With its enchanting setting and spellbinding score, La Bohème is as timeless as it is heartbreaking. Franco Zeffirelli’s picture-perfect production brings 19th-century Paris to the Met stage as a group of young friends and lovers navigate the joy and struggle of bohemian life.
Synopsis:
Paris, at the end of the 19th century. A group of penniless students count on the joys of life for a little relief from their daily misery, as eating, keeping warm and paying the rent are a luxury! With her tenderness, the seamstress Mimi offers a little warmth and light to the poet Rodolfo. The two fall in love at first sight and tell their friends about their love on Christmas Eve. As for Marcello the painter and his saucy mistress Musetta, who are used to bickering, they form a contrasting couple full of humour, compared to the more melodramatic pair of Mimi and Rodolfo, who eventually break up because they no longer get along. In fact, Mimi knows she has tuberculosis and will soon die. Even though they have parted ways, she returns to die by Rodolfo’s side, among their bohemian friends, who can do nothing to cure her.
Considered the world’s most popular opera, La Bohème has a marvelous ability to make a powerful first impression and to reveal unsuspected treasures after dozens of hearings. At first glance, it 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.
Soprano Juliana Grigoryan is the feeble seamstress Mimì, opposite tenor Freddie De Tommaso as the ardent poet Rodolfo. Keri-Lynn Wilson conducts the MET Live in HD performance.
This encore presentation is part of the Met’s award-winning Live in HD series, bringing opera to movie theaters across the globe.
