Organization

Conductor

Eun Sun Kim

Carlo Rizzi

Stage director

Franco Zeffirelli

Set designer

Costume designer

Peter J Hall

Lighting designer

Gil Wechsler

Singer

Soprano

Anita Hartig

Mimi

Maria Agresta

Eleonora Buratto

Tenor

Charles Castronovo

Rodolfo

Yusif Eyvazov

Federica Lombardi

Musetta

Gabriella Reyes

Aleksandra Kurzak

Baritone

Artur Rucinski

Marcello

Joo Won Kang

Lucas Meachem

Quinn Kelsey

Alexander Birch Elliott

Schaunard

Iurii Samoilov

Bass

Nicholas Brownlee

Colline

Ryan Speedo Green

Peter Kellner

Nicolas Testé

Donald Maxwell

Benoît

Alcindoro

Libretto

Giuseppe Giacosa

Luigi Illica

The Metropolitan Opera

Lincoln Center

Italian

La bohème

New York City

United States

Metropolitan Opera House

La bohème Puccini

Public

Private

La Bohème

German

English

Spanish

Approved

La Bohème: Trailer

“The whole cast was strong,” raved The New York Times about our starry revival of Puccini’s La Bohème. Returning to the stage tonight, November 13, tenor Charles Castronovo and soprano Anita Hartig star as the bohemian lovers Rodolfo and Mimì, headlining Franco Zeffirelli’s passionate staging. Maestro Eun Sun Kim conducts.
Buy tickets: bit.ly/2Zx8O9b
Videography by Pete Scalzitti

Puccini's La Bohème

The Met celebrates the 40th anniversary of Franco Zeffirelli’s beloved staging with three exceptional casts appearing as Puccini’s young bohemians. Sopranos Anita Hartig, Maria Agresta, and Eleonora Buratto trade off as the ill-fated seamstress Mimì, alongside tenors Charles Castronovo and Yusif Eyvazov as her lover, the poet Rodolfo. Sopranos Federica Lombardi, Gabriella Reyes, and Aleksandra Kurzak and baritones Artur Ruciński, Lucas Meachem, and Quinn Kelsey are the on-again-off-again pair Musetta and Marcello, with Eun Sun Kim and Carlo Rizzi conducting.

World premiere: Teatro Regio, Turin, 1896. La Bohème, the passionate, timeless, and indelible story of love among young artists in Paris, can stake its claim as the world’s most popular opera. It has a marvelous ability to make a powerful first impression and to reveal unsuspected treasures after dozens of hearings. At first glance, La Bohème is the definitive depiction of the joys and sorrows of love and loss; on closer inspection, it reveals the deep emotional significance hidden in the trivial things—a bonnet, an old overcoat, a chance meeting with a neighbor—that make up our everyday lives.

Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924) was immensely popular in his own lifetime, and his mature works remain staples in the repertory of most of the world’s opera companies. His librettists for La Bohème, Giuseppe Giacosa (1847–1906) and Luigi Illica (1857–1919), also collaborated with him on his next two operas, Tosca and Madama Butterfly. Giacosa, a dramatist, was responsible for the stories and Illica, a poet, worked primarily on the words themselves.
The libretto sets the action in Paris, circa 1830. This is not a random setting, but rather reflects the issues and concerns of a particular time when, following the upheavals of revolution and war, French artists had lost their traditional support base of aristocracy and church. The story centers on self-conscious youth at odds with mainstream society—a Bohemian ambience that is clearly recognizable in any modern urban center. La Bohème captures this ethos in its earliest days.

Lyrical and touchingly beautiful, the score of La Bohème exerts an immediate emotional pull. Many of its most memorable melodies are built incrementally, with small intervals between the notes that carry the listener with them on their lyrical path. This is a distinct contrast to the grand leaps and dives that earlier operas often depended on for emotional effect. La Bohème’s melodic structure perfectly captures the “small people” (as Puccini called them) of the drama and the details of everyday life.

Performance credits (Cast & Crew )

Cast

Crew

Co-Producer