Puccini's La bohème is a classic — but did he pinch the idea from a rival?

Times

a day ago

We tend to put our composers on pedestals, often literally. Puccini reclines on a bench in Lucca, Italy. A giant, robed Wagner looks imperiously over Berlin. The UK is full of effigies in stone, bronze and steel: Chopin, Handel, Beethoven, Elgar. In Victoria Embankment Gardens in London a bust of Arthur Sullivan is mourned by a bronze lady so apparently inconsolable that she has neglected to put on a top.
Like the ancient oracles, composers seem to float above the rest of humanity while being blessed with extraordinary insight into our mortal state. This is, of course, cobblers. Composers, then and now, are artists, and like all artists they misbehave, being prone to the intense rivalries and scandalous squabbles that are all part of the scrabble to reach the top of the tree.
In late-19th-century Milan, as the reigning king of opera Giuseppe Verdi headed towards retirement, the gallerias were packed with composers falling over themselves, and each other, to be his successor. In 1893 the young rivals Ruggero Leoncavallo and Giacomo Puccini got into a stand-up row in a café after Leoncavallo accused Puccini of stealing his idea for an opera of La bohème. Each composer went on to write his own version, and the Italian public took sides in a 'battle of the Bohèmes' that played out across the stages of Europe.
There are similar stories of sabotage and plagiarism. Gioachino Rossini aroused the fury of Giovanni Paisiello after he copied the latter's idea — already an enormous hit — for an opera of Beaumarchais's play The Barber of Seville. On Rossini's opening night there were heckles and chants of Paisiello's name — all quite possibly paid for by the rival composer. The brilliance of Rossini's piece carried the day, but when an admiring crowd came to his house, he hid, fearing reprisals from Paisiello fans. Rossini himself was not beyond the odd dig. Of one German rival he said: 'Wagner has some beautiful moments, but some bad quarters of an hour.'
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Wagner has drawn more than his fair share of envy and barbed remarks from other composers. 'After the last notes of Götterdämmerung,' Tchaikovsky said, 'I felt as though I had been let out of prison.' Brahms was another composer who laid into Wagner — but if he expected some collegiate support from his contemporary Tchaikovsky, he was disappointed. The Russian summed him up thus: 'Brahms is a giftless bastard.'
Wagner turned on his great champion the Jewish composer Giacomo Meyerbeer. After Meyerbeer helped the younger man to ascend Parisian musical society, Wagner — for reasons of intense jealousy mixed with antisemitism — turned on his mentor, viciously lobbying against him, until Meyerbeer fell out of fashion and Wagner was in vogue.
One night in Hamburg in 1704, Handel and his fellow composer Johann Mattheson let their friendship turned rivalry get out of hand. A quarrel during an opera performance turned into a duel, and Handel's life was saved from Mattheson's blade by — depending which version you believe — a metal coat button or, more poetically, a score carried next to his chest.
In every era composers have flown into great rages, stabbed each other in the back, stolen ideas or simply driven each other crazy. Sometimes, intended or not, a little unwanted criticism is all it takes. Was Richard Strauss playing mind games when he devastated poor Gustav Mahler after a rehearsal for the latter's huge Sixth Symphony by sniffily saying only that it was 'overinstrumented'?
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One of my favourite stories, described in Alex Ross's book The Rest Is Noise, is of the irascible French composer Pierre Boulez showing the composer René Leibowitz the piano sonata he was dedicating to him — only for Leibowitz to offer some helpful pointers. 'Vous êtes merde!' Boulez screamed and later removed Leibowitz's name from the score by stabbing it out with a letter opener. In England, Benjamin Britten cut off ties with so many colleagues he felt weren't enthusiastic enough that they became known simply as 'Britten's corpses'. Across the Atlantic, the Americans Steve Reich and Philip Glass didn't speak for 40 years after (as Reich told it) a dispute about the extent of Reich's influence led to Glass changing the name of a new work from Two Pages for Steve Reich to, simply, Two Pages.
So great composers do not live at a saintly remove. Puccini got close to the truth when he said: 'Art is a kind of illness. Inspiration is an awakening, a quickening of all man's faculties.' That means feeling everything more intensely — the good stuff, but also jealousy, rage and vengefulness. Because only by diving deeply into our shared human frailties can the greats reflect them back to us — and, apparently, to each other.
James Inverne's play about the battle of the Bohèmes, That Bastard, Puccini!, is the Park Theatre, London, Jul 10-Aug 9