The Best La Bohème

"For me, La Bohème is an opera about young people who have not yet grown up," Valentin Dytiuk told me after last night’s premiere. "They don’t truly love yet; rather, they play at love. Each of them undergoes their own rite of passage. The first to mature is Marcello, who paints walls for Musetta’s sake. Then comes Colline, who stumbles upon a second-hand coat at the flea market—one that should last another million years, until he suddenly realizes why it came so cheap. Just listen to 'Vecchia zimarra' in the fourth act. But the final initiation is the most painful. Rodolfo already knows that Mimì is dead, but he clings to illusion, like a child clutching a broken toy, hoping that if he squeezes his eyes shut, everything will remain as it was. And it is at that moment that he finally becomes an adult."

                                        Photo by Yossi Zwecker

Had Puccini been alive, he would have named last night’s enchanting Bohème at the Israeli Opera Rodolfo—just as Verdi once considered naming Il Trovatore after Azucena. Because its undisputed hero was Valentin Dytiuk, who performed with the depth of a dramatic genius. Later, he would tell me that he prefers Michael Chekhov’s approach to Stanislavsky’s system, while I would insist that he wasn’t acting but living every note—every pause, even—and that his final “Mimì! Mimì!” would be forever imprinted in our subconscious. He would counter that if one truly lived through it each time, one wouldn’t last long, and that he is still learning to keep a distance from operatic passions.

Be that as it may, from the very first bars, we, the fortunate witnesses of last night’s premiere, felt it—this was it. The essence, the flesh and blood of bohemian existence: vivid, bitter like unsweetened French coffee, and permeated with cold like a garret morning in December. A theater like this makes you want to believe, to bask in its warmth, even if it is all drafts, despair, and three acts of poverty.

Mmm… theater? Not quite. Michael Hampe’s staging (along with Regina Alexandrovskaya and Eike Ecker) shattered theatrical illusion and the so-called fourth wall. The curtain did not fall, did not conceal scene transitions; instead, we became witnesses to metamorphosis. Stagehands moved walls and props as if sketching a new world on a blank canvas. The lights dimmed, and everything turned black-and-white—outlines, silhouettes, even the air, as though trapped in an old glass plate negative. The world became a pencil sketch, an unfinished draft where the lines had yet to solidify into flesh—a wavering shadow of what was meant to become real. Backlit silhouettes, as stark as Goya’s engravings, inky cutouts like children’s paper collages, seemed unaware of their impending transformation. But then, the conductor lifted his baton (yes, here he conducted more than just music), and the stage flared into light and color. A chime rang out—was it glass? A bell? A sound like foreboding? The shadows ignited into color as if brushed by Chagall’s hand. Horses soared over Paris, Marcello painted The Crossing of the Red Sea, and the little house at the city gate morphed into Mare Rosso, where Pharaoh squinted, reaching for Moses like in a synagogue’s stained-glass window, where history dissolves into myth. And then the music burst through the space, and reality emerged—like a photograph developing in the darkness of a lab—only now luminous, iridescent, like a Christmas fair with its carnival tableaux, where fools make faces and children chase balloons: red, green, blue. Perhaps these moments were more than mere effects; they were the essence of La Bohème—the passage from dream to reality, from illusion to inevitable awakening. Because the tragedy, after all, is that everything that seems eternal can turn to dust in an instant.

                                      Photos by Yossi Zwecker

And in this fairy-tale continuum, there is snow. Real, shimmering, light as the upper register of the violins. The entire production seemed sculpted from it, rolling onto the stage in drifts, coursing like a shiver across the boards. It felt as though the creators—the director, the designers, the entire team—had been influenced by the very air of Montmartre, thick with dust, torn newspapers, cheap wine, and reckless youth. Someone once wrote about poverty as the mother of all artists; here, it was poverty with set designs, with a score, with rehearsals till dawn, with mulled wine from a basement. And, of course, Puccini—"musica, musica, musica!"—so beautiful it chills your spine, like frost, like falling snow, like an unbearable, breathtaking beauty.

Music drifted in from the backstreets of Paris, threading its way through the clatter of dishes at Café Momus, through Marcello’s creaking laughter, through Mimì’s cough. We held out our hands, trying to catch it, but music is like a draft, like a rippling shadow on a damp wall. The moment you turn your head—it’s gone. All that remains is a cold little hand and, echoing in your ears, “Mimì! Mimì!”

Mimì, Mimì. One could describe, in conventional terms, how the exquisite Alla Vasilevitsky captivated with the tenderness of her sound production, how her voice scattered like crystalline ice shards, at times resembling fragile pine needles resisting the cold wind, yet miraculously preserving warmth and sensuality in every note; how refined was the interplay of light and shadow in her vocal delivery, how delicate and radiant she appeared in her pink beret. Yes, of course, all of that is true. But none of it is enough to convey what we truly heard. In this role, Alla Vasilevitsky was perfect, both in voice and presence.

                                       Photo by Yossi Zwecker

Her duets with Valentin Dytiuk are a separate chapter in opera history. Somehow, they fuse together astonishingly, so freely and so organically. Two opposing worlds, two distinct personalities intertwine in their voices so closely that they become inseparable. It seems as though Mimì’s voice, light, touched with tenderness and passion, unfolds its depths in duets with Rodolfo, growing richer, more mature. In turn, his tenor acquires a special expressiveness, resonating with both gentleness and power, as if carrying the fragility of Mimì in its embrace.

And once again, Rodolfo. The incredible Ukrainian tenor Valentin Dytiuk, blessed with a voice of rare beauty. But more than that, such naturally gifted vocalists simply do not exist. Or rather, vocalists of such natural origin do not exist. Or rather, vocalists of such natural origin do not exist. As I wrote when I first heard him in Un ballo in maschera in 2019, Valentin Dytiuk is that very treasure for which people go to the opera. He sings as if confiding a thrilling secret; he laughs and weeps through his voice. His radiant high notes, mesmerizing low register, a middle range shimmering with enchanting overtones and colors, his heartfelt brio—all delivered without the slightest strain. Everything is as effortless as breathing, as life itself. No trace of operatic bombast, no forced theatricality—just pure magic.

His voice became the nervous system of the stage, the pulse of the night’s cold, of an unfulfilled dream, of a mirage of love that melted before it could transform into something real. Dytiuk, alive, trembling with emotion, from the very beginning, as he sits with his back to the audience in a blue sweater, tapping something out on a typewriter. Even his back is acting. From his very first aria, his “Che gelida manina” fills the soul with bliss, sending shivers down the spine. And how mischievously he slips Mimì’s fallen key into his pocket, how he grows jealous of his friends (of each one in a different gesture!), how he dances his little ballet steps, and the range of his suffering is beyond description. Especially in the finale, of course, when a lump rises in your throat, when the tears come—my neighbor in the audience, a rather stoic-looking man, even shed a discreet but unmistakable tear.

                                     Photos by Yossi Zwecker

And then, unexpectedly, a delightfully comic Musetta. In every production I’ve seen, she has been lithe and glamorous; here, she was a plump little firecracker, bursting with humor—Yael Levita. In Hanoch Levin’s opera, she was the very embodiment of darkness; here, she was no conventional Puccinian tart-with-a-heart, but rather a bonne vivante straight out of Maupassant. No, exactly out of Maupassant. Beside her, Mario Cassi, the Italian baritone of seductive allure, made for a sharp-witted Marcello, effortlessly executing stage gags alongside Schaunard, Julien Van Mellaerts. And when the bohemian quartet launched into their ensembles, the fusion of voices utterly consumed the audience. This, too, was one of the countless virtues of a production that falls squarely into the category of a major event.

                                     Photos by Yossi Zwecker

For the Latin Quarter’s hapless dreamers, conductor Carlo Montanaro proved a kindred spirit, leading the orchestra with an exquisite delicacy and stripping La Bohème of any trace of saccharine melodrama. The music would freeze, then, in a reckless tempo, race from the icy garret to warm itself in the sun. Like the poet Rodolfo, Montanaro offers a deeply poetic reading of the score, imbued with spirit, modernity, and no shortage of emotion. And in the refinement, transparency, and elegance of the Israel Symphony Orchestra Rishon LeZion lies yet another charm of this Israeli Opera production. Il verismo, in all its glory.

Let us, in closing, sing a hosanna to set and costume designer Germán Droghetti, to lighting wizard Andreas Grüter, and to video artist Thomas Reimer—for they are, indeed, magicians. (I will never forget the final scene—the black-and-white vision where Mimì’s death quite literally drains all color from the world.) And a special ode to Regina Alexandrovskaya, an extraordinarily gifted and profoundly sensitive director, whom the Bohème protagonists praise with breathless admiration. (I was even told a little secret about the muff, but that’s another story.) Following in the footsteps of Michael Hampe, she approaches Puccini’s masterpiece with both wit and depth, fusing tragedy with comedy in a strikingly philosophical way. Here, everything is both wonderful and dreadful—a brilliant theatrical formula.

                                     Photos by Yossi Zwecker

Today, just as two hundred (well, almost) years ago—considering that the opera is set in the 1830s—we are still fighting for survival. Only now, we do so on a global scale, surviving together. Four in a cramped garret is far better than one alone in a void. One is broke, another is starving, a third has lost inspiration, and the fourth is dying of love. But as long as we laugh, as long as we play, as long as we argue, we are alive. And so, not all is lost. In this, if you will, lies our small hope for eternity.