Madame Butterfly Premieres: Puccini's Tale of Betrayal

The audience at La Scala hissed, laughed, and made animal noises throughout the performance, and by the final curtain on February 17, 1904, Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly had become one of the most spectacular opening-night disasters in opera history. Rival composers had packed the house with supporters. The leading soprano’s kimono billowed in a draft, prompting shouts of "She’s pregnant!" Puccini, sitting in a box with his publisher, was devastated. He withdrew the opera the next morning and refused to let La Scala stage it again. Puccini had poured more of himself into Butterfly than any previous work. He had attended a London performance of David Belasco’s one-act play about a Japanese woman abandoned by an American naval officer and wept openly, unable to understand the English dialogue but overwhelmed by the emotion. He spent two years researching Japanese music, consulting with the wife of the Japanese ambassador, and composing a score of unusual delicacy and restraint for an Italian opera. The La Scala premiere was sabotaged from the start. Puccini’s rivals organized a claque — a paid group of audience members — to disrupt the performance. The opera’s unusual structure contributed to the hostility: the entire second act was over an hour long, and the audience’s patience ran out. The tenor Rosina Storchio, singing Cio-Cio-San, was competent but could not overcome the orchestrated disruption. Puccini returned his fee to the theater and took the score home. Three months later, Puccini staged a revised Madama Butterfly at the Teatro Grande in Brescia. He had split the long second act in two, cut several passages, and added the tenor aria "Addio, fiorito asil." The audience gave the cast six curtain calls. The opera entered the permanent repertoire and has been performed continuously for over a century, becoming one of the three or four most popular operas in the world. The masterpiece that was booed off the stage of Italy’s greatest opera house needed nothing more than a smaller theater and an audience that had come to listen rather than to destroy.