Madama Butterfly Program Notes

Puccini’s Creation of the Opera, Madama Butterfly:

One day in 1876, young Giacomo Puccini’s future changed dramatically when he and his brother walked 20 miles to hear Verdi’s magical opera, Äida. Born into a long lineage (124 years) of music directors of his family’s local cathedral in Tuscany, Puccini had been expected from birth to assume his family’s musical duties. Perhaps it was destiny that threw this responsibility at Puccini at age six when he was too young to comply, followed by his negligent musical studies in his youth. In any case, everything changed after that fateful 1876 evening listening to Verdi’s masterpiece. Smitten, opera became Puccini’s passion, and not long afterwards he made his way to the Milan Conservatory where he roomed with Pietro Mascagni (who would later single-handedly create the verismo movement in Italian opera with his great Cavalleria Rusticana in 1890). From then on, Puccini would only consider composing operas to be his life’s work. It was his great fortune that the publishing house of G. Ricordi supported him despite his first two unsuccessful operas, until Puccini became a rising star with his Manon Lescaut (1893). Thereafter, Puccini continued to write blockbuster operas – La bohème, Tosca, Madame Butterfly, Gianni Schicchi, and lastly, Turandot (1924, unfinished) – becoming the greatest Italian opera composer after Verdi… he had indeed come a long way from that first long walk to hear Äida.

Puccini, like many of the great Italian opera composers before him, had a genuine gift for great melodies, and indeed, many of opera’s “Greatest Hits” were written by him. But along with his knack for melody, Puccini had a keen sense of story – he embraced the new movement, opera verismo, which focused on telling realistic stories of faraway places and told with penchant for violence. Great melodies and life-like drama helped the popularity of Puccini’s operas, further strengthened by his special gift for orchestration. In Puccini’s hands, even the simplest tune could become a thing of transcendent beauty. Such is true in many moments of his great opera, Madama Butterfly of 1904 – a work that examines cross-cultural love, loss, innocence, and arrogance – with themes as potent today as they were in Puccini’s time.

Puccini’s inspiration for Butterfly began in 1900 when he was in London overseeing a production of his latest opera, Tosca (1900). While in town he attended a performance of a new play that had gotten much popular press, American playwright David Belasco’s Madame Butterfly: A Tragedy of Japan. Belasco’s play was based on the short story, Madame Butterfly, by John Luther Long, a Philadelphia lawyer who himself found inspiration for his story in two sources: the semi-autobiographical 1887 French novel Madame Chrysanthème by Pierre Loti (1850–1923), and the stories told to Long by his sister, Jenni Cornell, about her experiences as a missionary in Japan with her husband.

Belasco’s adaptation of Long’s Butterfly for the stage focused on realism – something that Puccini was just beginning to explore in his operas, beginning with his Tosca. Even though the play was in English, Puccini resonated with the story and its pathos, as well as the West’s current infatuation with Asian aesthetics at the turn of the Century – many things from Japan, in fact, from ceramics, textiles, traditional artworks, to folk ways, were much the rage in the Western World. Japan was on everyone’s mind, including Puccini’s.

Puccini was soon hard at work on his new opera, Madama Butterfly, and enlisted the libretto writing skills of Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica, with whom he also collaborated for both La bohème and Tosca. Butterfly had its premiere in 1904 at La Scala in Milan. But, the premiere was an utter disaster and it was withdrawn after only one performance. This terribly disappointing premiere occurred because there had been too little time to rehearse, and the Opera’s structure was problematic – with only two Acts, the second was longer than audiences had patience for. Puccini immediately began to revise it, with a much more successful second version premiering in Brescia, Italy, just months later. Eventually his reworking ended in the opera’s fifth revision in 1907, which is now considered the “standard version.” The main difference between the original and the final version is that Puccini split Act II into a second and third Act, inserting a famous Japanese folk song as the entr’acte between the two. Since then, Madame Butterfly has become the sixth most performed opera in the world, with its popularity thanks to its compelling story, and Puccini’s music that’s as memorable as anything he penned.

© Max Derrickson