The process is reversed between acts, but this time when the cafe set slides in from the side, it's crowded with people, and the "sky" is pulled up out of sight so the whole street scene is visible. Then the garret arrives on another wagon from stage left and the music begins. The front of the cafe slides off to stage right on a rolling platform called a "wagon," the houses are pushed back, and a gray gauze scrim representing the sky comes down to hide the rear half of the set. "They need 12 minutes of focus so it can just come out and be ready to go," he said.Ībout 15 minutes before show time, Act II disappears. The reverse order is necessary, Diaz explained, so that lighting cues for the street scene can be tested ahead of time. ("Organized chaos," is how he described it with a laugh.) "We do it backwards - Act II first, then Act I," said Diaz, who was overseeing backstage work before a performance last week as about 50 carpenters, electricians and painters buzzed about the set. Only when she is dying, does Rodolfo return to her side, now unable to revive the cold hand he had held at their first meeting.There's a secret to the rapid scene change that the audience never guesses: The second-act set is put together onstage long before the opera even begins. Rodolfo abandons her, not because he does not care for her penniless, he simply does not have the means to save her. Misplaced jealousies, as well as Mimì’s poor health, drives a wedge between the two lovers. Happiness, however, is not to be their destiny. In one of the gentlest encounters in all opera, Rodolfo, an impoverished writer, and Mimì, a seamstress, fall in love with each other following a fleeting touch of hands in the dark in the Parisian garret he shares with his three bohemian friends. Based on Henri Murger’s collection of short narrative sketches, Scènes de la vie de bohème, Giacomo Puccini’s opera eschews storytelling on a grand scale to focus on the intimacy of the relationships between its characters.įirst performed at the Teatro Regio in Turin on 1 February 1896, La bohème is a compelling and emotional musical exploration of the nature of love.
La bohème, more than any other opera of the nineteenth century, is so freshly reminiscent of modern literature that it could have been written yesterday.
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