So… one of the most performed operas of all time, jammed pack of famous tunes, what more is there to say?

Well, there are some interesting facts about the whole shebang you might need at a dinner party, so, here goes…

Puccini was just coming to the fore as a leading opera composer when he hit the ground hobbling with slow burner of a hit La Bohème.  And not without some prior scandal and hesitation and a lot of argument either.

Leoncavallo, Puccini’s rival (and trust me, Puccini was insecure enough to see him as such), had offered Puccini a libretto for an opera based on Murger’s novel Scènes de la vie de Bohème.  Puccini had pooh poohed it, and now Leoncavallo was writing it himself. When he discovered Puccini’s intention to write one too, he was not best pleased and took his story to the local press.  Shortly after the Secolo published Leoncavallo’s intention to present a new opera entitled La Bohème; Corriere della Sera published Puccini’s – needless to say it was a little bit messy.

Things were only made messier by the fact that Puccini kept getting fed up with writing La Bohème, and was pretty busy travelling from opera house to opera house to oversee various productions of Manon Lescaut.

In fact he told many people he was packing Bohème in on various occasions.

At one point, he and one of the librettists working on Bohème, Illica, got in such a tiff about the project that Puccini upped sticks and went on a sojourn in Sicily to try and write another opera, La Lupa.

Puccini wanted to get rid of Mimi and Rodolfo’s great break up and have them still together at the start of Act III; Mimi dying in the shabby garret. Illica said, no deal, rightly surmising that this would undermine the complexity of Murger’s original and turn the whole thing into a kitchen sink drama, or, in his words: “a pitiful story…a tear jerker…but not La Bohème...[which is] more complex than that.“

Eventually, Puccini gave up on La Lupa (much to his publisher and benefactor, Ricordi’s, annoyance) and work on La Bohème (now very overdue) continues. But all was not well between composer and librettists.  Puccini even tried to hire a new librettist through the back door, without even telling Ricordi. Plus, the second librettist on the project, Giuseppe Giacosa, was having trouble coming up with a libretto for Act III that anyone could agree on.

Anyway, when La Bohème  finally did get up and running it was hardly an instant success. The premier in Turin had terrible reviews, but it seemed to pick up steam with each new production.

Then, Leoncavallo’s version of Bohème premiered in Venice, and was a flop.  Puccini was unbecomingly smug about this, even composing a poem about his friend’s failure (and they say schadenfreude is a German thing).

Puccini had, perhaps unknowingly, composed a masterpiece.  What seemed like a none-story was to become one of the most performed and touching operas of all time.

It’s taken on many, many guises – from a televised film version with Anna Netrebko to a shabby heart wrencher in a North London pub – but the Jonathan Miller version that is about to start (once again) at the ENO is a classic of a classic.  It has everything you want from a La Bohème and no directorish ego in the way.  Many people say Miller is a genius, I am not sure about that – I think he is just very good at doing exactly what is on the page, and seeing as Puccini, Illica and Giacosa were pretty good at their jobs, that’s quite enough!