Giacomo Puccini experienced recurrent difficulty in choosing opera subjects. In his mid-forties, at the height of success after Manon Lescaut, La Bohème and Tosca, he settled at length on a play he had seen in London — American playwright David Belasco’s adaptation of Madame Butterfly. Though he understood almost no English, he instinctively felt the appeal and sentiment of the story. It took time to secure rights to the play, and for his librettists, Illica and Giacosa, to fashion a text.
Belasco’s play capitalized on the turn-of-the-century vogue for picture-postcard views of Japan. Taking the Butterfly story from a magazine novella by John Luther Long (1861­p;1927), Belasco had transformed it with virtuoso stagecraft.
Perhaps because of its fragile atmosphere and intimate lyricism, Butterfly offered a perfect excuse for demonstrators jealous of Puccini to turn its premiere at La Scala on February 17, 1904, into a fiasco. Neither a fine cast — Rosina Storchio, Giovanni Zenatello, Giuseppe De Luca — nor the authority of Maestro Cleofonte Campanini availed. The composer made revisions, redeeming his favorite piece with a second “premiere” at Brescia on May 28, 1904. The first American performance was in Washington, D.C., in English, in 1906. Butterfly bowed in Italian at the Met (supervised by Puccini) on February 11, 1907, with Farrar, Homer, Caruso and Scotti, under Arturo Vigna.
© Copyright OPERA NEWS 2011. Reprinted with permission.
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