Musette svaria sulla bocca viva (La bohème)

Leoncavallo had been working on Murger's Scènes de la vie de bohème when Puccini announced that he was setting the same book; the two quarrelled in print, and Puccini's opera reached the stage first, in February 1896. Leoncavallo's followed at La Fenice in Venice on 6 May 1897, to his own libretto. He gives Musetta and Marcello the weight Puccini gives Mimì and Rodolfo, and keeps more of Murger's comedy and squalor. The opera did well at first and was then displaced; it is revived periodically as a record of what a different reading of the same source produced.