Giacomo Puccini

Puccini's next work after Manon Lescaut was La bohème ("The bohemian lifestyle"), a four-act opera based on the 1851 book by Henri Murger, La Vie de Bohème. La bohème premiered in Turin in 1896, conducted by Arturo Toscanini. Within a few years, it had been performed in many of the leading opera houses of Europe, including in Britain, as well as in the United States. It was a popular success and remains one of the most frequently performed operas ever written. The libretto of the opera, freely adapted from Murger's episodic novel, combines comic elements of the impoverished life of the young protagonists with tragic aspects, such as the death of the young seamstress Mimí. Puccini's own life as a young man in Milan served as a source of inspiration for elements of the libretto. During his years as a conservatory student and in the years before Manon Lescaut, he experienced poverty similar to that of the bohemians in La bohème, including a chronic shortage of necessities like food, clothing and money to pay rent. Although Puccini was granted a small monthly stipend by the Congregation of Charity in Rome (Congregazione di caritá), he frequently had to pawn his possessions to cover basic expenses. Early biographers such as Wakeling Dry and Eugenio Checchi, who were Puccini's contemporaries, drew express parallels between these incidents and particular events in the opera. Checchi cited a diary kept by Puccini while he was still a student, which recorded an occasion in which, as i…

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