La Boheme

La bohème was born from a challenge between Giacomo Puccini and Ruggero Leoncavallo, who competed to write two works of the same name taken from the same source at the same time. After more than a century, Puccini's work is still among the most popular in the world, while Leoncavallo's has never been very successful.
The Puccini libretto was written by Illica & Giacosa and had a rather laborious gestation due to the difficulty of adapting the situations and characters of the original text to the rigid schemes and framework of a musical work. To complete the score Puccini spent three years of work spent between Milan, Torre del Lago and the Villa del Castellaccio near Uzzano, made available by Count Orsi Bertolini; here he completed the second and third act, as he noted with an inscription left on the walls of the villa. The orchestration of the score instead proceeded quickly and was completed one evening in late November 1895.
Less than two months later, on February 1, 1896, La bohème was performed for the first time at the Teatro Regio in Turin with Evan Gorga, Cesira Ferrani, Antonio Pini Corsi, Camilla Pasini and Michele Mazzara, conducted by the 29-year-old maestro Arturo Toscanini. The public success was good, while the official criticism, which at first proved rather hostile, soon had to align itself with the general consensus.
After the performance in Turin, the opera was slightly retouched by Puccini: this second version, now considered the definitive one and usually performed, was staged for the first time at the Teatro Grande in Brescia, attracting so many applause as to make the stage walls tremble. .
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