How can one revisit one of the most frequently performed operas in the world? By projecting it into the future. Puccini's La Bohème—which will be performed at the Paris Opera from September 12 to October 14—invokes the lost loves of Mimi and Rodolfo in a dreamlike space epic. We discussed this with directors Claus Guth and Sébastien Guèze, who staged and performed in an equally futuristic version of La Bohème, broadcast on France Télévisions.

In 2025, what has become of the bohemian lifestyle? This movement has long been associated with young people pursuing the arts, living frugally on love and fresh water under the rooftops of Paris. “Bohemians have nothing and live on everything they have,” wrote Balzac in his short story A Prince of Bohemia. Its young practitioners were already the subject of pastiches at the time. While in the 21st century it continues to be regularly portrayed in film and television to convey a romanticized image of Paris, in reality it now reflects a more bourgeois reality. This obsession with bohemianism in our cultural imagination is a legacy of Puccini's masterpiece, created in 1896.

The Italian composer aspired to immortalize his younger years spent among penniless, rebellious artists, and found the perfect inspiration in Henry Murger's Scènes de la vie de bohème, which tells the story of the thwarted love between the poet Rodolphe and the seamstress Mimi. Like their friends Marcello and Musette, these penniless lovers prefer to keep warm by attending parties, going to cabarets, and loving each other. The outcome? Tragic, of course. After separating for a time, our two heroes are reunited. She dies, choosing love over the security of a wealthy protector. 

The work was an almost immediate success and became one of the greatest hits in the history of opera. Every year, La Bohème continues to attract millions of spectators to theaters. In 2023, it was performed 782 times worldwide, an average of more than twice a day. At first glance, it seems difficult to reinvent the genre. Yet that is precisely what tenor and director Sébastien Guèze and director Claus Guth have set out to do.   

“When I was asked to stage La Bohème, I dragged my feet a little,” he recalls with amusement. “I deeply love Puccini's music, but the story is a web of clichés.” For Claus Guth, these are not penniless artists, confined to languishing in their attic and never knowing fame. The images conveyed by the libretto of La Bohème correspond “to something that has long since ceased to exist, to a cultural Disneyland.”  

With his eyes closed, the director listens to the opera over and over again. "At first, it was a joke, but I told Stéphane Lissner—director of the Paris Opera at the time, editor's note—that it sounded more like floating through space. If you don't worry about the text, [Puccini's work] is more about the power of love and imagination.“ Claus Guth then immersed himself in reading the original novel, Scènes de la vie de bohème by Henry Murger. ”In fact, it's mainly about men reminiscing about their youth. They idealize the past and their memories," he continues.

From there, he imagines moving the action “to a world where Paris probably no longer exists, ravaged by nuclear war or climate crisis.” In Claus Guth's staging, Rodolfo and Marcello live out their last hours in a drifting spaceship. The characters regularly lose themselves in contemplation of a distant planet, Earth. “Day 126. Lost our way. Last reserves exhausted. Mimi returned,” reads the logbook kept by cosmonaut Rodolfo, projected above the stage. 

In his version, La Bohème 2050, broadcast on France TV, Sébastien Guèze propels our protagonists into the corridors of the Palace of Versailles, which has become a refuge from global warming. “Young people who once died of cold under the roofs of Paris now perish from heat,” explains the tenor and director, whose interpretation also highlights the profoundly universal nature of the issues addressed in opera librettos: “They tell stories of love, social inequality, the quest for freedom, and youth.”

And this universality also rhymes with avant-garde, he points out: “La Traviata (adapted from La Dame aux Camélias by Dumas fils, editor's note) invokes a subject that was little or not at all dealt with in the 19th century, prostitution, while Carmen depicts a fiercely free woman.” Sébastien Guèze's approach is no exception to this futuristic tradition, imagining a Bohème that brilliantly questions the effects of the environmental crisis and the excesses of technosolutionism. One of the characters even takes the form of artificial intelligence.

In doing so, he takes the exercise further by taking a gamble on staging an opera that is 80% carbon-free. “The idea behind this work is to present a desirable future, and that required this experiment.” To change people's imaginations, you have to experiment with them, anchor them in reality: “I believe that sobriety, working with limited resources, also goes hand in hand with creative freedom. After all, Mozart lived in a carbon-free world, and that didn't stop him from composing sublime works that have stood the test of time.” And indeed, this ecological gamble does not detract from the beauty of an opera film that is certainly apocalyptic in tone but furiously optimistic.

Pas de deux and pas de côté

While Sébastien Guèze's La Bohème anchors its plot in the impulses of youth, Claus Guth's explores the other side of life. “All that remains for Rodolfo and Marcel,” he explains, “are their memories.” In a black-and-white and pastel setting, their lovers Mimi and Musetta appear in bright colors. “When you don't have enough oxygen to breathe, your brain starts to hallucinate.” For the director, when Mimi appears in the first act, “it's a memory of Rodolfo.” A big fan of films set in space, Claus Guth pays homage to scenes in which the loved one appears before the cosmonaut, as in Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972). 

He also manages the feat of bringing together the finest moments of space cinema—including 2001: A Space Odyssey—and cinema in general, combining a Gilda-style striptease, a golden dragon, and a cosmonaut's spacewalk. The curtain rises on the third act to reveal a lunar crater. Here and there lie shuttle debris. The engines are buried in the lunar sand, while beneath the snow, the cosmonauts struggle to move. Sublime.  

Beyond creating images of literally interstellar beauty, Claus Guth's dramatic shift, which sets the action in space, also allows us to question a future with limited resources. When they sing about delicious wine, reality shows the protagonists feasting on meager drops of water. They have to share their food. “It was already in the original text. When they talk about champagne, it's actually cheap wine. We just had to take it further.”

In a world that is falling apart, what becomes precious, Puccini's work already asked. "The arts, love, glory? What is important when everything is falling apart?“ agrees Claus Guth. ”I suggest, the audience decides." And that is the beauty of revisiting our cultural hits. They make us dream, surprise us, shake us up, make us think and, perhaps unexpectedly, move us...

On the occasion of Claus Guth’s futuristic production for the Paris Opera, we turn back to Scènes de la vie de bohème, the little-known work by Henri Murger that inspired Puccini to write one of his most beautiful operas.    

Appearing first in serial form in 1845 in Le Corsaire Satan, then performed at the Théâtre des Variétés in 1849, Scènes de la vie de bohème became a novel in 1851 at the instigation of the publisher Michel Lévy, only too pleased to prolong the commercial success of the play, and with the agreement of its author, equally delighted to sign a new contract ensuring, in the short term at least, some additional income. Like his characters - Rodolphe the poet, Schaunard the musician or Marcel the painter, Henri Murger was himself bohemian.

It was directly from incidents in his own existence that Murger drew the raw materials for his novel, thus making his opus an example of auto-fiction before the time. The motherless son of a tailor, self-taught, a poor Latin scholar though hardworking and not without talent, he worked first as a painter and a poet before frequenting the publishing houses where, in the mid-nineteenth century, business was booming (Balzac’s Illusions perdues comes to mind) and devoting his time to prose. On the advice of a journalist friend, with a view to launching his career and in a flight of literary fancy, he changed his name to Henry Mürger, anglicizing his first name and germanising his surname.

In 1841, he founded the Buveurs d’eau (the Water-drinkers), an informal collective for artists with Romantic ideals, with headquarters in the Nouvelle-Athènes neighbourhood in Paris, in the Rue de la Tour-d’Auvergne, to be precise. The name of this association, which was dedicated to mutual assistance and solidarity among penniless artists in want of patronage, originated in the fact that they generally met over a carafe of water. The chapter entitled “L’Ecu de Charlemagne” in the novel is a thinly veiled transcription of those meetings – gatherings improvised in a garret by candlelight during which a succession of performances, recitals and readings were given with unavoidable economy of means. Within the cenacle of bohemian life, poverty rubbed shoulders with the most poetic spirit of invention.    

So what does bohemian life really refer to? Besides being an auto-fiction, the novel is also a vivid sociological portrait of a particular fringe community within the population of Paris. Indeed, “Bohemian life only exists and is only possible in Paris”. The term was not actually invented by Murger, it can be traced back to 1830.

Deriving from Bohemia, an area in central Europe, and designating a Romany or Gipsy nomadic traveller, the term took on new significance in the work of Balzac who modified its spelling by adding an accent to make bohème rhyme with poème, and used it to qualify a marginal type relegated to society’s side lines for its classless, transgressional or even monstrous character. Unknown or rather, unrecognised Parisian artists, became the bohemians of the period and figures of the media society that the newspapers, magazines and other press organs were in the process of founding. In 1837, George Sand, who contributed to the creation of the romantic myth surrounding the Nouvelle-Athènes neighbourhood, stated in La Dernière Aldini, “Vive la bohème!”

Why did Paris house such a concentration of bohemians? A major nineteenth-century capital, the Ville Lumière was the ultimate cultural metropolis where not only provincials but also foreigners converged to try their luck. In the midst of industrial transformation and the crystallisation of the capitalist system, Paris was to undergo an initial, and unprecedented, inflation of its cultural life in relation to the local demand. As a result, the well-known law of supply and demand condemned an entire population of artists to temporary or endless poverty. La bohème is a road with three lanes (the garret, the café and the street) that leads either to glory or to the gutter.

Murger, in the wake of such illustrious pioneers, and as a genuine insider, becomes the chronicler of the milieu, “the common historian of the bohemian saga.” Combining lyrical, epic, tragic, ironic and pathetic registers, the preface to the novel is, so to speak, the phenomenon’s founding text, as it definitively consecrates the terminology and the definition: “La bohème is an apprenticeship for artistic life; It is the preface to the Academy, the hospice or the morgue”.

The heterogeneity of Murger’s phraseology, varying from romantic parody to social realism, from academic or aristocratic culture to popular culture, makes the work eminently contemporary. Although the use of a vernacular bearing the hallmark of the 1830s requires the odd footnote, the miserably precarious situations faced by the artists and the sparkling resourcefulness with which they survive them, seem to have remained resolutely timeless ever since the emergence of the media society.

The success of Murger’s play is undeniable. Indeed, in 1849, the Prince-President, the future Napoleon III, even attended the first performance. In spite of everything, the novel, still not widely read, and the name of its creator, who died in penury at the age of thirty-nine, have not attained equal glory.

Giacomo Puccini’s opera was performed for the first time in Paris in 1898 at the Opéra-Comique, in French, under the title La Vie de bohème. Today, the libretto, inspired by the theatrical version of Scenes and written by Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica, has eclipsed the literary work and become the focus of all critical and literary acclaim. 

However, it has tended to simplify the plot of the novel which, in describing bohemian life episodically, sketched an artistic map of Paris that was absolutely new and radical. Even more than the bildungsroman or coming-of-age novels of Balzac, Flaubert, Maupassant and Zola, or the anthologies and destinies of the poètes maudits, Murger’s book is a vade-mecum: essential reading for any artist starting out in a metropolis because it is addressed to those “who enter the arts, with no other means of existence than art itself”. La bohème is an obligatory rite of passage.