By Mark Arnest
With apologies to Dan Brown, this is not going to be a breathless thriller featuring a plucky composer, a secret Vatican plot, a buggy chase, and an ancient artifact hidden in the Leaning Tower of Pisa. But there is a paradox in the personality of Giaccomo Puccini, who along with Verdi and Mozart, is one of the world’s most produced opera composers.
On the one hand, few composers were as determinedly anti-intellectual as Puccini, who once wrote that, “Only with emotion can one achieve a triumph that endures.” Unlike such opera composers as Verdi or Wagner, Puccini had no interest in musically rendering philosophical or political ideas. His interest was in creating passionate human characters who, as often as not, were motivated by sexual desire.
But what really made Puccini stand out was his incredible talent and hard work, which turned him into one of the greatest composers of his time. He wasn’t just a master at creating beautiful melodies that stick with you; he also knew how to use the entire orchestra to bring those melodies to life in the most exciting way possible. Puccini had a special gift for telling stories through music, keeping audiences on the edge of their seats from start to finish. He was also great at focusing on the little details, making the music and the story fit together like pieces of a puzzle.
All these traits are abundantly on display in what’s arguably his greatest work, Madame Butterfly. Premiered in 1904 (but extensively tweaked for a further three years) it was the last of a string of hits that began with Manon Lescaut (1892) and continued with La bohème (1896) and Tosca (1900).
The power of Madame Butterfly flows from four areas: the way it brings its characters to life and tells a gripping story; the richness and beauty of its melodic ideas; the variety of musical styles that keep things fresh and exciting; and Puccini’s unique twist on using recurring musical themes (called leitmotifs) that tie everything together in a way that makes the music feel connected and meaningful.
These elements come together to make Madame Butterfly a truly powerful and emotional experience. Each melody, each theme, and every moment of the story works to create an opera that feels alive, full of passion, and unforgettable. But first a bit about Puccini’s two pairs of literary sources. For atmosphere and certain moments of action he used French writer Pierre Loti’s 1887 autobiographical novel Madame Chrysanthème and its 1893 operatic adaptation by André Messager, meanwhile much of the plot comes from John Luther Long’s 1898 short story Madame Butterfly, and its 1900 theater adaptation by David Belasco. (Belasco also provided the story for Puccini’s next opera, La fanciulla del West.)
Madame Butterfly is different from the stories that inspired it, and these changes make the opera even more powerful. In the original story by Loti, the story is no tragedy: There is no child, and the last time Pierre looks back at his Japanese wife, she’s already testing the coins with which he paid her. Long devotes only a small fraction of his story to Butterfly’s life with Pinkerton, while Belasco omits it entirely, beginning his play with the last day of Butterfly’s life. But Belasco makes the story even more dramatic and emotional by turning what was just a small wound in Long’s version into something much more serious and tragic.
To create Act 1 from almost nothing, Puccini’s long-time librettists Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa adapted several ideas from Messager’s opera, including the lovers’ meeting, the crowded wedding, and the love scene. They made Long’s rift with the family appear earlier and more dramatically, and introduced the sword as a chilling foreshadowing of the opera’s end.
This leisurely Act 1 gave Puccini a world to demolish in the taut Acts 2 and 3. The love scene – a scene unsurpassed in all of Puccini – gives the audience some sympathy for Pinkerton. He’s a cad, of course, but he’s not just a cad, and seeing Butterfly’s love for him makes her later actions believable.
However, Pinkerton’s presence does not make Madame Butterfly a romance; more than any other full-length Puccini opera, Madame Butterfly revolves around a single character. The opera’s theme is not love, but rather the betrayal of trust and its consequences. Butterfly, wrote Puccini scholar Mosco Carner, was unique among the composer’s heroines for “developing in a continuous and consistent line – from the child-bride of Act 1 to the tragic woman and mother at the end of the opera.”
Butterfly enters to a four-note theme that becomes increasingly rapturous and ethereal as it’s repeated, each time higher in register. (Madame Butterfly famously flopped at its February 1904 premiere; one of the major changes Puccini made before its successful reboot three months later was to reshape this theme, making it more sinuous and expressive.) From that point on, she’s rarely offstage, and during her rare absences, she’s the focus of attention.
Compared to Butterfly, Pinkerton plays a smaller role in the story. One writer, Carner, describes Pinkerton as just a spark that sets everything in motion, while Suzuki and Sharpless act like a kind of Greek chorus, commenting on the action. But thanks to Puccini’s music, these characters become much more memorable. Puccini helps us feel Sharpless’s kindness, Suzuki’s loving loyalty, and Pinkerton’s passionate and loud personality.
Madame Butterfly was the first Puccini opera to explore another country’s musical language. In addition to the passionate late Romanticism that was Puccini’s native tongue, there are seven Japanese tunes, some of which are used for local color, and others of which receive the full Puccini treatment. One interesting part of Madame Butterfly is a special melody called the wholetone theme. Back in 1904, this type of music sounded a little new and different. At first, this theme is connected to a character called the Bonze, but as the story goes on, it starts to show Butterfly’s feelings of loneliness and how she feels separated from her family. Puccini liked these musical ideas so much that he used similar ones later when writing another famous opera, Turandot.
Puccini’s mastery of motivic development deserves its own essay, but two examples must suffice. First is the motif at the climax of Butterfly’s famous Act 2 aria, “Un bel dì vedremo,” at the words “Tienti la tua paura” – “banish your fears.” It’s unforgettably rendered: It has the aria’s first loud, high note, its immediately repeated for emphasis, and is further set off by a dramatic change in key. It’s the fourth time we’ve heard the motif in the aria, although the first two times its shape is slightly different. The earlier appearances all have to do with her vision of Pinkerton arriving, and each time he’s closer.
These alone would make the motif powerful. But we’re also already familiar with it, at least unconsciously. It’s sprinkled throughout the opera, appearing as early as the fourth bar of the opera as part of the violin fugato that represents pre-wedding bustle. And we’ll hear it again, notably as the high point in the sublime vigil scene, a scene that was surely the at least unconscious inspiration for Les Miserables’s “Bring Him Home.”
A second example follows one of the opera’s psychological low points, Butterfly’s Act 2 “Ah! m’ha scordata?” – “did he forget me?” It’s a triumphant transformation of Butterfly’s motif, and leads to the reveal that changes the opera’s arc: Butterfly has a child.
This surprising change in mood is an example of Puccini’s mastery of psychology – not just his characters’ but also his audience’s. Again and again in Madame Butterfly, the music leads the way, anticipating the text rather than merely illustrating it. And since the final two acts (for the most part) develop musical ideas introduced in Act 1, as the opera develops, we experience a web of associations and reminiscences. You may find yourself wondering where you’ve heard some-thing before, or what its dramatic context was. Puccini makes our attention and memory crucial ingredients in creating meaning.
In Madame Butterfly, Puccini’s extraordinary musical mind is entirely in service of his goal of powerful emotion in the theater. He created a world of overwhelmingly abundant lyricism – how many composers could afford to toss off a scrumptious phrase like “Gettiamo a mani piene” (“throw [the flowers] with both hands”) at the end of the flower duet? – and a character who will continue to move audiences for as long as there is opera.
