Melbourne's long Indian summer coincided with Opera Australia's 2016 autumn season. It began with a revival of La Bohème (★★★) and the new production of The Pearlfishers (★★★★1/2) (first seen in Sydney earlier this year). The much-anticipated Luisa Miller with Nicole Car (which I reviewed in February 2016) will follow next week.

Giacomo Puccini does not seem to have been a highly emotional creature – promiscuous, yes (as his long-suffering wife, Elvira, could attest), but not loving. 'In later life,' William Mann has written, 'he lamented that nobody loved him; but Puccini seems to have been psychologically unable to form a loving relationship with anyone.' He was attracted, in Mann's phrase, to 'frail, appealing girls'. They gave him some of his greatest operatic creations: Manon Lescaut, Liù, Butterfly, and of course Mimì. In the composer, Mimì inspired unprecedented emotions. Of the evening in December 1895 when he finished composing the opera Puccini later told his biographer: 'I had to get up and, standing in the middle of my study, alone in the silence of the might, I began to weep like a child. It was as though I had seen my own child die.'