La Bohème

About the opera

• Run time: 2hrs 30min, 1 intermission
• Sung in: Italian
• Subtitles: English, German and other languages
• Opera house: Vienna State Opera

Franco Zeffirelli’s sensational production of Puccini’s haunting opera of young love is one of the great classics in the history of the Vienna State Opera. This season Roberta Mantegna is the fragile seamstress Mimì, who instantly falls in love with the poor poet Rodolfo (Freddie De Tommaso).

Maria Nazarova is the flirtatious Musetta, Clemens Unterreiner is her sweetheart Marcello, and Michael Arivony as Schaunard and Günther Groissböck as Colline complete the ensemble.

Ticket information

• Select a date an book
• E-Ticket (Print@home)

Vienna State Opera

Address:

Opernring 2, 1010 Vienna, Google Maps

How to get there:

Subway: U1, U2, U4 to Karlsplatz
Trams: 1, 2, D, 62, 71 to Opernring

Music and Libretto

Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924) was enormously popular in his lifetime and is generally regarded as the greatest Italian composer of the post-Verdi generation. An operatic composer with a most original gift for lyrical melody, Puccini possessed a masterful technical savoir-faire and an extraordinary sense of the theatre. Although he created only ten operas in a 40-year career, his mature operas remain a firm part of the operatic repertoire and are among the most popular operas ever written.

His third opera, Manon Lescaut, brought him lasting fame and marked the beginning of a fruitful collaboration with the librettists Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa. Together, they wrote Puccini's three greatest masterpieces: La Bohème (1896), Tosca (1900) and Madama Butterfly (1904). In 1910, the premiere of La Fanciulla del West took place at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Puccini then composed a lighter piece, La Rondine, performed at the Monte-Carlo Opera. In 1918 Il Trittico premiered at the Metropolitan Opera. His last opera, Turandot, remained unfinished.

Puccini’s librettists for La Bohème, Giuseppe Giacosa (1847–1906) and Luigi Illica (1857–1919) adapted for the opera the writings of Henri Murger (1822-1861), a French author who is best known for describing the day-to-day life of struggling artists in Paris during the 1840s.