Ruggero Leoncavallo: La Bohème

Revival: March 6, 2008

The name of Ruggiero Leoncavallo has been most typically associated with his hugely successful one-acter opera, I pagliacci. His other operas are not now known to many, and so there are also few who know his operatic output includes a vehicle entitled La boh?me, whose stagings have been very sporadic indeed even in the composer’s home country, Italy. The premiere of Leoncavallo’s La boh?me took place in Venice, on May 6, 1897. It is based on the same literary model, Henry Murger’s Sc?nes de la vie de Boh?me, as its internationally far more popular twin, La boh?me from the pen of Giacomo Puccini. Unlike Puccini, Leoncavallo, who also wrote the libretto, kept much closer in it to Murger’s original story; after all, he himself had spent some time, still before composing this opera, in Paris, and so got to know intimately the place and atmosphere described by Murger. In a dynamic sequence of scenes (or “clips,” were one to apply today’s terminology), he portrays members of a stratum rebelling against the established social pattern by their own extreme lifestyle. The creative tandem recreating the work on the stage of the Prague State Opera, the German stage director Roman Hovenbitzer and the Czech designer Pavel Bílek, were acutely aware of the obvious parallels between the Parisian boh?me of the 1830s, and the attitudes embraced by the hippies and similar youth subcultures cropping up across the globe from the 1960s onwards. They peppered up the Leoncavallo opera by musical-style dynamism, involving an almost hectic pulsation of movement and sharp conflicts. The production’s first night at the Prague State Opera, on March 13, 2003, was acclaimed by Czech and German critics alike as one of the season’s finest opera premieres, and as an unequivocal rehabilitation of this undeservedly omitted Leoncavallo stage piece. It was then likewise very warmly received by the audience of the PSO’s guest appearance at the festival in Miskolc, Hungary, on June 17, 2006.

The 2007/08 season will bring a revival of this production of Leoncavallo’s La boh?me, in a streamlined version involving a new music direction.

Premiere: Mar 6, 2008