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How can one revisit one of the most frequently performed operas in the world? By projecting it into the future. Puccini's La Bohème—which will be performed at the Paris Opera from September 12 to October 14—invokes the lost loves of Mimi and Rodolfo in a dreamlike space epic. We discussed this with directors Claus Guth and Sébastien Guèze, who staged and performed in an equally futuristic version of La Bohème, broadcast on France Télévisions.

In 2025, what has become of the bohemian lifestyle? This movement has long been associated with young people pursuing the arts, living frugally on love and fresh water under the rooftops of Paris. “Bohemians have nothing and live on everything they have,” wrote Balzac in his short story A Prince of Bohemia. Its young practitioners were already the subject of pastiches at the time. While in the 21st century it continues to be regularly portrayed in film and television to convey a romanticized image of Paris, in reality it now reflects a more bourgeois reality. This obsession with bohemianism in our cultural imagination is a legacy of Puccini's masterpiece, created in 1896.

The Italian composer aspired to immortalize his younger years spent among penniless, rebellious artists, and found the perfect inspiration in Henry Murger's Scènes de la vie de bohème, which tells the story of the thwarted love between the poet Rodolphe and the seamstress Mimi. Like their friends Marcello and Musette, these penniless lovers prefer to keep warm by attending parties, going to cabarets, and loving each other. The outcome? Tragic, of course. After separating for a time, our two heroes are reunited. She dies, choosing love over the security of a wealthy protector. 

The work was an almost immediate success and became one of the greatest hits in the history of opera. Every year, La Bohème continues to attract millions of spectators to theaters. In 2023, it was performed 782 times worldwide, an average of more than twice a day. At first glance, it seems difficult to reinvent the genre. Yet that is precisely what tenor and director Sébastien Guèze and director Claus Guth have set out to do.   

“When I was asked to stage La Bohème, I dragged my feet a little,” he recalls with amusement. “I deeply love Puccini's music, but the story is a web of clichés.” For Claus Guth, these are not penniless artists, confined to languishing in their attic and never knowing fame. The images conveyed by the libretto of La Bohème correspond “to something that has long since ceased to exist, to a cultural Disneyland.”  

With his eyes closed, the director listens to the opera over and over again. "At first, it was a joke, but I told Stéphane Lissner—director of the Paris Opera at the time, editor's note—that it sounded more like floating through space. If you don't worry about the text, [Puccini's work] is more about the power of love and imagination.“ Claus Guth then immersed himself in reading the original novel, Scènes de la vie de bohème by Henry Murger. ”In fact, it's mainly about men reminiscing about their youth. They idealize the past and their memories," he continues.

From there, he imagines moving the action “to a world where Paris probably no longer exists, ravaged by nuclear war or climate crisis.” In Claus Guth's staging, Rodolfo and Marcello live out their last hours in a drifting spaceship. The characters regularly lose themselves in contemplation of a distant planet, Earth. “Day 126. Lost our way. Last reserves exhausted. Mimi returned,” reads the logbook kept by cosmonaut Rodolfo, projected above the stage. 

In his version, La Bohème 2050, broadcast on France TV, Sébastien Guèze propels our protagonists into the corridors of the Palace of Versailles, which has become a refuge from global warming. “Young people who once died of cold under the roofs of Paris now perish from heat,” explains the tenor and director, whose interpretation also highlights the profoundly universal nature of the issues addressed in opera librettos: “They tell stories of love, social inequality, the quest for freedom, and youth.”

And this universality also rhymes with avant-garde, he points out: “La Traviata (adapted from La Dame aux Camélias by Dumas fils, editor's note) invokes a subject that was little or not at all dealt with in the 19th century, prostitution, while Carmen depicts a fiercely free woman.” Sébastien Guèze's approach is no exception to this futuristic tradition, imagining a Bohème that brilliantly questions the effects of the environmental crisis and the excesses of technosolutionism. One of the characters even takes the form of artificial intelligence.

In doing so, he takes the exercise further by taking a gamble on staging an opera that is 80% carbon-free. “The idea behind this work is to present a desirable future, and that required this experiment.” To change people's imaginations, you have to experiment with them, anchor them in reality: “I believe that sobriety, working with limited resources, also goes hand in hand with creative freedom. After all, Mozart lived in a carbon-free world, and that didn't stop him from composing sublime works that have stood the test of time.” And indeed, this ecological gamble does not detract from the beauty of an opera film that is certainly apocalyptic in tone but furiously optimistic.

Pas de deux and pas de côté

While Sébastien Guèze's La Bohème anchors its plot in the impulses of youth, Claus Guth's explores the other side of life. “All that remains for Rodolfo and Marcel,” he explains, “are their memories.” In a black-and-white and pastel setting, their lovers Mimi and Musetta appear in bright colors. “When you don't have enough oxygen to breathe, your brain starts to hallucinate.” For the director, when Mimi appears in the first act, “it's a memory of Rodolfo.” A big fan of films set in space, Claus Guth pays homage to scenes in which the loved one appears before the cosmonaut, as in Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972). 

He also manages the feat of bringing together the finest moments of space cinema—including 2001: A Space Odyssey—and cinema in general, combining a Gilda-style striptease, a golden dragon, and a cosmonaut's spacewalk. The curtain rises on the third act to reveal a lunar crater. Here and there lie shuttle debris. The engines are buried in the lunar sand, while beneath the snow, the cosmonauts struggle to move. Sublime.  

Beyond creating images of literally interstellar beauty, Claus Guth's dramatic shift, which sets the action in space, also allows us to question a future with limited resources. When they sing about delicious wine, reality shows the protagonists feasting on meager drops of water. They have to share their food. “It was already in the original text. When they talk about champagne, it's actually cheap wine. We just had to take it further.”

In a world that is falling apart, what becomes precious, Puccini's work already asked. "The arts, love, glory? What is important when everything is falling apart?“ agrees Claus Guth. ”I suggest, the audience decides." And that is the beauty of revisiting our cultural hits. They make us dream, surprise us, shake us up, make us think and, perhaps unexpectedly, move us...