The Met: Live in HD

La Bohème

Giacomo Puccini

Saturday, Nov. 8 | 1 p.m.
Museum of Art | Sinnott Family – Bank of Utica Auditorium
$26 Members | $32 General Public | $16 Students

With its enchanting setting and spellbinding score, the world’s most popular opera is as timeless as it is heartbreaking. Franco Zeffirelli’s picture-perfect production brings 19th-century Paris to the Met stage as Puccini’s young friends and lovers navigate the joy and struggle of bohemian life. Soprano Juliana Grigoryan is the feeble seamstress Mimì opposite tenor Freddie De Tommaso as the ardent poet Rodolfo. Keri-Lynn Wilson conducts.

At first glance, La Bohème is the definitive depiction of the joys and sorrows of love and loss; on closer inspection, it reveals the deep emotional significance hidden in the trivial things—a bonnet, an old overcoat, a chance meeting with a neighbor—that make up our everyday lives.

Lyrical and touchingly beautiful, the score of La Bohème exerts an immediate emotional pull. Many of its most memorable melodies are built incrementally, with small intervals between the notes that carry the listener with them on their lyrical path. This is a distinct contrast to the grand leaps and dives that earlier operas often depended on for emotional effect. La Bohème’s melodic structure perfectly captures the “small people” (as Puccini called them) of the drama and the details of everyday life.

Language: Italian
Run Time: 3 hrs., 30 min., with two intermissions

To purchase tickets at the student price, call 315-797-0055.

Cinema Series Sponsor: Elizabeth R. Lemieux, PhD.