The premiere of La Boheme took place at the Teatro Regio in Turin on 1 February 1896. Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica based their libretto for this opera on Scenes de la vie de Boheme by Henry Murger. It took Puccini only a fewmonths to complete a score brimming with wonderful melodic invention and orchestrational genius. The music is a surprisingly supple and sensitive medium for depicting a variety of emotions that animate the young: reckless living full of stop-gapexpedien