La bohème

Puccini’s undeniable classic returns.

In the depths of an Italian winter, with the sun slowly setting on the 19th century, Giacomo Puccini premiered his fourth opera at Turin’s Teatro Regio. Today, just shy of 130 years later, that work continues to stand alone.

La bohème is, at its heart, a gorgeously simple story. Its core cast of friends and lovers share dreams and passions, yet are forced by circumstance to move through a world whose edges feel sharper by the day. Their struggles mount and shift, hardships compounding into tragedies, yet their spirits remain ultimately unsullied by the corroding forces working upon them.

Puccini’s most enduring work is a masterpiece in the truest sense; an indelibly beautiful opera whose music has reached the hearts of generations, and a gorgeously rendered story whose tragic romance created the blueprint for countless works to follow in the years since. The 2025 New Zealand Opera season of La bohème promises a transporting, unforgettably emotional take on this enduring work; one which maintains fidelity to the opera’s original setting of bohemian Paris – and which honours the idea that ‘bohemia’, in this context, is perhaps less a physical place or condition of living than a state of mind – while finding new, endlessly relatable depth in its world.

Join Mimi, Rodolfo, Marcello, Musetta and the rest, as they’re joined by the NZ Opera Chorus and some of the country’s finest orchestras for this monumental, unmissable 10-show national season – grand opera at its heartrending best.