SFO “Summer” Season Begins with Puccini

Last night in the War Memorial Opera House, the final performances of the 2024–25 San Francisco Opera (SFO) season got under way. The first of the two operas to be presented was Giacomo Puccini’s La Bohème with the staging by John Caird of a production shared with the Houston Grand Opera and the Canadian Opera Company. This revival was directed by Katherine M. Carter, making her SFO debut.

The cast featured tenor Pene Pati in the role of Rodolfo and Lucas Meachem as Marcello, both Merola alumni. The role of Mimi was sung by Merola alumna Karen Chia-ling Ho, last seen in the Opera House in the role of Princess Jia in Bright Sheng’s Dream of the Red Chamber. The conductor was Ramón Tebar.

The Latin Quarter set for the second act of La Bohème (photograph by Cory Weaver, courtesy of SFO)

This narrative of the “Bohemian” life of poverty-stricken artists is framed by opening and closing acts set in a prototypical garret. These provide “personal” context for the more public Parisian settings, the first in the festive Latin Quarter and the second in the early morning at the city gate known as the Barrière d’Enfer (gate of Hell). While the opera’s title refers to the life of the male “starving artists” (such as Rodolfo and Marcello), Mimi is the sickly one, whose death is the climax of the final act.

The narrative is thus a roller-coaster ride through starvation, revelry, love, and death. Just as Richard Wagner knew how to identify each of his characters with a leitmotif (“guiding motif”), Puccini’s music breathes individual personality into his. Those individuals are then turned loose into the public settings of everyday life. It is this breadth of scope that elevates the narrative over the melodramatic relationship between Rodolfo and Mimi.

Thus, what is significant about this production is how Caird’s staging keeps the viewer focused on the contexts in which the fates of the characters themselves progress. The opera is so familiar that everyone knows that the overall path leads downward. Nevertheless, context prevails in both music and staging. Thus, however familiar the journey may be, between the path laid out by Caird and the following of that path by the cast for this particular production, it was well worth taking.