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A Bouquet of Bohèmes
MARIA NOCKIN reviews
one opera at two different venues
On Saturday in Phoenix and on Tuesday in San Diego, Giacomo Puccini's enormously popular opera about young people starting their lives in Paris played to packed houses.
In 1893, after the successful première of Manon Lescaut, Puccini began looking for a new subject. He chose an 1849 play by French writers Henri Mürger and Théodore Barrière called Scènes de la Vie de Bohème, even though he knew that Ruggiero Leoncavallo also wanted the rights to it. Both composers eventually wrote operas called La bohème to libretti based on the work of the French authors.
Mürger had lived as a pauper in Paris where he wrote stories about his Bohemian friends that were eventually made into a play...
Copyright © 8 February 2010
Maria Nockin,
Arizona USA
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