Madame Butterfly by Puccini, From (2021/2021), Directed by Chiara Muti, Conductor Francesco Ivan Ciampa, Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, Florence, Italy

After the successes of Manon Lescaut , La bohème and Tosca , the time has come for Puccini to conquer the temple of Italian opera as well. The subject of Madama Butterfly- an opera that made its debut with an initial failure at the Teatro alla Scala on February 17, 1904 - he had chosen it himself after having witnessed a similar drama by David Belasco in London, based on a short story by John Luther Long. The story of the young geisha seduced and abandoned by an American naval officer immediately struck his imagination. Flanked by the proven tandem of librettists Illica and Giacosa, Puccini decided to concentrate the work on the figure of Cio-Cio-San, creating a real monodrama that follows his psychological evolutions from the initial and disarming naivety to the tragic and heroic final resignation. . Madama Butterflyit is an individual drama but it is also an emblem of diametrically opposed worlds and cultures: on the one hand the docile but at the same time resolute geisha, who will pay the price of her life for the error of falling in love with a man who is foreign to her tradition of belonging, and on the other hand, the Yankee Pinkerton, the cynical adventurer unable to feel real emotions and devoted solely to satisfying his passions. Although opposed in the drama, East and West are perfectly combined in the music that is very rich in heterogeneous contaminations: oriental sounds skillfully recreated with the adoption of traditional Japanese melodies, pentaphonic and hexagonal scales, very refined timbral combinations but also compositional elements of the Western musical tradition ( such as the fugato or the Leitmotiv, for example,