Who am I? I'm a poet. What do I do? I write and how do I live? I live
- Rodolfo, Acte I
Is it because Murger had himself lived this way in his youth? No one better described the half-starved, struggling artists than the writer in his Scènes de la Vie de Bohème: artists ready to burn a manuscript to try to keep warm yet,in an era of triumphant bourgeois materialism, dreaming of another existence. Taking up these scenes of Bohemian life, Puccini offers us a heart-breaking love story and some of the most beautiful music in the history of opera in the story of the poet Rodolfo and fragile Mimi. The staging of this new production has been entrusted to Claus Guth who sets the drama in a future devoid of hope in which love and art become the sole means of transcendence.
