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
The Letter (opera) old-fashioned—Paul's musical language is in no way derivative of Verdi or Puccini—but we do want it to move fast and hit hard." Later Teachout described the challenges to adapting a literary work into a new medium, in this case an opera: "Every great opera based on a literary source involves an imaginative transformation of the original, one that typically goes far beyond the setting of the old words to new music." In May 2008 Moravec and Teachout discussed the opera at a press conference held in Santa Fe. Moravec called it “an opera "noir", a music drama about ordinary people