MADAMA BUTTERFLY

“HER FOR WHOM I WROTE MUSIC IN THE NIGHT ”
Study Guide Article

Like many great operas, the fabled story of the premiere of Madama Butterfly is nearly as operatic as the work itself. So operatic, in fact, that it officially qualifies as a “fiasco.” This wonderful Italian word, theatrical slang for a bomb, a stinker, a failure, is derived from the idiomatic expression “fare fiasco,” to make a bottle – as in, the gentleman at the premiere of Madama Butterfly turned to his companion in disgust and exclaimed, “Puccini really made a bottle with this one!” However, Puccini most certainly did not make a bottle on February 17, 1904 at La Scala in Milan. What he made was an enduring masterpiece, which the audiences in the Italian town of Brescia, where it was performed in a revised form three months later, were quick to realize. What follows is an account of the difficult birth of Puccini’s favorite heroine, of whom he wrote, years later, “There is no comparison between my love for Mimì, Musetta, Manon and Tosca and that love which I have in my heart for her for whom I wrote music in the night” – his beloved Madama Butterfly.

Following the completion of Tosca Puccini was casting about for the subject of his next opera. For a time he considered both Hugo’s sprawling novel Les Misérables and Rostand’s verse drama Cyrano de Bergerac, but his publisher Giulio Ricordi, who as advisor and friend played a key role in Puccini’s artistic development, suggested he was not well suited to such “manly” themes. When considering Puccini’s oeuvre to that point, this advice seems sound: one of his strengths as a composer from his earliest compositions was his ability to create vivid, immediately sympathetic heroines who are invariably undergoing some kind of trauma; we watch them fall apart to beautiful music and, although it’s horrific, we cannot stop watching and listening. His heroines gain both humanity and nobility through their suffering. What might seem melodramatic in a libretto becomes, with the addition of Puccini’s music, profoundly moving. Leave the heroic, “manly” themes to Verdi – it is true, there is a thrilling sense of expansiveness and true tragedy to be found in La forza del destino or any number of Verdi operas. But could Verdi, for all his profound talent, have given us a Mimì? This is the particular province of Puccini.

It wasn’t until he was in London in the summer of 1900 attending rehearsals for the first English production of Tosca that he stumbled upon, in a tiny theatre, the subject that would consume him for the next three years. Playing at the Duke of York’s Theatre was a one-act play by David Belasco called Madame Butterfly, after a short story by John Luther Long. Long’s story begins with a detailed account of the marriage of Pinkerton and Butterfly, features a scene at the consulate with Sharpless, and ends with Pinkerton’s return years later. Belasco’s play moves more swiftly than Long’s story: it begins the evening before Pinkerton’s return. Belasco also altered the ending, having Butterfly successfully commit suicide at the end – so that Pinkerton could rush in at the last moment and hold her in his arms, as she cries, “Too bad those robins didn’ nes’ again.” When judged by today’s standards of psychological realism Belasco seems to have been a lousy playwright, yet that is not a fair assessment. He had a wonderful sense of the theatrical. He was a brilliant impresario and director whose productions succeeded in spite of weak, maudlin scripts and because of fantastic actresses (whose talents he “developed,” both on and off the stage) and cutting-edge stage effects. His heroines made very strong impressions through sheer force of personality. A case in point is the moment in Madame Butterfly that audiences went home talking about: a lengthy lighting change denoting the passage of time from dusk to dawn, as Butterfly, having seen Pinkerton’s ship pull into the harbor, sat up all night waiting for him to climb the hill. Rather than have the curtain go down and then quickly up again Belasco engineered a lighting change that was technologically innovative and theatrically daring: the colors of dusk, sunset, darkest night, and morning light washed over the stage for fourteen minutes as his actress simply stood, staring. By all accounts this did not slow the action but was in fact riveting. Audiences could not have just been watching the lights change; they were watching Belasco’s Cio-Cio-San being transformed painfully, and without words, from the ecstasy that accompanied the sighting of Pinkerton’s ship, to a weary hopefulness, to a mood of sheer desolation. At the time it was stunning and revolutionary use of lighting to alter and augment the mood on stage.

The play had a major impact on Puccini. He was sufficiently moved to immediately ask Belasco for the rights to turn it into his next opera. That he could see the operatic potential of this play while understanding barely a word of English is evidence of his intuitive understanding of the power of the pictorial. Belasco’s painstakingly realistic sets and costumes and the carefully choreographed movements of the actors were enough to suck Puccini into the story of a 15 year-old geisha who takes love seriously, the arrogant naval lieutenant who thinks their marriage is a game, and her swift journey from optimism for a happy reunion with Pinkerton to despair and shame when he does return with his American wife. Some of the opera’s finest moments musicalize the pictorial. Consider Butterfly’s diaphanous entrance music as she and her cousins ascend the hill. Puccini’s music beautifully renders the flowers, the sky, and the sea as they sing “Quanto fior! Quanto cielo! Quanto mare!” Two other images to listen for, in an opera that overflows with images rendered beautifully through music, are the sound of Butterfly’s fragileness in the love duet at the end of Act One and Butterfly’s image of Pinkerton’s homecoming in “Un bel dì.” In the duet, Pinkerton suggests her name, Butterfly, is apt – that she is a gossamer creation: “Mia Butterfly! Come t’han ben nomata tenue farfalla…” Shimmering and beautiful, yet she is fragile because in her youthful ardor she is in love with the idea of love, and blind to the possible pitfalls of the marriage contract she is entering into. Listen to Puccini’s accompaniment for her momentary hesitation, in which she asks: when a man catches a butterfly in America, doesn’t he put a pin through it? And in the celebrated set piece “Un bel dì,” she recounts the mental picture that has been playing in her mind since Pinkerton left: that of his return. Puccini masterfully musicalizes the images of the ship pulling into the harbor, its cannons thundering forth, a speck of a man in the distance at the foot of the hill, beginning the climb…Every moment that is painstakingly described by Butterfly is lovingly detailed in Puccini’s score, ending rapturously with the actual moment he returns to the little house. The music takes your breath away. We, too, can see it!

Puccini’s opera is in every way an improvement over the story by Long and the play by Belasco. The dialogue provided Cio-Cio-San by Long and Belasco, at least on the page, reduces her to an unconvincing cardboard cutout. It is an unkind and unconvincing Pidgin English. Yet in the opera she is painfully eloquent. There is no attempt to approximate the idiom of Long and Belasco’s stereotype – rather, her lines are poetry, detailing real love and real despair, and her melodic lines match the graceful arcs of this poetry. In the play audiences had to rely on what Butterfly was not saying – on the look of desperation in her eyes and in her movements. In the opera we believe not only the words she speaks but also the melodies and actions that accompany them.

Puccini worked hard to insert moments of “authenticity”: at various times he consulted with a Japanese actress living in Milan and acquired music to Japanese folk songs through the wife of the Japanese ambassador. His curiosity even extended to studying the score of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado. The modal harmonies and Japanese folk melodies go a long toward making Cio-Cio-San “sound Japanese,” to listeners both then and now. And as hard as he worked to make her sound Japanese, he worked just as hard to make Pinkerton sing like an American, in an American idiom. The dissonant strains of the “Star-Spangled Banner” are only the most conspicuous evidence of these efforts.

It was well over a year before the rights were granted to use Belasco’s play as the basis for the opera, during which Puccini nearly exploded with impatience. Once he was able to get to work, difficulties arose with his two librettists. He was again working with Giacosa and Ilica, the team behind both La bohème and Tosca. Madama Butterfly was their third and final collaboration with Puccini. He could be hard on his librettists, going back and forth many times to get the text precisely as he wanted it. Puccini argued vehemently with the writers over the size and scope of the acts. An entire scene at the American consul that he had at first insisted upon was cut prior to the opening in Milan. However, his demand for one very long second act, in which the curtain does not go down at the end of Butterfly’s vigil (just like Belasco’s play), overrode the concerns of the writers.

Compositional struggles were compounded, in the midst of work on the opera, by a nearly fatal car crash. Puccini was notoriously wild behind the wheel, but in this case he wasn’t even driving. His leg was fractured and he suffered through a long, painful convalescence due in large part to a diabetic condition that was later diagnosed. In great pain and often unable to sleep, it was during this period that he wrote music in the night for his beloved Butterfly. Although Puccini was given to hyperbole throughout his life, historians tend to believe him when he suggested, in correspondence with friends and his publisher Giulio Ricordi, that it was his love for this character alone that kept him going during what was a very dark period in his personal life. (His difficulties with the woman who later became his wife during this period are a novel of woe in and of themselves.)

The day of the premiere at La Scala the usually cautious Puccini was unreservedly optimistic. In the past he had asked his family to avoid his premieres; in this case he reserved a box for his sisters and brought his son with him to watch from backstage. Below is the text of a letter he wrote to Rosina Storchio, the soprano who created the role of Cio-Cio-San, dated the day of the first performance at La Scala:

Dear Rosina, My good wishes are superfluous! So true, so delicate, so moving is your great art that the public must succumb to it. And I hope that through you I am speeding to victory. Tonight then – with sure confidence and much affection, dear child.

The curtain went up and what followed might be hard for timid, well-behaved contemporary American audiences to understand. From almost the first moments there was a well-orchestrated effort to ruin the performance. There were catcalls, snickers and sneers throughout. Upon hearing the ascending melody of Butterfly’s entrance music, many cried out “Bohème!,” inferring that Puccini had stolen one of his own melodies from another opera. At the end of the vigil, as the sun is rising, the director decided to plant stage hands with bird whistles at strategic places throughout the auditorium. Rather than creating the atmosphere of a lonely dawn, it created further chaos in the auditorium as the audience jeered mercilessly. As Giulio Ricordi later described it, there were, “Growls, shouts, groans, laughter, giggling…that sums up the reception which the public of La Scala accorded the new work by Maestro Giacomo Puccini…The spectacle given in the auditorium seemed as well organized as that on the stage since it began precisely with the beginning of the opera.” Puccini himself referred to it as “a Dantean inferno, prepared in advance.” Irrefutable evidence suggests that this attack was planned in advance. Historians have been hesitant to point fingers, but the mastermind behind the melee seems to have been Ricordi’s rival, the publishing firm of Sozogno.

Puccini immediately withdrew the opera after one performance and returned his entire fee of 20,000 lire. Four days after the premiere, in a letter to a friend, he wrote, “I am not rewriting anything or, at least, very few details. I shall make a few cuts, and divide the second act into two parts.” It is true, he did not drastically overhaul the piece, but he did make some important revisions for the revival three months later in Brescia, including taking his librettists advice and dividing the long second act. He also streamlined the wedding scene in act one. There were further revisions for the Paris production of the opera, and it is that third version that has come to be known as the standard version. BLO audiences, however, will be seeing the Brescia version, which was Puccini’s favorite of the three.

Not everyone in the audience at La Scala that night was booing – in fact, it was probably a fairly small group – but they were loud enough to disrupt the entire performance and create the impression of an utter fiasco. If the claques had actually been listening, they would have noticed what a fine, well-crafted opera it is. They would have noticed the characterization of Butterfly in which she evolves so movingly from a child to an adult in three short years. They would have noticed the careful attention paid to musical details, as melodic fragments return and change and grow as the characters change and grow, as well as the pentatonic harmonies of Japan and the American music of Pinkerton and Sharpless. And finally, if they had been paying attention they could not help but be moved by the dramatic effectiveness of the opera. Puccini was a man of the theatre and he knew what would move his audiences. His music dramas are economical, focusing only on the most pertinent details – the intimate details of a character’s life that, when they add up, will break your heart –and they move quickly and inexorably to their devastating conclusions. Madama Butterfly may not reach the heights of tragedy as Verdi can, as Puccini is limited by his themes, and perhaps by the deep sympathy he demonstrates for his heroines. Yet this opera is not simplistic, nor is it an orientalist fantasy. At the micro level it is an intimate portrait of one woman’s trust destroyed, and at a broader level it is a scathing attack on the callousness that characterized the colonialist mentality for centuries. We feel the repercussions of that callousness today. For those who accuse Puccini of writing sensational, sentimental tear-jerkers rather than dialectical treatises, they are mostly right. The rest of us are happily getting out our Kleenexes at the end of the opera. Those other guys are just bitter that they purposely left theirs at home only to find, once again, they have been moved.

-- Luke Dennis, Education and Community Programs Manager, Boston Lyric Opera
Photos courtesy Minnesota Opera, New York City Opera