La Bohème by Giacomo Puccini is back to Teatro La Fenice for Carnevale di Venezia 2024, with a libretto by Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica. Inspired by Henri Murger’s novel Scenes from the Life of Bohème, the libretto had a rather laborious gestation, due to the difficulty of adapting the situations and characters of the original text to the rigid schemes and framework of a musical opera. Instead, the orchestration of the score proceeded swiftly and was completed in December 1895. Less than two months later, on 1 February 1896, La Bohème was staged for the first time at the Teatro Regio in Turin, with Evan Gorga, Cesira Ferrani, Antonio Pini-Corsi and Michele Mazzara, conducted by the twenty-nine year old maestro Arturo Toscanini, with good public acclaim, while the official critics, who were rather hostile at first, soon had to align themselves with the general consensus