While in London in 1900, Puccini attended a performance of American theatrical producer and playwright David Belasco’s one-act play Madame Butterfly, which recounted the tale (derived from a short story of the same name by American author John Luther Long) of a Japanese girl’s ill-fated love for an American sailor. Although he knew no English, Puccini responded to the play’s poignancy and asked his publisher, Giulio Ricordi, to obtain the story’s operatic rights. Early in 1901 the composer and his favourite librettists, Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa, with whom he had previously worked with success on Manon Lescaut, La Bohème, and Tosca, set about creating Madama Butterfly.
Puccini and his librettists took steps to introduce an element of realism into the new opera. Illica even traveled to Nagasaki to investigate local colour, while Puccini set about researching Japanese music. He visited with the wife of the Japanese ambassador to Italy, who sang Japanese folk songs to him. She also acquired for him sheet music for further study. Puccini’s music for the opera reflects what he had learned and even makes a few direct references to the Japanese songs he had been exposed to. To delineate the American characters, Puccini often used a bluff forthright manner of expression, and he occasionally worked in bits of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
For all his care in composing the opera, Puccini was stunned at its reception. The opening-night audience at La Scala in Milan on February, 17, 1904, openly jeered, booing and hissing throughout the performance. Madama Butterfly’s Japanese theme was mocked, and its tragic heroine was derided as a secondhand copy of Mimì from La Bohème. Puccini withdrew the opera from performance after opening night, but he was not discouraged. Perhaps he was aware that jealous rivals had filled the house with their own noisy supporters.
Nevertheless, he and his librettists began extensive revisions, most notably dividing the opera’s overly long second act. The new Madama Butterfly, which reached the stage in Brescia, Italy, on May 28, 1904, was a great success. Two more revisions would follow, in 1905 and 1906, before the opera reached its definitive form. All versions included “Un bel dì,” which remains one of the best-known arias in the soprano repertoire.
