La bohème 5-29 March | Mid Wales Opera celebrate being back on stage with one of opera’s greatest love stories. 

Mid Wales Opera celebrate being back on stage with one of opera’s greatest love stories.

Mid Wales Opera return to their MainStages tour in spring 2022 with Puccini’s La bohème; a timeless tale of love, loss and longing featuring some of opera’s best-known arias.

MWO’s tour opens at their home theatre, Hafren in Newtown, on Saturday 5 March, before touring to eight theatres, joined by their long-term orchestra partners Ensemble Cymru.

It’s Christmas Eve and high above the streets of Paris a knock at the door begins the timeless love story of poet Rodolfo and his neighbour Mimi. Their fairy-tale romance feels like a Christmas miracle, but even the warmth of their love can’t defeat the winter chill. Mimi is desperately ill; Rodolfo and his fellow bohemians can’t afford the help she needs. From a student garret to the bustling streets of Montmartre, Puccini’s masterpiece celebrates the power of love and friendship.

Puccini wrote La bohème at his villa in Torre del Lago; a Tuscan village which celebrates the composer in an annual festival attracting some 40,000 visitors. He was considered the greatest Italian opera composer of his time, and the most significant representative of ‘verismo’ (Italian for ‘realism’). Puccini’s realist approach to opera invites audiences into the lives of ordinary people to suffer with them, and to fall in love with them.

The opera perfectly captures the gritty atmosphere of 1840s Paris. Through the intertwined stories of its four main characters (a poet, a seamstress, a painter and a musician), it captures the passion and profligacy of the young bohemians. And like the exchange of love letters, most decisions about the opera where made (slowly!) through letters sent back and forth between Puccini and his publisher, Ricordi, and librettists Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa. 

Music Director Jonathan Lyness said: “La bohème, Puccini’s fourth opera, was premiered in February 1896 at the Teatro Regio in Turin, conducted by the young Arturo Toscanini. Fifty years later, aged 78, Toscanini conducted it again in a famous performance with New York’s NBC Symphony Orchestra. I conducted La bohème for the first time aged 28 in a venue somewhat smaller than the Teatro Regio – the tiny Italianate cloisters of Iford Manor in Wiltshire in one of that venue’s earliest summer opera seasons. Perhaps I’ll conduct it again when I’m 78!”.

La bohème concludes MWO’s Puccini in Paris season, delayed for a year by Covid-related theatre closures. Their SmallStages tour in autumn 2021 was Puccini’s Il tabarro – the first of the three Il trittico (‘The Triptych’) operas. Henri Murger’s 1851 series of vignettes provided the basis for the La bohème libretto. Scènes de la vie de bohème portrayed the lives of young bohemians living in the Latin Quarter of Paris. 

The young bohemians in MWO’s production are depicted by a stellar cast and wealth of Welsh talent. The role of Rodolfo is sung by Welsh Tenor, Robyn Lyn Evans, who was raised in Pont-rhyd-y-groes, Ceredigion, but now lives in Machynlleth. He is delighted to be reprising one of his favourite roles, which he has sung previously for both Opera Project and Longborough Festival Opera. 

The tour begins in Newtown on 5 March, then Aberystwyth, Bangor, Newport, Brecon, Mold, Llanelli, Milford Haven and ends in Yeovil on 29 March.

For full details of their La bohème tour dates, visit www.midwalesopera.co.uk