In the summer of 1893, Puccini wasn’t working very hard.  For the first time in his life the 35-year-old composer had plenty of money, thanks to the success of Manon Lescaut.  He had settled in the small village of Torre del Lago, his “supreme joy, paradise, Eden”.  He spent a lot of time hunting, and drinking with the locals. He even hired a young man to play snatches of Bohème on the piano in the early morning while he went out, so his wife would assume that he was composing. 

But gradually, Bohème came together. Much of the delay was caused by Puccini’s dissatisfaction with the work of his librettist team, Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica.  The same pair had finished the libretto of Manon, and would go on to write the text for Tosca and Madama Butterfly. During the creation of Bohème, Puccini’s demands seemed endless.  At least twice, Giocosa was on the point of giving up the project. “Those conferences for Bohème,” Illica said, “they were slaughters in which entire acts were cut to pieces, scene after scene sacrificed…setting at naught in one minute the long, heavy labor of months.”

But Puccini was right.  Time after time, he insisted that unnecessary material be removed.  A long “local color” scene at the start of Act III, a formal quartet for the Bohemians in Act IV, even an entire act planned to go between the last two – all were thrown out. In the end, Puccini gave us an opera that is astonishing for its speed and conciseness. The entire second act, with its wealth of detail and incident, plays in only 17 minutes. La Bohème is one of the only standard operas which is performed with no cuts at all; there is not a note to spare.

An essential partner in the creative process was Puccini’s publisher, the legendary Giulio Ricordi. An uncommon judge of talent, Ricordi supported the young composer for years before the success of Manon Lescaut repaid his investment. It was Ricordi who brought Puccini and his two librettists together, and whose diplomacy kept them at it when the writers were ready to quit in despair. He made important suggestions about the scenario, and was responsible for the brilliant idea to have Musetta sing the reprise of her waltz offstage in Act III.

La Bohème opened in Turin on February 1, 1896. The reception was mixed; the audience was generally favorable, but many critics didn’t like it. “What has pushed Puccini on this deplorable road?” one reviewer wrote of the premiere performance. The first production at the Metropolitan in New York drew a celebrated misjudgment from the noted critic of the Tribune: “La Bohème is foul in subject, fulminant but futile in its music.” Meanwhile, all over the world, audiences fell in love with the opera. In less than two years, Puccini noted performances in Alexandria, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Malta, Smyrna, and Zagreb. 

Paris really had a Bohemian colony in the mid-nineteenth century. The source for the opera was a collection of stories about life on the Left Bank by Henri Murger, called Scènes de la vie de bohème. Murger knew the Bohemian life first-hand, having chosen it in preference to the bourgeois world he grew up in. Café Momus, the setting of the opera’s second act, was a real place, and it was Murger’s regular watering hole as well.  There was much appeal in this romantic portrait of brilliant young artists living in happy poverty, enjoying unconventional liaisons with pretty girls. But in real life, the poverty was extreme and sometimes very hard. Disease was epidemic; Murger and his friends rotated in and out of the hospital regularly, and death from consumption was all too common. (Murger himself moved to the Right Bank as soon as he received the publisher’s advance for his book.)

But in Puccini’s opera the threads of gaiety and tragedy are interwoven as brilliantly in the drama as joy, passion, and loss are intertwined in the music. “As long as men and women are young, and not quite virtuous,” wrote Arthur Symons, the English poet, “so long will this kind of life exist…and never has it been rendered so sympathetically, and with so youthful a touch of sentiment. To be five-and-twenty, poor and in love: that is enough.”