Some mystery exists over the origin of the idea of the composition of La bohème. Following the success of Puccini's Manon Lescaut, the composer toyed with the possibility of an opera based on Giovanni Verga's La lupa, a tale from the collection that inspired Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana. But he veered off course from that destination and, sometime in 1893-1894 turned his attention to Henri Mürger's Scenes de la vie de Bohème. The next thing we hear about the topic is the scandal involving the composer Ruggiero Leoncavallo, composer of Pagliacci, who was writing his own version of Murger’s novel. In documentation that still exists, Leoncavallo swears that sometime in 1892 he showed a scenario of the novel to Puccini and Puccini's publisher Ricordi but that at the time both Puccini and Ricordi rejected it. A few months later, in 1893, the two composers run into each other at a café and Puccini mentions his work on an opera of La bohème. Leoncavallo was furious, feeling that the project had been stolen from him. In operatic Milan during this period composers usually hid their projects with the utmost secrecy, protecting them like an inventor would a patent for a brilliant new invention. For Puccini to mention his project to his felloe composer, therefore, was highly unusual in the first place, and he paid dearly for that slip.
Leoncavallo immediately announced in the newspaper that he had embarked on a Bohème project. The next day, Puccini was forced to announce in a rival newspaper that HE had begun a project, and was quite well along with it. The battle of the newspapers went on for awhile, with Puccini essentially dismissing the situation by saying, “What does it matter to Leoncavallo? Let him compose and I shall compose and the public will judge.” In the end, Leoncavallo seemingly won the 'contest'. His Bohème, which premiered 15 months after Puccini’s, was very successful at its first performances. Puccini’s premiere, at the Teatro Regio in Turin, was not the unqualified success that he had enjoyed earlier. The public contrasted it to the very successful Manon Lescaut, also based on a French novel. The consensus was that this Bohème was more of the same, nothing new from the young composer, not evident of real growth. And although the first Bohème audience seemed to take the work to heart, the critics were not kind.
History has proved them wrong of course, and Puccini’s masterpiece holds the opera stage like no other work from the same period. Leoncavallo’s Bohème is hardly ever staged anymore, despite the fact that it was the first really successful vehicle for the brilliant young tenor Enrico Caruso. The score certainly has its moments, but it emphasizes the more tragic elements of the story at the expense of the wonderful humanity and humor of the original Mürger novel, something that Puccini captured beautifully in his brilliant score. The thing that seems to have bothered the critics the most about Puccini's work was its episodic realism. There is something quite life-like about the mixture of pathos and humor in this score, and it was this realism that, in fact, made La traviata and Carmen failures at their premieres as well. For some reason the critics found this new sense of realism too tough to take.
To be fair to them, we must remember that on that same stage in Turin six weeks prior to the debut of La bohème, that same audience experienced the local premiere of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung. Being in the company of Teutonic gods and goddesses for six hours had surely rendered them incapable of accepting anything approaching the human or the mundane onstage; it was certainly a stretch.
An interesting tidbit: who was on the podium for the Wagner as well as for the Bohème that fateful year of 1895? None other than the 28-year-old Arturo Toscanini. Puccini was delighted with the maestro, and actually found him to be “a very sweet and nice man”, something contrary to the conductor whom we know to have been able to fill his musicians with dread at the raising of one eyebrow. But the premiere of La bohème was the beginning of a long (though tempestuous) relationship between the composer and the young conductor.