Soloists - PUCCINI: Madama Butterfly

GIACOMO PUCCINI (1858-1924)Madama Butterfly‘Io sono la fanciulla più lieta del Giappone, anzi del mondo’‘I am the happiest girl in Japan, in the whole world’Madama Butterfly, Act 1 As every audience in the world must know, happiness does not prove to be Cio-Cio-San’s lot in life, but as she and her friends make their way uphill in Act 1 to meet her bridegroom, one of the most exquisite operatic entrances ever composed, a blissful future seems assured. Marriage was also topical in Puccini’s own life at the time of Madama Butterfly’s première, for just six weeks earlier he had finally wed Elvira Gemignani, his mistress of twenty years; their relationship was, alas, destined to be almost as tragic as that of Butterfly and Pinkerton, but early in 1904 things seemed set fair for the Puccini’s happiness too. The origins of Madama Butterfly go back further than Belasco’s play, which is generally held to be the source of the opera’s plot. It was on a visit to London in 1900 that Puccini first saw the one-act Madame Butterfly, itself based on a short story by John Luther Long, and it was certainly no coincidence that an even earlier novel, Pierre Loti’s Madame Chrysanthème, published in 1887, had a story that is reflected very closely in the opera. The plot, centring on the tragedy of betrayed love in an exotic Japanese setting, must have appealed to all four men, particularly at a time when nineteenth-century japonaiserie was still much in vogue. Cio-Cio-San is one in the series of fragile, ill-fated heroines around whom Puccini composed his beguiling melodies, and with whom he fell more than just a little in love; Manon Lescaut and Mimì were her predecessors, Angelica and Liù her successors in the composer’s canon. As was the case with much of his work, the creation of Madama Butterfly was plagued by dispute with his librettist Giacosa and, on this occasion, a temporary halt to composition caused by a car accident, in which Puccini was badly injured. It was not an auspicious start. Once the libretto was finished to Puccini’s satisfaction, he started with enthusiasm on the opera’s composition, which was completed at the end of 1903. The première at La Scala, Milan, was to feature three of Italy’s finest singers, Rosina Storchio, Giovanni Zenatello and Giuseppe de Luca, in the leading rôles. To Puccini’s horror the evening was a disaster and the composer suspected that some of his musical rivals had organized a hostile claque to disrupt the performance; making a virtue of the fiasco, he took the opportunity to revise several sections of the score, ready for a re-launch at Brescia three months later. He excised a section of Act 1 in which Cio-Cio-San’s family played a prominent part, added the short aria for Pinkerton in Act 2 and divided that act into two scenes, rather than retaining the over-long first versi