La Bohème New Year's Eve at the Sydney Opera House

With the flickering of a candle, love sparks. Two hands meet in the dark and four friends' lives are changed forever.

The way that first love grabs hold of your insides and floods you with something you've never felt before. The fire that burns you the first time jealousy flares. The growing up you do in the instant you realise love can't last forever. Puccini takes these achingly human feelings and sets them to music—music that soars with the ecstasy of love, crackles with the pain of jealousy and cries with the agony of loss.

Some human emotions are too big for words alone, and for that, we have music. La Bohème exposes your soul to the feelings that only music can express, and it opens our season most years because that's an experience everyone should have in their lifetime.

Gale Edwards’ glittering production is set among the fishnets and fairy lights of 1930s bohemian Berlin.