Live from the Met: La Bohème
Puccini's touching tale of the love of the beautiful but consumptive seamstress Mimi and the poet Rodolfo, set against the background of late-19th-century bohemian Paris, with the ambitious daydreams of its poverty-stricken artists, its lovers' quarrels, crowded cafe scenes and lonely garret rooms. This is one of the most heartrending of all Puccini's operas, crowned by the death scene of Mimi. Sung in Italian.
Chorus and Orchestra of the Metropolitan Opera, New York, conductor Marco Armiliato
Acts 1 and 2 7.30 New York Stories
The continuing series of interval talks in which novelists, essayists and playwrights who have moved to
New York present portraits of the city through fiction and non-fiction.
Distinguished Irish professor of literature Denis Donoghue reflects on his years in New York, filtered through the perspective of the writer whose chair he holds - Henry James.
7.55 Act 3
8.20 Bohemian Paris
Christopher Prendergast explores the Parisian background to Puccini's setting. "A district bordered on the north by cold, on the west by hunger, on the south by love, and on the east by hope." Such was an anonymous 19th-century geographer's definition of Bohemia, both a geographical quarter and a state of mind, its boundaries defined as much by lifestyle as by location. The run-down Left Bank gave 19th- and 20th-century Europe a potent cultural reference point. Repeat
8.45 Act 4