 The première of La bohème on February 1, 1896 at the Teatro Regio in Turin was a particularly stressful event for Puccini. Although he was enthusiastic about the young and talented conductor (Arturo Toscanini), he disliked the acoustics of the theater, was not satisfied with the abilities of some of the cast members, and was anxious about the critics’ reaction. The audience’s response to the opera was favorable but considered tame by the day’s standard, commanding only fourteen curtain calls. The local music critics were openly hostile. One reviewer chastised Puccini for missteps in the opera and predicted that La bohème “will not leave any great marks on the history of our lyric theater.” Although the reviews published in newspapers and journals from other Italian cities were much more positive, perhaps the Turinese concern betrays the pressing issue in the minds of many Italian music critics at the time: the uncertain future of the Italian opera in the aftermath of what was widely acknowledged as Verdi’s final opera, Falstaff (1893).
Like every other Italian opera composer active in the late nineteenth-century, Puccini was indebted to the legacy of Verdi in all aspects of opera production. Puccini’s imitation of Verdi’s working model is particularly pronounced in the process of creating the libretto for La bohème. As in Verdi’s collaboration with librettists such as Francesco Maria Piave and Arrigo Boito, Puccini constantly and repeatedly asked his pair of librettists, Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa, to fashion and refashion the libretto to accommodate his musical ideas. However, Puccini’s taste in literature, in this case Henri Murger’s Scènes de la vie de Bohème (1851), a popular semi-autobiographical novel depicting the lives of young Bohemian artists in Paris, differed considerably from Verdi’s inclination to choose literary works of highly respected writers such as Schiller (Giovanna d’Arco, Luisa Miller, Don Carlos), Hugo (Ernani, Rigoletto), and Shakespeare (Macbeth, Otello, Falstaff).
 Verdi’s middle period operas, overlapping with the Risorgimento, often capitalized on the political messages of the original sources, eliciting censorial restrictions from the authorities and defiant support from the audience. On the other hand, Puccini and his librettists’ tendency in adapting Murger’s novel was to suppress its overt social criticisms. Set in the politically turbulent environment of the Revolution of 1848, Murger’s novel contained critiques of the crippling stagnancy and repulsive hypocrisy of bourgeois culture and social mores. Puccini and his librettists, while celebrating the cheerful liberty of the Bohemian lifestyle, transmuted Murger’s antagonism toward the dominant culture into benign pranks. Furthermore, the setting of the opera was pushed back from the revolutionary years of the late 1840s to the early 1830s, after the restoration of order following the July Revolution. Unlike Verdi’s operas, which so frequently depict the impossible conflict between the protagonists’ public obligations with their private passions, La bohème dwells exclusively on the vicissitude of youthful love.
 Compositionally Puccini’s La bohème also betrays the influence of Verdi, especially his late works, but displays crucial divergences. The loosening of mid-nineteenth-century formal devices in Verdi’s Otello and Falstaff continues in Puccini’s La bohème, which results in a seamlessly integrated, continuous musical texture. This is most clear in the comic segments of Acts I and IV, which, with their rapid juxtaposition of episodes and sudden shifts in mood, have much in common with Falstaff. Yet at key lyrical moments in the opera, Puccini, like Verdi, scaffolds his music onto traditional formulas to make the drama immediately perceptible. The love duet in Act I, for example, follows the conventional sequence of events: a dialogue between main characters (Rodolfo and Mimì), separate lyrical introductions by the two, a brief interruption by the third party (Marcello), and a concluding passage in which the lovers sing together.
One significant feature of Puccini’s style that distinguishes him from his predecessor is his receptiveness to Wagner’s Leitmotif technique, to which Verdi remained essentially impervious throughout his career. Certainly Puccini’s La bohème is worlds apart from Wagner’s Die Walküre or Tristan und Isolde. Nevertheless, as in Wagner’s works, recurring musical materials play an important dramatic role in La bohème, especially in Act IV when Puccini creates a complex web of thematic recalls, sometimes altered and recombined in a Wagnerian manner. The result of Puccini’s thematic manipulation is not, as in Wagner, an exposition of a profound philosophical message, but rather a projection of an acute sense of nostalgia.
 Despite the reservations expressed by the Turinese critics, Puccini’s extensions of and departures from Verdi’s model add to the opera’s accessibility and emotional immediacy and have contributed to continuing success of the opera. Observing the divide between the music critics and the public over the reception of La bohème in Turin, one Roman writer remarked that “between the two disputing parties, I side with the public.” A little more than a century later, the statement still rings true.
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