La Bohème

The premiere of La Bohème took place at the Teatro Regio in Turin on 1 February 1896. Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica based their libretto for this opera on Scènes de la vie de Bohème by Henry Murger. It took Puccini only a few months to complete a score brimming with wonderful melodic invention and orchestrational genius. The music is a surprisingly supple and sensitive medium for depicting a variety of emotions that animate the young: reckless living full of stop-gap expedients, erratic feelings and sudden explosions of noble sentiment, the driving ambitions of one’s art.

Puccini’s musical imagery illuminates the different moments and moods of the story with a delicate yet intense lyrical quality; just as the rapid decline and death of Mimì, subtle yet invincible, remind us of the universal reality that all things must inevitably come to an end. On the cover: “Al Quartiere Latino”, sketch by Riccardo Salvadori, as a variation on the sketch by Adolf Hohenstein for the world premiere in Turin of Bohème , 1896 © Archivio Storico Ricordi