8. The Heartbeat of Bohème. For the last in our series of familiar operas, we turn to Giacomo Puccini’s eternally popular La bohème. It makes a fine case study to explore some of the more interesting trends in opera directing today, including the fashionable European taste for Regie Opera, or as its detractors call it, "Eurotrash." But it is also a moving story with the power to draw in audiences, no matter how it is staged. The 2017 production at Berlin's Komische Oper by Australian director Barrie Kosky has all the Regie credentials, but it is also one of the simplest stagings out there, thus enabling us to touch multiple aspects of this fecund work.

Puccini called Bohème an "Opera in Four Pictures." It was based on Scènes de la vie de bohème (Scenes of Bohemian Life) by Henry Murger, set in Paris in the 1830s. Murger’s "scenes" began as a series of newspaper pieces, later assembled into a loosely-connected novel. Librettists Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa selected certain episodes to focus on the love of the poet Rodolfo and the mortally-ill seamstress Mimì, who is in fact a conflation of two separate characters in the Murger original; (incidentally, Ruggiero Leoncavallo's Bohème a year later made different selections and had different protagonists). The world premiere of the Puccini was given in Turin on 1 February 1896 at the Teatro Regio, conducted by Arturo Toscanini. Since then, the work has become one of the most frequently performed operas worldwide.

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