Puccini’s La Bohème directed by Claus Guth film screening

TheatreHD and Tsaritsyno State Museum-Reserve present the project Tsaritsyno. Opera at the Movies.

On 15 January 2022, at 16:00, Tsaritsyno Museum-Reserve will present the opera La Bohème directed by Claus Guth.

Giacomo Puccini’s La Bohème is an opera that almost always lives up to the audience’s expectations. It’s hard to do anything radical with this tale of the poor, unsettled and merry life of the inhabitants of the Parisian Latin Quarter in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. You can look for new ‘addresses’, settle the characters in the occupied Paris of the 1940s, Berlin squats of the 1990s, or New York lofts of the noughties, but its main plot twists, love dramas, and semi-starving hilarity will remain in place. Bohemia is still bohemian, even 125 years later.

Perhaps that’s why this opera is rarely undertaken by directors who are known for their ability to reimagine old opera plots and infuse them with modern psychological motivations.

Claus Guth, who finally made his debut in Russia last season with Salome at the Bolshoi, is the undisputed master of active opera directing and one of the ten most sought-after directors in the world. Curiously, both conservatives and modernists love him: as his concepts, however far removed from the source material, are transformed into a very stylish, understandable, and culturally allusive performance on stage. No one was expecting a catch from his 2017 Parisian La Bohème either. However, Claus Guth decided to roll the dice and offer a completely new way of looking at opera. He sent the ‘creative youth’ from Montmartre – a poet, painter, philosopher, musician – into space, into an uncertain future, turning the whole action of the opera into flashbacks and near-death hallucinations of the dying astronauts lost in the universe.

Paris roared with delight mixed with outrage, and both reactions are clearly audible in the video version of the performance. But as is often the case with scandalous Parisian premieres since the days of Diaghilev, the more time passes, the more this production is talked about as a ‘classic’. And more and more reviewers find the director’s arguments convincing. In the preface, Guth refers to the structure of Henri Murger’s novel, which forms the basis of the libretto, recalling that it is a novel of memory, a novel of nostalgia. And in this context, the association of the plot with Stanisław Lem’s Solaris (and later Andrei Tarkowski’s Solaris) no longer seems voluntaristic. And in the context of today’s bohemian spaceflight, it hits the nerve of the times very precisely.

‘Got off course. The expedition is in danger. The life support system is running out… The last vestiges of humour. Let’s use imagination. Revive the days of the past,’ Rudolf writes in the electronic logbook. The role of the space poet is played by the superb Brazilian tenor Atalla Ayan. This is where the opera begins. Then, from a past life comes Mimi with a candle – the awe-inspiring, delicate Australian soprano Nicole Car. In the next scene, the jolly Parisian life of Café Momus bursts into the dying spaceship – and with it the beautiful Musetta, played here by the Russian Aida Garifullina. Then we find ourselves in a cold, anti-human alien landscape, contrasted by warm, emotion-rich memories of earthly love and parting. Unlike the author’s version of the story, where Mimi dies of consumption in the finale, here everyone dies in the finale, and Mimi’s ghost in a white dress with a candle in her hand is left to live in Cosmos.

With all the mixed reactions to the directing in the premiere, there was one thing that was immediately appealing about La Bohème. The true and undoubted triumphant figure in this production was Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel, one of the most vibrant and impassioned maestros of his generation. La Bohème was his début at the Paris Opera, and four years later, in the 2021/22 season, he was offered the position of Musical Director of this renowned theatre.