Puccini's La bohème

Floris Visser directs a new production of opera’s greatest love-story.

When seamstress Mimì meets the struggling writer Rodolfo they are instantly drawn together. But while Paris is a magical city of love, it’s also a very real place of hardship as the two young Bohemians and their friends soon discover, when not just jealousy but poverty and sickness tear them apart.

In La bohème Puccini created an opera in which ordinary people are elevated to the level of the extraordinary, the tragic, the timeless – transformed by a score that has seduced generations of audiences. Conversational and familiar, atmospheric and emotionally amplified, La bohème paints the complexity of human relationships in all their many shades, framing them with wonderfully vivid, bustling scenes of Parisian life. Comedy and tragedy are woven tightly together in an irresistible flow of melody and drama.

Transferring straight from Festival 2022, Floris Visser’s production is Glyndebourne’s first new La Bohème in over 20 years.