Are today’s young people really only capable of appreciating art in bite-sized portions? A new arrangement of Puccini’s opera La bohème, to be performed in Perugia in September, assumes as much. The Times reported on 26 August that the Italian tenor / director Gianluca Terranova has made a cut-down version, which will run for 90 minutes rather than around two hours forty minutes, on the assumption that the so-called TikTok generation can no longer cope with a full-length opera.

Let’s be clear from the outset: Italian operas have always been subjected to adaptation and appropriation. Within Puccini’s lifetime, his music was being rearranged by jazz bands — despite his efforts to bring legal action against those involved — and themes from his operas were frequently borrowed to accompany silent films. In the twenty-first century, La bohème has been staged in pubs, using piano accompaniment and a handful of singers. And recently, the musicians Mathieu van Bellen and Mathias Halvorsen arranged the opera for solo violin and piano, pulling off the astonishing feat of playing every note in the score on just two instruments. Start cutting bits out of La bohème, however, and attempting to present what remains as a performance of the opera and you have a problem.

According to The Times, Terranova’s version will consist of little more than the most famous arias connected by a spoken narrative. Filleting an opera for “the good bits” and stringing them along with dialogue could work for operas that are based around discrete musical numbers. You could do it with a Rossini or Mozart opera, or with Carmen, and produce something fun and workable. 

But not Bohème. For Puccini had learnt a great deal from Wagner and this is an opera that is largely through-composed. The music flows along continuously for large swathes of the opera, bending and twisting to the demands of the drama and the fluctuating moods of the characters, telling you everything you need to know even if you can’t understand the words. There are stand-alone arias which can be extracted, but they are distributed unevenly across the opera, and there certainly isn’t one at the end. Remove the “in-between bits” and you lose so much of what this opera is about. The high jinks of the bohemians, absolutely essential to conveying the character of the work, would be lost entirely, and it isn’t “purist” to think this might be a shame. 

The Times’ leader writer speculated that people might be turned off opera because “the highlights, those wonderful arias that get played again and again on popular classics selections, are inevitably followed by a lot of faffing around where the tragic situation of the protagonists is dwelt on in melodramatic detail”. But in the case of the comparatively short, uber-naturalistic La bohème this simply doesn’t apply. This is not an opera of extended subplots or tedious musical longueurs. In fact it is hard to think of an opera of greater musical and dramatic economy. There is no “melodrama” here, save for good-time-girl Musetta’s tongue-in-cheek histrionics. To say that the tragic dénouement is drawn-out makes no sense: the heroine Mimì’s death happens so quickly and quietly that her friends do not even notice. Not a single note is wasted.

Terranova argues that Puccini would be pleased because he “wrote [his] operas to be understood by everyone”. But the point is, they already can be. La bohème has the simplest of operatic plots: boy and girl meet, boy and girl split up, girl dies. As my book Puccini’s La bohème shows, this is an opera that was deeply influenced by the popular culture of its day, which would go on to be plundered, more or less directly, by the creators of films, stage musicals, pop songs and popular sitcoms. If you can get to grips with The Big Bang Theory, you won’t find La bohème’s characters — four pseudo-intellectuals, one of whom gets together with “the girl next door” — too much of a stretch. 

This is also an opera that is literally about how it feels to be young. It is a brilliant evocation of first love, not having much money, sharing a flat with friends, feeling jealous, and struggling to work out what responsibility means. Older characters are the butt of jokes. The Bohemians make fun of their elderly, indiscreet landlord Benoît, while Musetta humiliates her sugar daddy, Alcindoro, and tricks him into picking up everyone’s bar tab.

When David McVicar’s production for Glyndebourne, featuring drug taking, was first staged in 2000, The Observer remarked: “The tragic La bohème, first performed in Turin in 1896, is one of the most romantic works in the classical canon but until now had few points of reference for younger people”. So preposterous was this remark that one was left wondering whether the reporter had even read a plot summary, let alone seen the opera. 

Assuming a relatively short opera would be “too much” for today’s twenty- and thirty-somethings patronises them

If young people have little interest in opera — and the enthusiastic family audience I saw at the dress rehearsal of Longborough Festival Opera’s recent La bohème would suggest otherwise — it is surely not because their attention spans have shrunk to the point where they can no longer cope with an opera that is shorter than any of the films in the Lord of the Rings franchise. Rather, it is probably because they no longer encounter opera in their daily lives, whether via school music lessons or broadcasts on television. Young people don’t need their operas cut down: they just need to be shown that they exist, and that they can be enjoyable — something a bit different to try. 

Assuming a relatively short opera would be “too much” for today’s twenty- and thirty-somethings patronises them. Let them see the real thing, imaginatively staged and at low cost. La bohème is the ultimate young person’s opera, with just as much capacity to engage the young people of 2024 as it did those of 1984, 1944 or 1904. It has no need of gimmicky helping hands — whether heavy cuts or cocaine snorting — to make it “relatable”.