Madama Butterfly

“I am now convinced that the opera should be in two acts […] The drama must run until the end without interruption, powerful, efficacious and terrible. […] I will surely transfix my audiences and send them away not unsatisfied. At the same time, we will have a new serving of opera, sufficient for an evening to hold.” With these words, Giacomo Puccini pleaded in front of a stubborn Giulio Ricordi for the innovative cut of the nascent Madama Butterfly, the “Japanese tragedy” he was composing from the homonymous pièce by David Belasco that he had seen in London in 1900, which was in turn based on a story by the American John Luther Long. The division into just two acts was the response to a need for dramatic concentration, which clearly emerged in the Zeitgeist of European musical theatre: think, for example, of Strauss’ single-act operas (Salome dates from 1906 and Elektra from 1909) which share with Butterfly the coarseness of the subject and the dramatic death on stage of the protagonist.

Puccini prevailed and the opera was staged in two acts in Teatro alla Scala on 17 February 1904 under the baton of Cleofonte Campanini and starring Rosina Storchio as Cio-Cio San. The evening, however, was not without problems: perhaps the staging was not all it could have been but there is no disputing that the enemies of the composer and his editor fomented the protests, which degenerated into a brawl (“a lynching” in the words of Puccini). The magazine “Musica e musicisti” edited by Ricordi observed: “The spectacle in the stalls seems just as well organized as that on the stage, as its beginning coincided precisely with the beginning of the opera. So much so that it was like watching an all-too-real battle, as though the Russians in the serried battalions of enemy host wished to storm the stage and sweep away all Puccini’s Japanese”, where the reference to the emerging Russian-Japanese war alludes to the supporters of Giordano’s Siberia, which was performed in December 1903. The Ricordi family was consulted and it was Tito, the son of Giulio, who suggested to Puccini that he renounce his more controversial choices and split the second act into two parts, cutting some thousand lines mostly dedicated to colourful and comical episodes, and presenting the tenor with a romance before its conclusion. The new version triumphed in Brescia on 28 May that year, but the story of the composer’s changes of mind was set to continue: apart from the two scores from 1904 relating to the Italian editions, Dieter Schickling documents two editions relating to English performances in 1906, and two editions relating to the Paris debut in 1906 and 1907 before the third Italian edition in 1907, but the picture is further complicated by the discovery of some copies containing variations penned by the composer himself. Of particular importance are the adaptations that occurred on the occasion of the Parisian première in 1907, where Albert Carré, director of the Opéra Comique and in charge of staging, insisted on softening both the anti-American features and the ridicule of the Japanese customs.

Madama Butterfly did not return to La Scala until 1925, after the composer’s death, in the version in three acts conducted by Toscanini with costumes by Caramba: La Scala thus came back into line with the great international theatres that had hailed Butterfly as a masterpiece. Nevertheless, with his proverbial innate insecurity and maniacal perfectionism, Puccini continued to mull over his “powerful, efficacious and terrible” drama and sixteen years later, in 1920, he urged Ricordi again to propose, at Teatro Carcano in Milan, a version that restored part of the cuts. In point of fact, observes Dieter Schickling, “We cannot determine which version of Madama Butterfly the mature Puccini reputed as the correct one. Every single performance in which he was involved was for him an experiment, until the end.”