With its enchanting setting and spellbinding score, the world’s most popular opera is as timeless as it is heartbreaking. Appearing on the Torch Theatre screen this November, fans will be left enchanted by the passionate and indelible story of love among young artists in Paris.

Franco Zeffirelli’s picture-perfect production brings 19th-century Paris to the Met stage as Puccini’s young friends and lovers navigate the joy and struggle of bohemian life. Soprano Juliana Grigoryan is the feeble seamstress Mimì, opposite tenor Freddie De Tommaso as the ardent poet Rodolfo.

At first glance, La Bohème is the definitive depiction of the joys and sorrows of love and loss; on closer inspection, it reveals the deep emotional significance hidden in the trivial things—a bonnet, an old overcoat, a chance meeting with a neighbour—that make up our everyday lives.

The libretto sets the action in Paris, circa 1830. This is not a random setting, but rather reflects the issues and concerns of a particular time when, following the upheavals of revolution and war, French artists had lost their traditional support base of aristocracy and church. The story centres on self-conscious youth at odds with mainstream society—a bohemian ambience that is clearly recognizable in any modern urban center. La Bohème captures this ethos in its earliest days.

Canadian, Keri-Lynn Wilson, conducts the performance having made her Met debut in Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk in 2022. Lyrical and touchingly beautiful, the score of La Bohème exerts an immediate emotional pull. Many of its most memorable melodies are built incrementally, with small intervals between the notes that carry the listener with them on their lyrical path. This is a distinct contrast to the grand leaps and dives that earlier operas often depended on for emotional effect. La Bohème’s melodic structure perfectly captures the “small people” (as Puccini called them) of the drama and the details of everyday life.

Showing from Wednesday 12 November at 6pm. Tickets: £20 | £18.00 Cons | £9 Under 26. Book tickets via the website torchtheatre.co.uk / Box Office: 01646 695267 or click here.