This Day in History: Puccini’s La bohème premieres

On 1 February 1896, Giacomo Puccini’s Italian opera La Bohème, debuts at the Teatro Regio in Turin, Italy.
One of three career-defining operas of Puccini, by the time it premiered, he had already made himself known in the world of Italian opera with, Manon Gascaut, and earned him a significant advance on his next work. With his debts repaid and a country villa acquired, Puccini was no longer a starving artist, but rather an up-and-coming star embraced by the artistic establishment.
The libretto of La Bohème was based on the immensely popular Scènes de la Vie de Bohème, Henri Murger’s 1845 collection of stories depicting the lives and loves of a group of young Parisian “Bohemians” – a label that Murger’s work helped popularize to define people like the Gypsies, itinerant, out-of-the-mainstream ways.
In choosing to write La Bohème, Puccini was choosing to involve himself in his own real-life drama. Puccini’s friend, the composer Ruggero Leoncavallo, was working on an opera of his own, also based on Scènes de la Vie de Bohème and also called La Bohème. His pursuit of the project cost him his friendship with Leoncavallo, who is nevertheless famous for his 1892 opera Pagliacci.
Puccini’s La bohème, on the other hand, is second on the list of the world’s most-performed operas, behind only his own Madama Butterfly, the third of his acknowledged masterworks, after Tosca.