Madama Butterfly
The complete metaphorphosis
Music by Giacomo Puccini. Libretto by Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica, after the play by David Belasco. Premiere: Feb. 17, 1904, Teatro alla Scala, Milan. Presented in the Brescia version, premiered May 28, 1904. Sung in Italian.
Giacomo Puccini was expecting that the elite opera lovers of the Teatro alla Scala in Milan would accord a huge ovation to his new opera, Madama Butterfly, when it opened on Feb. 17, 1904. It was the culmination of almost four years of work. He had been captivated by David Belasco’s one-act play Madame Butterfly, which was based on a story by John Luther Long that was itself adapted from a tale by Pierre Loti. When Puccini saw the play in London in the summer of 1900, he went backstage to ask Belasco’s permission to develop it into an opera. The playwright reported, “I agreed at once … because it was impossible to discuss arrangements with an impulsive Italian who has tears in his eyes and both arms round your neck.”
Once the requisite literary contracts had been drawn up, Puccini embarked on the project with his tried and true librettists, Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica, who had previously joined him in creating the operatic masterworks La bohème and Tosca .He immersed himself in researching things Japanese, intent on infusing a realistic flavor into the sad tale of the young Japanese woman who marries an American serviceman and then finds herself deserted by him and left with a baby, named Dolore (Trouble), as a memento. A terrific cast was assembled, headed by the soprano Rosina Storchio in the title role, the tenor Giovanni Zenatello as Lt. Pinkerton, and the baritone
Giuseppe de Luca as the American consul Sharpless, who tries to keep things on an even keel as the sorry tale unfolds.
Rehearsals went smoothly, and the accomplished conductor Cleofonte Campanini had everything well in hand in the orchestra pit. Puccini’s longtime publisher Giulio Ricordi had some misgivings about the new work, but La Scala’s general manager Giulio Gatti-Casazza (who would later head the Metropolitan Opera for nearly three decades) was enthusiastic, and Ricordi’s son Tito had put together a production that infused the current craze for Japonisme with truly operatic opulence.
Nonetheless, Madama Butterfly was hissed and booed practically from the moment the curtain rose. Instead of ovations, Puccini spent the evening hearing whistles and catcalls. According to Gatti-Casazza, the cast behaved with admirable poise, singing through the din as if nothing unusual was happening. The audience kept quiet only at the opera’s end, which, he recalled, was greeted by “absolutely glacial silence.” Giacosa launched into a backstage tirade about the disrespect the audience had shown for the libretto. Puccini was flabbergasted; but, being experienced in the ways of Italian opera, he was not unfamiliar with the feared claque, the army of strong-voiced opera-goers whom anyone might hire to ensure or deny success.
Puccini withdrew his new opera after that single performance. He returned his fee to Gatti-Casazza and he reimbursed Ricordi for the expenses the publishing house had incurred printing scores of the piece. Then he leapt into revising the work, altering the division of its acts, tightening a number of passages, eliminating a few unnecessary details, and — most strikingly — adding a considerable expanse that included the evergreen tenor romanza “Addio fiorito asil.” He scheduled the revised version of Madama Butterfly to be introduced three months later, not in heady Milan, but rather at the more modest Teatro Grande in Brescia, 40 miles to the east, before an audience that had been historically supportive of the composer’s endeavors. Illica termed the success in Brescia to be colossal. The audience demanded encores of seven numbers and granted 32 curtain calls. An extended engagement ensued in Brescia, and Madama Butterfly was instantly added to the calendars of opera houses throughout Italy. Before the year was out, it was produced in Buenos Aires, Montevideo, and Alexandria. In its first decade, it would be mounted in dozens of productions from Stockholm to Saigon, from Odessa to Johannesburg, most often in its original Italian but also in English, French, Spanish, German, Czech, Hungarian, Polish, Slovenian, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, and Croatian.
Puccini continued to tinker with the score, effecting further cuts for a 1905 production at London’s Covent Garden and a somewhat reconfigured version for the Paris Opéra in 1906. Producers today have various options to choose from, and some opera houses have come up with their own versions that combine details from different early editions. (Puccini’s last surviving granddaughter, who died this past December at the age of eighty-nine, was vehement in opposing La Scala’s reviving the presumed original text of the premiere in its 2016 season, insisting that the company was disrespecting the composer’s wishes.)
Santa Fe Opera will stick with the Brescia text, which seems a wise choice given that it was the version that first scored a success and vindicated the composer’s belief in what would become a perennial favorite. Even what was performed in Brescia, however, does not correspond exactly to any of the
Madama Butterfly editions published during the composer’s lifetime. “It is not possible to speak of clearly definable ‘versions’ of Madama Butterfly,” argues the musicologist Dieter Schickling, who has catalogued all the scores’ variants. “We must think, rather, of a ‘work in progress,’ changing from performance to performance and only incompletely reflected in the printed vocal scores.”
One curious footnote emanating from the variety of early editions is confusion about the name of the tenor lead. At the disastrous La Scala opening, his name was given as Sir Francis Blummy Pinkerton — a moniker that, to English speakers, sounds neither dashing nor
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American. In the immediately ensuing emendations, the librettists and composer changed it to Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton. (That accords with the name as given in Long’s story and Belasco’s play.) The original libretto published by the house of Ricordi accordingly identifies him as “B.F. Pinkerton,” but some printings of their score — including the piano reduction attached to the Brescia production — held on to the “F.B.” initials in the cast list. You will find him identified either way in writings about the piece.
Audiences in the United States adored it from the outset, notwithstanding that the bad guy is an American naval officer. The opera first reached our shores in October 1906, when it was given in English by the Savage Opera Company at the Columbia Theatre in Washington, D.C., and the following month it was mounted in New York at the Garden Theatre. It made it to the stage of the Metropolitan Opera in February 1907, with the starry cast of Geraldine Farrar, Enrico Caruso, and Antonio Scotti singing in the presence of the composer. That was the first of the 881 times it has been offered by that company in the years since. It has become the Met’s seventh most frequently performed opera, outranked only by La bohème, Aida, La traviata, Carmen, Tosca, and — just barely — Rigoletto, which beats it by four performances. In fact, that company has offered it in all but 19 of its seasons since the house premiere. The website Operabase, which tracks opera performances internationally, finds that it is also the seventh most frequently presented in the world, receiving 2,428 performances in 555 separate productions from the 2013-2014 to 2017-2018 seasons alone. Puccini was justified in not anticipating his opera’s failure, but he could hardly have expected that degree of success either.