Giacomo Puccini: La Bohème

Hardly any other opera tells so closely about young people's attitude to life, about growing up, as "La Bohème", and hardly any other piece gets under your skin as much, because it features realistic characters in a realistic situation.

Puccini introduces us to completely new "heroes" on the opera stage. Mimi is a new social type, a desperately poor young woman in search of happiness, which is exactly what Musetta is also looking for - in a completely different way. We also have to deal with four young men who deliberately live the way they do. They are unable or unwilling to adapt. And that is a question that young adults are faced with again and again.

Puccini does not glorify these young people, he portrays them. We recognize their origins in the student milieus of Paris and Milan just as vividly as the areas of friction with our present day.

So what could be better than having young people portrayed by young people? Together with our wonderful students from the opera school, we want to explore these episodes of the "Vie de Bohème". Dreams and brief happiness carry them through poverty, life and survival, sometimes beyond - and yet there is no romantic solution to material hardship - these will be the thoughts on our way.

But above all, bohemia is a phase of life that will eventually be over. What will become of the young friends? Puccini leaves the end open.

With students from the HMDK Opera School and the
University Symphony Orchestra of the HMDK

Musical direction: Rasmus Baumann
Director: Franziska Severin
Stage and costumes: Michael S. Kraus

A production of the Opera School of the HMDK Stuttgart