Giacomo Puccini

La Boheme

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.