PUCCINI’S MADAMA BUTTERFLY
A SHORT GUIDE TO A GREAT OPERA
The opera and its composer
Who’s who and what’s what
The interval: talking points
Act by act
THE OPERA AND ITS COMPOSER
Early in Puccini’s opera, we hear that Cio-Cio-San is called ‘Madame Butterfly’ because she possesses all the delicacy, lightness and transparency of the fluttering tiny creature. In her early years, Maria Callas was invited to sing the part for her début at the Metropolitan Opera. To everybody’s amazement, she turned the opportunity down: she reckoned that at nearly thirteen stone it would not work. How wise she was.
Much later, when a slimmer Callas sang in Chicago, a member of the audience commented, ‘I never want to hear her Butterfly again … I’ll end up liking this dreadful opera.’ We can wonder whether it was Butterfly, the geisha,1 which the individual did not like, or whether he was offended by Puccini’s subtle portrayal of the arrogant cultural superiority assumed by ‘the West’. It is surely amazing that music which quotes several times, and most disrespectfully, ‘The Star-spangled Banner’ can be found at the very top of lists of much-loved and most popular operas in the USA.
The libretto of Madama Butterfly is based on a story, almost certainly a true one, published in an 1898 magazine.2 The author was a Philadelphia lawyer, John Luther Long. The Far East had opened up to Western trade in the second half of the 19th century. Japan was now topical, sufficiently so for Gilbert & Sullivan to produce their operetta The Mikado in the mid-1880s.3
Puccini, who was most careful in his choice of opera libretti, had for some time been searching for a suitable subject to follow Tosca. He had even had a serious look at the possibilities of Victor Hugo’s novel Les Misérables but rejected the idea. A one-act stage version of Long’s story, by David Belasco4, was seen by the stage manager of Covent Garden who suggested that Puccini should come and see it. Thereafter, the negotiations with Belasco took nine months.
Luigi Illica, who was a rough republican, produced the structure and first draft of the libretto; Giuseppe Giacosa, a smooth socialite, versified and polished it. This improbable and quarrelsome team, the ‘Holy Trinity’ (as the music publisher Giulio Ricordi called them), had also created Puccini’s Manon Lescaut, La Bohème and Tosca.
The première of Madama Butterfly took place at La Scala on 17 February 1904. Rosina Storchio was Cio-Cio-San, Giovanni Zenatello was Pinkerton, and Giuseppe de Luca was Sharpless. Puccini was very confident of its success. But complete pandemonium broke out in what was to be one of the sensational failures in the history of opera. Puccini withdrew it and revised it. He cut some of the material dealing with the wedding in Act 1, and also provided for an interval, which some today regard as a mistake, between the night and the dawn in Act 2.
Three months after the première, a revised version was staged with great success at the Teatro Grande in Brescia, a large city between Milan and Lake Garda. This was received with tremendous acclaim: Un bel dì, the letter scene, the flower scenes, and the Humming Chorus were encored; Puccini was called ten times. The opera has been a triumph every since.
On the surface, the story is a very ordinary tale about typical behaviour in a seaport. The drama, however, is created by the use of a technique familiar to the ancient Greeks, known as ‘dramatic irony’. From the outset, the audience is ‘in the secret of what is inevitable’, first, that Pinkerton will desert Madame Butterfly, and then that he has deserted her. This should be apparent to her, but she does not understand, and does not want to understand. Apart from its melody5, the effectiveness of Un bel dì is attributable to this dramatic irony. And later, Puccini underlines the irony by providing the beautiful Humming Chorus (at the end of Act 2 Part 1), as an interlude to enable the audience to be able to sit and contemplate, unencumbered by words, the inevitable drama which is about to unfold, and compare the vulnerability of one protagonist and the heartlessness and insensitivity of the other.
Puccini’s sense of theatre is unsurpassable. The thinness and simplicity of his orchestration, designed to enhance the exotic atmosphere of Japan6, can lead a listener to underrate the music, but those listening carefully will appreciate the quality of his craftsmanship. The Chicago resident completely failed to appreciate these aspects when he called Madama Butterfly ‘dreadful’.
Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924) came from a musical family in Lucca, a city in Tuscany. He studied at the Milan Conservatoire, where he experienced the life he depicted in La Bohème. The prominent Milanese music publisher Giulio Ricordi brought him together with his librettists Luigi Illica (1857–1919) and Giuseppe Giacosa (1847–1906).
Puccini modelled himself on Massenet, France’s most popular composer, a mass-producer of pleasing operas including Manon. Puccini’s first successful opera was in 1893, also based on Abbé Prévost’s novel, Manon Lescaut.
At a time when the operatic heir to Verdi was being sought, the music critic and writer Bernard Shaw thought that Puccini, with his catching melodies, was the likely candidate. His main rivals, Mascagni and Leoncavallo, the composers of Cavalleria rusticana and I Pagliacci respectively, lacked sustainability.
La Bohème (1896) was followed by Tosca (1900), Madama Butterfly (1904), La Fanciulla del West (1910), and Turandot. La Rondine (1917) and Il Trittico (1918) were less remunerative.
Puccini was a chain-smoker, who lived a ‘fast’ life and chased women. He eventually settled down with Elvira, who could only be married once her husband, a schoolfriend of the composer, had died. Elvira was possessive and jealous, and hounded one of the household servants, with whom she thought Puccini was having an affair. This was Doria Manfredi, who had joined Puccini’s household five years earlier, aged sixteen. She committed suicide, and Puccini and Elvira had to settle a very difficult lawsuit relating to Elvira’s behaviour.
Puccini’s great hobby was shooting birds, especially on nearby Lake Massaciuccoli near his villa, quite close to Lucca. He also had a passion for high-speed motor cars and was lucky to survive, with just a broken leg, a crash in which the car plunged down a 15ft embankment before turning over.
His unpatriotic attitude during the First World War made him unpopular. He developed throat cancer, and died in a Brussels clinic on 29 November 1924. Turandot was incomplete at the time of his death and was finished by Franco Alfano, a minor composer of operas. BACK
WHO’S WHO AND WHAT’S WHAT
The story below is based on the libretto. Certain directors m...