Today, Malte Wasem (Artistic Director), Matthew Ferraro (Director and Stage Designer), Clemens Fieguth (Musical Director), Mila van Daag (Costumes) and Frank Nickel (Management Board Member of Helaba Landesbank Hessen-Thüringen Girozentrale) introduced the DomStufen-Festspiele 2025 (top image, from left to right | Photo: Lutz Edelhoff). For over three decades, the Theater Erfurt has transformed the 70 steps in front of Erfurt Cathedral and the Severikirche into one of Germany's most impressive open-air stages every summer. The Sparkassen-Finanzgruppe Hessen-Thüringen has supported this event as a reliable main sponsor from the very beginning.

From 8 to 31 August 2025, the opera La Bohème by Giacomo Puccini will feature in the programme of the DomStufen-Festspiele. In this production by Matthew Ferraro, the music takes centre stage. Audiences can look forward to a visually striking performance that stays true to the original while featuring surprising and innovative elements.

For Matthew Ferraro, who previously directed and designed Madama Butterfly and Sweeney Todd at Theater Erfurt, La Bohème is a tour de force: "La Bohème is a big swing, emotionally and thematically. It’s about the best night of your life, when you’re out with your friends in a big city and it seems like the whole world is out on the street, and the whole city is open to you, and love is new, and life is exciting and full of possibilities. I think everyone—I hope everyone—has had at least one night like that in their life. And then it does what Verismo does, which is show the inevitability of tragedy. So it’s a huge swing— it shows the whole spectrum of human emotion, from joy to despair, from fantasy to reality, and it gives us this radical and shocking —but musically inevitable— ending. It’s really quite a trick Puccini pulls off, and I think that’s the source of its continued popularity."

The stage design consists of two levels. The lives of the four artists unfold on the movable main setting, in their Parisian attic apartment. Below the 16-metre-high Eiffel Tower is an amusement park with a 22-metre-long slide and the Café Momus. The entire park is illuminated by over 500 lights, creating a captivating atmosphere for the audience.