Leoncavallo and Puccini were at work on their respective Bohèmes at approximately the same time, and the sense of competition that developed between them ultimately ended their friendship. Puccini had the advantage of a far superior libretto, Giacosa's and Illica's very free adaptation of Murger's Scènes de la vie de bohème, in which they wisely focused in on the love between Rodolfo and Mimì. The libretto that Leoncavallo wrote stayed closer to the episodic spirit of the source and the result was a work that was ...
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Leoncavallo and Puccini were at work on their respective Bohèmes at approximately the same time, and the sense of competition that developed between them ultimately ended their friendship. Puccini had the advantage of a far superior libretto, Giacosa's and Illica's very free adaptation of Murger's Scènes de la vie de bohème, in which they wisely focused in on the love between Rodolfo and Mimì. The libretto that Leoncavallo wrote stayed closer to the episodic spirit of the source and the result was a work that was dramatically more diffuse, with less clearly defined characterizations. Puccini's version was premiered in 1896 in Turin, and Leoncavallo's in 1897 in Venice. Both works held the stage for a while, but Puccini's superseded Leoncavallo's in the first decade of the twentieth century. One of the unanswerable "what ifs" of operatic history is whether Leoncavallo's version might have made him more than a one-hit wonder had Puccini not written his Bohème. While his version falls far short of the...
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