Représentation Lyrique - La Bohème de Puccini

Orchestra of the Opéra national de Nancy-Lorraine
Opéra national de Nancy-Lorraine and Opéra de Dijon choruses
Children's Choir of the Conservatoire régional du Grand Nancy
Musical Director: Marta Gardolinska
Stage director: David Geselson

Living on love and art in an icy garret, laughing at misery and using levity as a weapon against the adversity of fate: this is the foolish gamble of the characters in Scènes de la vie de bohème (1851), the short novel by Henry Murger that later inspired Puccini's opera (1895). By showing "bohemians" dreaming and failing in their lives, Puccini and his librettists hijacked the success story imagined by Murger. La Bohème is a negative, disillusioned Christmas tale, exalting the sublime tragedy that is so operatic (and inevitably so lachrymal too) that it touches the heart of the spectator. David Geselson's staging places his Bohème in the perspective of the revolutionary movements of the 19th century, with Delacroix as a political and pictorial reference. Mimì and Musetta are the emblematic figures of this social freedom, which seeks to triumph in death and love respectively. In so doing, he reveals in these two women a poignant form of commitment: that of loving and existing fully, even when the outcome is known in advance and everything seems to be working against the possibility of future happiness.

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