Libretto
Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica, after the novel Scènes de la vie de bohème (Scenes of Bohemian Life) by Henry Murger.
First performance
Turin, Teatro Regio, February 1st, 1896.
Trama
In an attic apartment in the Latin Quarter of Paris, a group of young artists are living together in poverty. Their neighbour, the little seamstress Mimì, introduces herself, seeking a light for her candle, when Rodolfo is left alone. They fall in love. At the Café Momus Rodolfo presents Mimì to his friends, while the singer Musetta abandons her elderly rich lover Alcindoro in order to join Marcello. Alcindoro is left to settle the bill for all of them.
Time has passed. Mimì has been living with Rodolfo, but they quarrel, because of his apparent jealousy. He has planned to leave her, as we learn in a scene set on a cold winter morning by the city gates. Musetta, a contrast in character to the gentle Mimì, later returns to the attic apartment of the four young men, bringing with her the dying Mimì, whom they now try to comfort, but in vain, as she dies before their eyes of the consumption that has racked her.
La Bohème was born as a contest between two of the most acclaimed opera composers of the late nineteenth century: Ruggero Leoncavallo and Giacomo Puccini. Both wanted to write an opera based on Murger’s novel Scènes de la vie de bohème, published between 1845 and 1848 and finally freed from copyright. Puccini began work on his La Bohème in 1893, together with librettists Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa (with whom he had already worked on his first success, Manon Lescaut). Two years of work on the libretto, divided into four scenes, was followed by about eight months to complete the score. Puccini’s La bohème was performed on February 1, 1896, at the Teatro Regio in Turin, conducted by a young Arturo Toscanini, and given its enormous success, the opera of the same name by his “rival” Leoncavallo, which would have debuted in May 1897, was quickly forgotten.