La bohème

Puccini and Leoncavallo discovered in 1893 that they were setting the same book, Murger's Scènes de la vie de bohème, and quarrelled about it in the press; Puccini's version reached the Teatro Regio in Turin first, on 1 February 1896, conducted by the twenty-eight-year-old Arturo Toscanini. The critics were unimpressed — one predicted the opera would leave no mark — and the public decided otherwise within months. Puccini's librettists Giacosa and Illica compressed the novel's episodes into four self-contained tableaux with no plot machinery between them.