La bohème 101: Director’s Notes
The story of La bohème is familiar to most opera fans as a tragic love story between two couples. Director Kristine McIntyre thinks this opera is also about a different kind of love. Explore her thoughts on this timeless story in the Director’s Notes below.
Learn more about La bohème, on stage at the Ellie Caulkins Opera House from February 22-March 2.>>
La bohème is a love story. Most obviously it is about Rodolfo and Mimì, who fall in love in Act One right before our eyes. And it’s also about Marcello and Musetta, with their off-again, on-again romance that one almost needs a scorecard to follow. But really, it is a love story about youth – about a particular time in one’s life and the closest group of friends you will ever have. It is about a time so precious and fleeting that even while you are living it, you have the sense that it will never come again.
The title refers to the lifestyle of the nineteenth-century artists and freethinkers who were consciously living outside the main-stream, who chose not to be part of the rising middle class and instead pursue lives centered around art and ideas. And while many have written about it since, we owe our conception of Bohemia almost entirely to one man: Henri Murger.
In 1851, Murger published Scènes de la vie de bohème, a series of loosely connected stories based on his life in Paris, where the unique mix of intellectuals, University students, and artists made Bohemia possible. They all lived in the same areas, went to the same cafés, and had one thing in common: they were all poor. You cannot find Bohemia on a map of the city, he wrote, but it is “bordered on the north by cold, on the west by hunger, on the south by love, and on the east by hope.”
Puccini and his librettists, Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica, may never have lived in Murger’s Bohemia, but they certainly had tremendous sympathy for its inhabitants. They gave us an opera that celebrates youthful exuberance and joie de vivre and contrasts it so effectively with poverty, misery, and the trials of daily existence. This is the darker side of Bohemia, a place known all-too-well by the women in the story, and it is never far away. Time in Bohemia is short. Colline is the first to arrive at its borders, and we sense that the others will soon follow. So live life while you can, build your castles in the air and reach for the moon, especially when it casts its light on the lovely young woman standing in your garret.
Notes written by Kristine McIntyre, Stage Director for Opera Colorado’s 2025 production of La bohème.