The Opera Balet Ljubljana Presents:

Giacomo Puccini”s

LA BOHÈME

An Opera in Four Acts

A Repeat Performance from the Season 2005 / 2006 (Premiere: 16th March 2006)

One of the most popular operas of the entire opera repertoire was inspired by the novel Scènes de la vie de bohème by Henry Murger and remade for the libretto by the Italians Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa. Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924) created a stunning musical illustration of the lives of Parisian bohemians, full of hopes and dreams, joys and disappointments.

La bohème was first performed on 1st February 1896 at the Teatro Regio in Turin. It was conducted by the young Arturo Toscanini. The opera was not a glorious success at all. Although it was well received by the audience, the critics found it too cheap and sentimental. Today, La bohème is constantly performed by all the opera theatres around the world. Its success with the audience is hidden in its wonderful melodies, well-founded plot and sophisticated mixture of pleasure and pain. Many opera connoisseurs find La bohème Puccini’s best work, in which his incredible talent for creating melodies convincingly intertwines with the impressionist musical and dramatic procedures as well as with his unmistakable sense of details.

La bohème was first performed in Ljubljana’s German Theatre already in 1898 and first staged with the Slovene authors in 1903 (the production was conducted by H. Benišek and directed by F. Lier). This performance, premiered in the season 2005/2006, is already a fourteenth in a row. Although the audience usually takes this opera for romantic and full of emotion, the director Vinko Möderndorfer decided to expose in it the cruelty and poverty of the artistic life as well. He also updated the theme and adapted it to our environment and time. Thus he interlaced the realistic scenes of the bohemian life with the dreamy and symbolic world of puppets.