Giacomo Puccini
La bohème

Puccini's next work after Manon Lescaut was La bohème, a four-act opera based on the 1851 book by Henri Murger, La Vie de Bohème. La bohème premiered in Turin in 1896, conducted by Arturo Toscanini. Within a few years, it had been performed in many of the leading opera houses of Europe, including in Britain, as well as in the United States. It was a popular success and remains one of the most frequently performed operas ever written.

The libretto of the opera, freely adapted from Murger's episodic novel, combines comic elements of the impoverished life of the young protagonists with tragic aspects, such as the death of the young seamstress Mimí. Puccini's own life as a young man in Milan served as a source of inspiration for elements of the libretto. During his years as a conservatory student and in the years before Manon Lescaut, he experienced poverty similar to that of the bohemians in La bohème, including a chronic shortage of necessities like food, clothing and money to pay rent. Although Puccini was granted a small monthly stipend by the Congregation of Charity in Rome (Congregazione di caritá), he frequently had to pawn his possessions to cover basic expenses. Early biographers such as Wakeling Dry and Eugenio Checchi, who were Puccini's contemporaries, drew express parallels between these incidents and particular events in the opera. Checchi cited a diary kept by Puccini while he was still a student, which recorded an occasion in which, as in Act 4 of the opera, a single herring served as a dinner for four people. Puccini himself commented: "I lived that Bohème, when there wasn't yet any thought stirring in my brain of seeking the theme of an opera". (" Quella Bohème io l'ho vissuta, quando ancora non mi mulinava nel cervello l'idea di cercarvi l'argomento per un'opera in musica. ")

Puccini's composition of La bohème was the subject of a public dispute between Puccini and fellow composer Ruggiero Leoncavallo. In early 1893, the two composers discovered that they were both engaged in writing operas based on Murger's work. Leoncavallo had started his work first, and he and his music publisher claimed to have "priority" on the subject (although Murger's work was in the public domain). Puccini responded that he started his own work without having any knowledge of Leoncavallo's project, and wrote: "Let him compose. I will compose. The audience will decide." Puccini's opera premiered a year before that of Leoncavallo, and has been a perennial audience favourite, while Leoncavallo's version quickly faded into obscurity.
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