La bohème is an opera in four acts, composed by Giacomo Puccini between 1893 and 1895 to an Italian libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa, based on Scènes de la vie de bohème (1851) by Henri Murger.
The story is set in Paris around 1830, and shows the Bohemian lifestyle, known in French as la bohème, of a poor seamstress and her artist friends.
The world premiere of La bohème was in Turin on 1 February 1896 at the Teatro Regio, conducted by the 28-year-old Arturo Toscanini. Since then, La bohème has become part of the standard Italian opera repertory and is one of the most frequently performed operas worldwide.
In 1946, fifty years after the opera's premiere, Toscanini conducted a commemorative performance of it on radio with the NBC Symphony Orchestra. A recording of the performance was later released by RCA Victor on vinyl record, tape and Compact Disc. It is the only recording ever made of a Puccini opera by its original conductor.
As credited on its title page, the libretto of La bohème is based on Henri Murger's 1851 novel, Scènes de la vie de bohème, a collection of vignettes portraying young bohemians living in the Latin Quarter of Paris in the 1840s. Although often called a novel, the book has no unified plot.
Like the 1849 play drawn from the
book by Murger and Théodore Barrière, the opera's libretto focuses on
the relationship between Rodolfo and Mimì, ending with her death. Also
like the play, the libretto combines two characters from the novel, Mimì
and Francine, into the single character of Mimì.
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Early in the composition stage Puccini was in dispute with the composer Ruggero Leoncavallo, who said that he had offered Puccini a completed libretto and felt that Puccini should defer to him. Puccini responded that he had had no idea of Leoncavallo's interest and that having been working on his own version for some time, he felt that he could not oblige him by discontinuing with the opera. Leoncavallo completed his own version, in which Marcello was sung by a tenor and Rodolfo by a baritone. It was unsuccessful and is now rarely performed.
Much of the libretto is original. Major sections of acts two and three are the librettists' invention, with only a few passing references to incidents and characters in Murger. Most of the acts one and four follow the book, piecing together episodes from various chapters. The final scenes in acts one and four -the scenes with Rodolfo and Mimì- resemble both the play and the book. The story of their meeting closely follows chapter 18 of the book, in which the two lovers living in the garret are not Rodolphe and Mimì at all, but rather Jacques and Francine. The story of Mimì's death in the opera draws from two different chapters in the book, one relating Francine's death and the other relating Mimì's.
The published libretto includes a note from the librettists briefly discussing their adaptation. Without mentioning the play directly, they defend their conflation of Francine and Mimì into a single character: Chi può non confondere nel delicato profilo di una sola donna quelli di Mimì e di Francine?, Who cannot confuse in the delicate profile of one woman the personality both of Mimì and of Francine?. At the time, the book was in the public domain, Murger having died without heirs, but rights to the play were still controlled by Barrière's heirs.
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and it is manifested in all high artistic achievements.
Giacomo Puccini
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