Giacomo Puccini were Puccini's contemporaries, drew express parallels between these incidents and particular events in the opera. Checchi cited a diary kept by Puccini while he was still a student, which recorded an occasion in which, as in Act 4 of the opera, a single herring served as a dinner for four people. Puccini himself commented: "I lived that "Bohème", when there wasn't yet any thought stirring in my brain of seeking the theme of an opera". ("") Puccini's composition of "La bohème" was the subject of a public dispute between Puccini and fellow composer Ruggiero Leoncavallo. In early 1893, the two
Dialogues of the Carmelites New York City on 3 March 1966, in a staging by New York City Opera. The opera is among a comparatively small number of post-Puccini works that has never lost its place in the international repertory. Against the setting of the French Revolution, when crowds stop carriages in the street and aristocrats are attacked, the pathologically timid Blanche de la Force decides to retreat from the world and enter a Carmelite monastery. The Mother Superior informs her that the Carmelite Order is not a refuge; it is the duty of the nuns to guard the Order, not the other way