Madame Butterfly premieres
On this day in 1904 Giacomo Puccinis opera Madame Butterfly premieres at the La Scala theatre in Milan Italy.The young Puccini decided to dedicate his life to opera after seeing a performance of Giuseppe Verdis Aida in 1876.In his later life he would write some of the best-loved operas of all time La Boheme (1896) Tosca (1900) Madame Butterfly (1904) and Turandot (left unfinished when he died in 1906).Not one of these however was an immediate success when it opened.
La Boheme the now-classic story of a group of poor artists living in a Paris garret earned mixed reviews while Tosca was downright panned by critics.While supervising a production of Tosca in London Puccini saw the play Madame Butterfly written by David Belasco and based on a story by John Luther Long.Taken with the strong female character at its center he began working on an operatic version of the play with an Italian libretto by Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica.Written over the course of two yearsincluding an eight-month break when Puccini was badly injured in a car accidentthe opera made its debut in Milan in February 1904.Set in Nagasaki Japan Madame Butterfly told the story of an American sailor B.F.
Pinkerton who marries and abandons a young Japanese geisha Cio-Cio-San or Madame Butterfly.In addition to the rich colorful orchestration and powerful arias that Puccini was known for the opera reflected his common theme of living and dying for love.This theme often played out in the lives of his heroineswomen like Cio-Cio-San who live for the sake of their lovers and are eventually destroyed by the pain inflicted by that love.
Perhaps because of the operas foreign setting or perhaps because it was too similar to Puccinis earlier works the audience at the premiere reacted badly to Madame Butterfly hissing and yelling at the stage.Puccini withdrew it after one performance.He worked quickly to revise the work splitting the 90-minute-long second act into two parts and changing other minor aspects.
Four months later the revamped Madame Butterfly went onstage at the Teatro Grande in Brescia.This time the public greeted the opera with tumultuous applause and repeated encores and Puccini was called before the curtain 10 times.Madame Butterfly went on to huge international success moving to New Yorks Metropolitan Opera in 1907.
