their desire for freedom in social and artistic terms, their self-image as a public scare, their everyday life between exuberant celebration and existential needs: a lifestyle that the composer had also cultivated during his studies. With detailed musical descriptions of the ambiance, Puccini created a new form of veristic melodrama. His haunting and sound-painterly music describes the world of the bohemians and their surroundings just as realistically and meticulously as the emotional life of the characters that originate from it. In poetic images, Lindy Hume presents the work as a nostalgic look back at the carefree but also all too fleeting youth.