Opera Insights
By Kelley Rourke
OPERA America
For western audiences at the end of the twentieth century, Japan is probably more readily associated with a cutting-edge technology than with cherry blossoms and ancestor worship. However, Puccini's contemporaries, lacking our proliferation of cell phones and sushi bars, found the East mysterious and intriguing. Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado found enormous success in this climate, as did playwright David Belasco's Madama Butterfly. While in London to attend rehearsals for a new production of Tosca in the summer of 1900, Puccini attended Belasco's play at the Duke of York's Theatre. Although he was not able to understand a word of the dialogue, Puccini was deeply affected by the story of the simple, trusting Butterfly and her tragic fate, and immediately saw the potential for an operatic adaptation.
By 1901, the operatic rights to the play had been secured and the librettists, Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica, had begun to mold the material into a form which would readily accept Puccini's musical and theatrical ideas. An early misunderstanding between composer and librettist was to be the source of much debate: Belasco's play was, in fact, based on a short story by John Luther Long, which lavished equal attention on all parts of the story, from Pinkerton's first meeting with Butterfly to his last. Illica, in composing the libretto, turned to the story for his basic structure. However, Puccini had envisioned an opera with the shape of Belasco's play, which focused instead on Butterfly's final days. The two finally arrived at a compromise, wherein the entire story was dramatized on stage, with particular weight given to Butterfly's solitary anticipation and its replacement by despair.
Puccini took great pains to create a vivid and authentic musical landscape, even consulting with the wife of the Japanese ambassador in Rome for information on folk songs and customs. These melodies were skillfully interwoven with "exotic" tunes of his own devising and supported by lush orchestration. It seemed as though Puccini had all the ingredients for a hit: a heart-stopping tragedy, softened by its placement in a delicate, fairy-tale vision of Japan, wrapped in rich, romantic melodies and a fashionable sprinkling of exoticism.
Despite what seemed to be a winning combination of musical and theatrical elements, the first performance, at La Scala in February of 1904, was a flop. Butterfly was immediately withdrawn for revision and given a number of small changes, including elimination of the details of the wedding ceremony and the addition of a short aria for Pinkerton. Act Two was divided, giving the piece its current three-act form. Other small changes were made, but the revision was mostly concerned with subtle balancing and polishing, not radical overhaul. The new version of Madama Butterfly was first presented at the small theater in Brescia only three months after the disastrous premiere, and was an unqualified triumph. Although Puccini made some additional changes following the Brescia performance, the Madama Butterfly that today's audiences know and love retains its basic shape.
Puccini has occasionally been accused of pandering to popular tastes, and it is undeniable that 'Butterfly includes a bit of everything that was in vogue at the time of its composition. However, its continuing popularity on the cusp of the twenty-first century affirms its depth and worth. With the extraordinary cross-fertilization of musical cultures which has taken place since the opera's inception, the pentatonic tunes and eastern textures sprinkled through the piece have lost a bit of their "exotic" flavor for our modern ears, but Butterfly herself has remained a source of fascination (and skepticism) in a society where a certain degree of independence is taken for granted. Today's audiences greet Butterfly's simplicity and trust with the same mixed wonder and puzzlement that Pinkerton shows for her little house of sliding screens. Despite vast and varied cultural differences between Butterfly and her changing audience, her powerfully told and richly scored tale of love and heartbreak is a timeless classic.
