Richard Stilwell

The Lyric Opera of Chicago's 1985 production of Puccini's opera, set in the late nineteenth century in the city of Nagasaki, about a young Japanese woman who weds an American naval officer who later abandons her and the child she bore him.

"La Bohème" is one of Giacomo Puccini's most popular and timeless works and the second-most performed opera at New York's Metropolitan Opera. This production, directed by the legendary Franco Zeffirelli, features José Carreras, Teresa Stratas, Renata Scotto and Richard Stilwell. The opera is replete with extraordinary visual beauty as it presents the tragic story of young bohemians struggling to make it in the world.

This performance, and the film that documents it, is superb! From its comically vulgar opening in the Garter Inn, where we are introduced to a rotund (and slightly pathetic) Falstaff - in a richly nuanced performance by baritone Gabriel Bacquier cocooned in prosthetic girth (his face is too thin for the enormity to be real) - to the supremely beautiful nocturnal magic of the Finale in Windsor Park, Solti is lovingly accompanied by the sublime Vienna Philharmonic. They play with such delicacy and elan what is an undeniably delicate score, that I lost myself in the instrumentation, forgot it was Verdi, thought it was Mozart, and couldn't remember which Mozartean Opera this was. The woodwinds and strings are singled out for special praise: perfect intonation and phrasing doesn't begin to do them justice. They breathe life into this score, propel it forward, act as a Chorus commenting on the action.