Singer

Six Bohemians lead “charming, yet terrible lives” in 19th-century Paris. Their Latin Quarter apartments are furnished with hope for the future. Strolling crowded streets, they fraternize with famous writers and artists at the Café Momus while finding their places in a rapidly changing society. The perils of a freelance economy, along with brave epidemics of passion, jealousy, and loss guide their journey.

EPSG:4326

La bohème

The Raymond F. Kravis Center for the Performing Arts

Rodolfo is a struggling poet burning his manuscripts to keep out the winter chill. Mimi is a fellow tenant with big dreams and a deadly illness. A chance meeting has them falling in love, but when you’re at the bottom of Parisian society, every day could be your last. 

Puccini’s blockbuster opera returns to our stage starring Janai Brugger as the sweet but suffering Mimi and Oreste Cosimo as the lovestruck Rodolfo, with Gihoon Kim and Erica Petrocelli as the on-again-off-again lovers Marcello and Musetta.

Resident Conductor Lina González-Granados leads Puccini’s transcendent score, awash in lavish Romanticism and gorgeous melodies. Director Brenna Corner helms a timeless production from Herbert Ross that the LA Times calls a “warm, nostalgic evocation of Paris in Puccini’s time.”

La Bohème

The Music Center

Suffused with the spirit of the French Revolution, FIDELIO explores issues of individual and collective freedom in the face of tyrannical suppression. For his one venture into opera Beethoven chose a political event rooted in the French tradition of rescue opera. It tells the story of a fearless woman, Leonore, who triggers the end of the old order by having her husband released from prison, where he has been detained on a whim. Far from evincing Beethoven’s inability to compose a coherent opera, this mixed bag of genre elements – German light opera, heartfelt arias, exquisite orchestral interludes and a symphonic close – reflects his revolutionary idea of dramaturgical opposites and subversion of form. The further Leonore descends into the depths of the dungeon, the clearer the existential core of the drama becomes. In an explosive choral and symphonic finale, which, with its quote from Schiller’s “Ode to Joy”, foreshadows Beethoven’s “Ninth”, the uncompromising affirmation of liberty, human rights and humanist ideals bursts forth. The work has repeatedly been appropriated for political ends - on both sides of the spectrum – with Leonore acquiring iconic status. Yet Beethoven’s musical vision of a humanist society still manages to thwart all attempts to encapsulate the opera in simplified interpretations.

Fidelio

Deutsche Oper Berlin

Georges Bizet’s titular heroine is as captivating a character as any in the history of opera. The different interpretations of Carmen are legion: we have the seductress, the personification of forbidden yearning, the standard bearer for the “eternally female” in the brutal battle of the sexes, the anarchist unfettered by bourgeois angst and compulsions, the archaic clairvoyante seeing her own death in the cards - yet free, as she does not dread her destiny. Few opera heroines are so open to interpretation and hence so able to serve as a mirror held up to society.

Carmen

Shakespeare’s tale of star-crossed lovers was destined for the operatic stage.

Tenor

Oreste Cosimo

Events

Upcoming events

17 - 25 Apr, 2027

Romeo & Juliet · Pittsburgh Opera

Past events

23 - 25 Jan, 2026

La bohème · Palm Beach Opera

Nov 22 - Dec 14, 2025

La Bohème · LA Opera

Future and recently performed repertoire

Don José in Carmen by Bizet

Deutsche Oper Berlin

Romeo in Roméo et Juliette by Gounod

Pittsburgh Opera

Rodolfo in La Bohème by Puccini

Palm Beach Opera

Florestan in Fidelio by Beethoven

Deutsche Oper Berlin

About

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