The MacArthur-winning director, whose staging of Lohengrin is about to open the Bayreuth Festival, seriously proposes doing Puccini’s opera in reverse order, Acts 4 through 1. “It will work really well, from devastation to the beginning. Some people might even think it’s the way it’s supposed to happen. …You can put it on the moon or anywhere else and it’s still the same old Bohème. But how do you get to the core of this piece if not by radically transforming our ability to listen to this piece and thereby open a door to a way that we’ve never thought about it before? So if we end in Act 1, with them singing offstage with these high C’s, what a wonderful way to end an opera.”