The two composers clashed in the press, but it was Puccini who had the final say: ‘Let him compose, and I will compose.
Ruggero Leoncavallo, the author of the brilliant Palgliaci, began to work on his La bohème around the same time as Puccini. It is no wonder that the same topic caught the interest of another composer who had risen out of poverty and wanted to showcase ‘real life’ in opera. After the success of Manon Lescaut (1892) he could afford to buy a villa in Torre del Lago, but the memory of the hunger and cold of his student life in Milan never left his memory. There was a lot in Murger’s novel that he could relate to. And, above all, there is poetry, divine Poetry,’ Puccini gushed. There are people, feelings, there is a heart. It felt like a family: freshness, youth, passion, cheerfulness, tears shed in silence, a love that brings joy and makes you suffer. With a little help from seasoned librettists, Luigi Illika and Giovanni Giacosa, Puccini set out to write a loose adaptation of Henri Murger’s famed book, Scenes of Bohemian Life (Scènes de la vie de bohème), a raw description of the miserable life lead by the Parisian ‘artistic proletariat’. He was discouraged from pursuing the latter project by Wagner’s stepdaughter (and Liszt’s granddaughter), who was appalled by the story’s brutality. He was, however, also fascinated with the erotically charged Giovanni Verga’s The She-Wolf (La lupa), novella set in Sicily. Before Giacomo Puccini sat down to write La bohème, which turned out to be one of the world’s most popular operas, his had planned to create an opera about the life of Buddha.
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