The 1904 version returns to La Scala
After Turandot and La fanciulla del West, La Scala continues on the artistic-philological path that is restoring all the operas of Puccini to the author’s original intentions. Next 7 December we will hear Madama Butterfly as it was before contingent circumstances forced the musician to modify it and accept variations requested by the editor. With La fanciulla del West, too, the cuts were reopened and the orchestration of the first score was restored. It is a complex work that Riccardo Chailly is undertaking with Gabriele Dotto and the musicologists of the Ricordi Archive involved in this careful reconstruction, which must take several historical and environmental factors into consideration.
The work on Puccini is part of the latest trend of criticism, and not only in the musical sphere, of not limiting itself to examining the form of the work of art that is considered “definitive”, but to increase awareness of it by valorizing versions and variations, with the knowledge that the choice of the edition to be printed is – and was even more so in the past – subject to variable contingencies. It is not in any way an identification of an “authentic” version to be proposed in opposition to the current one; rather, it is an attempt to present a complete picture of the artist’s work to audiences. “We have long since learned that the definitive edition of an opera is not necessarily better than the previous attempts. By now wary of ‘blind faith in progress’, we have adopted a pluralistic view: the various drafts of an opera are indeed interesting in their diversity, expressions of a path that is perhaps uneven, of multiple moments in the life of the author, and in the history he is experiencing.” These words of the Italianist Lina Bolzoni are not referred to Madama Butterfly but to the edition in two volumes of the first edition, from 1516, of Orlando Furioso, rightly hailed as one of the key events in the celebration of the 500th anniversary of the poem by Ariosto and destined not to replace but to place itself alongside the 1532 version. This “pluralistic view” is also alleged in the field of musicology, and in the case of Madama Butterfly it is corroborated as much by the composer’s remaining uncertainties as by the circumstance that the version Puccini created for La Scala has never been performed in this Theatre since.
