Organization

Stage director (+1)

Krunoslav Cigoj

B.F. Pinkerton

Predrag Protić

Soprano (+3)

Dubravka Šeparović Mušović

Suzuki

Baritone

Zoran Aleksandrić

Sharpless

Bass (+1)

Slobodan Stankovic

Tenor

Jovo Reljin

Goro

Soprano (+2)

Svetlana Bojčević Cicović

Kate Pinkerton

Bass (+3)

Velizar Maksimović

Prince Yamadori

Bass

Dušan Marković

Uncle Bonze

Stage director

Stage director (+2)

Dejan Miladinović

Costume designer

Svetlana Čkonjević

Set designer

Mileta Leskovac

National Theatre Belgrade

National Theatre

After the success of the opera Tosca at its premiere on January 14, 1900 at the Teatro Constanta in Rome, Puccini was looking for suitable content for a new opera. staying in London, Puccini watched the play Madame Butterfly by John Long and David Belasco and under the deep impression of the poetry of a little Japanese geisha, her sincere and pure love full of longing, disappointment and suffering and decided to compose a libretto opera. Madam Butterfly carries all the characteristics of Puccini's musical-dramatic style that we know from his earlier operas  Bohemia andTosca : intimate and warm lyrics, sudden, often brutal contrast, temperamental outbursts, exciting gradations, interestingly instrumented mosaic music, intense orchestral underlining of the drama, warm singing along melodic lines, in terms of distinctly Italian opera tradition. But what particularly separates Madame Butterflyof Puccini's other operas, the exotic is strongly underlined. The modern age has brought great interest in the rhythmic, melodic and tonal features of music, which developed in non-European civilizations. When he set out to compose the shocking tragedy of a small Japanese geisha, Puccini had to, quite naturally, take an interest in Japanese musical folklore in order to more suggestively underline the Japanese ambience in which the action takes place. Madame Butterfly is interwoven with extraordinarily stylized elements of Japanese folklore, which give Puccini's score a special charm. In that respect, the exotic motif of the knife with which Butterfly will be killed stands out. In addition, Puccini made rich use of those bizarre harmonic relationships, which result from Japanese pentatonics, a scale of five whole tones, and in the instrumentation he tried to evoke the sounds of old Japanese wooden instruments. Of the significant and characteristic places in the scoreMadame Butterfly should emphasize the intoxicating atmosphere of a summer starry night in which a great, widely done, warmly sung love duet of the first act takes place, then the music of waiting, the letter scene and the floral duet of Ćoćosan and Suzuki in the second act, symphonic intermezzo between the second and third acts. which musically reflects the severe mental suffering of the unfortunate Butterfly, and then describes the slight awakening of nature and life in the port of Nagasaki. In addition to the expected great and complete success, Madame Butterflywas catastrophically ruined at the premiere in Scala in Milan on February 17, 1904. Overwhelmed by the failure, but aware that he had composed a work of value, full of poetry, Puccini wrote that unfortunate evening on a picture of a little Japanese woman given to him by a painter, Butterfly said: "Damn, but happy." Puccini withdrew the score from Scala and, on the advice of his friend and publisher Tito Ricordi, who was convinced of the value of the work, undertook a partial reworking of the score: divided the opera into three instead of two, re-composed certain Bohemian-like passages , some superfluous scenes and added in the third act a tenor aria. Thus restored Madame Butterflywas a triumphant success at the Teatro "Grande" in Brescia on May 28, 1904. She came to life and flew like a butterfly to the world to never die again. One of Puccini's most popular operas, Madame Butterfly , the audience also draws a sincere and warm tear from a woman's eye.

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