Lyric Opera of Chicago, Spring 2004

"Try to make the incidents clear and brilliant to the eye rather than the ear." So wrote Puccini to librettist Giuseppe Adami about his last opera, Turandot. He was in fact admonishing his colleague against wordiness, but it was still a remarkable statement coming from a musician, whose craft is usually thought to pertain to the ear and not the eye.

Puccini, though, was exceptional even among opera composers. Scholars once disparaged the "staginess" of his works (with Joseph Kerman famously dismissing Tosca as a "shabby little shocker"), but recent years have seen a remarkable change in views of his art. According to critic and novelist Alessandro Baricco, Puccini was a "prophetic genius" whose "feet were firmly planted in the modern world before 'modernity' even existed," and "who made films without knowing it… showing cinema how to go about its business."

Baricco offers a thought-provoking way of considering Puccini's concern with "l'evidenza della situazione," that quality allowing audiences to follow the action of a performance even without understanding its words. Puccini himself experienced this when he saw Sarah Bernhardt in Victorien Sardou's Tosca, and again when he attended David Belasco's one-act play Madam Butterfly in London in June 1900. At the time, he had been considering a variety of subjects for his new opera, including Maeterlinck's Pelléas et Mélisande and works by Dostoevsky, Zola, Goldoni, and d'Annunzio. Butterfly, though, fired his imagination, and in November 1900 he wrote to publisher Giulio Ricordi: "The more I think about Butterfly, the more excited I become. Ah, if only I had it here with me to work on!"

Besotted as Puccini was with Butterfly, the opera's gestation was difficult. Negotiations with Belasco's representatives were complicated by the fact that the playwright had based his work on John Luther Long's 1889 short story "Madame Butterfly." (Long's story, incidentally, ends very differently from the play and opera, with Suzuki binding up Cho-Cho San's wound, and Kate Pinkerton finding an empty house when she arrives to claim her husband's child.)

It was also a troubled time in Puccini's personal life. The composer's unhappy relationship with Elvira Gemignani, his longtime companion and the mother of his son, had been further soured by an affair Puccini was carrying on with a young woman named Corinna. The situation at home and a near-fatal car accident in early 1903, which left Puccini temporarily confined to a wheelchair, plunged the composer into a state of anguish.

Furthermore, Puccini and librettists Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica (with whom he had created Manon Lescaut, La bohème, and Tosca) clashed on how to construct Madama Butterfly. Since Belasco's play depicts only Butterfly's wait for Pinkerton, Illica needed to devise a first act relating the opera's backstory, turning to Pierre Loti's 1887 novel Madame Chrysanthème, a fictional account of the author's temporary "marriage" to a geisha. Puccini angered his colleagues by cutting a substantial scene set at the American Consulate, presumably to emphasize Cio-Cio-San's isolation and the shattering impact of Kate Pinkerton's irruption into her cocoon-like world. He also insisted that the part of the opera based on Belasco's play (the current Acts II and III) take place in one, uninterrupted act.

"The drama has to run to the end without interruption, closed, efficient, terrible!" Puccini wrote to Ricordi, adding that Butterfly would represent "a new type of opera." In the event, the La Scala premiere of Madama Butterfly on February 17, 1904 was a noisy, ugly fiasco: in Puccini's words, "a real lynching… an appalling orgy of lunatics, drunk on hate." The derisive reception probably derived in part from a claque paid off by a rival publisher, but Puccini's long second act also tried the audience's patience, and critics complained that the opera was a throwback to La bohème and Puccini's earlier scores.

In retrospect, it is hard to understand how Puccini's contemporaries failed to appreciate the striking modernity of Madama Butterfly. Some compared it unfavorably to Mascagni's Iris (1898), also set in Japan, but Michele Girardi (Puccini: His International Art) argues that unlike Iris and the majority of earlier operas set in "exotic" locales, Madama Butterfly represents an honest attempt to address the cultural clash between East and West. (Given the history of the latter twentieth century, too, Madama Butterfly today has acquired an anguished resonance that it did not possess in 1904.)

That said, Puccini and his librettists (along with Belasco and Long) did hold limited, unsophisticated views of Japanese customs. Geishas (the word means "artist" or "artisan," a mark of the seriousness of their training) were by no means dishonorable or akin to Western prostitutes. Compared with traditional wives in both Japan and Europe, they often possessed a high degree of economic autonomy, intellectual accomplishment, and freedom to interact with men at the highest levels of society.

Just as Puccini sought to understand the collision of values and expectations that leads to Cio-Cio-San's undoing, he also made a serious study of Japanese music in preparing his score. Asian music captured the European imagination after the 1889 Paris exposition, and Puccini was able to consult recordings and manuscripts of Japanese popular tunes, national hymns, and even songs cited in Long's story. (Girardi estimates that a quarter of the music in Act I of Madama Butterfly is based directly on authentic Japanese motifs.) Puccini enriched the sounds of the traditional European orchestra with Japanese bells, tam-tams, tubular bells, and celesta and leaned heavily on the pentatonic and whole-tone scales, creating (in Girardi's words) that "refined static quality" that imbues the score of Madama Butterfly.

All of this careful, loving work meant that not even the disastrous La Scala premiere could shake the famously doubt-ridden composer's faith in Butterfly, which he called "the most heartfelt and evocative opera I have ever conceived." He withdrew the opera after its raucous Milan outing and prepared three subsequent editions, for revivals at Brescia (1904), Covent Garden (1905), and Paris's Opéra Comique (1906).

The changes he made for Brescia include the addition of Pinkerton's "Addio, fiorito asil," the division of the opera into three acts, and numerous alterations to the scoring, melodic contours, and characterization of Butterfly's entourage in Act I. Puccini's work with renowned director Albert Carré in Paris led to further modifications to the stage directions and score, most tending to enhance the dignity of the Japanese characters and stress Cio-Cio-San's social and psychological apartness. Butterfly, in any event, had scored a triumph at its Brescia revival, fully vindicating Puccini's belief in his opera.

For a work that was dismissed as tired and derivative a century ago, Madama Butterfly today permeates popular culture to a degree that few operas (even Bizet's ubiquitous Carmen) can match. On Broadway, Boublil and Schönberg's Miss Saigon and David Hwang's M. Butterfly have riffed on the historical and gender politics of Puccini's beloved opera. Alessandro Baricco's novel Silk (itself reportedly destined for operatic treatment) turns the story of Madama Butterfly on its head, telling of a Western man's erotic obsession with a woman he encounters in Japan, who haunts his mind even after he returns to his happy home and marriage. Like Puccini's opera, Silk is suffused with the "white music" of whispering breezes and words unspoken. Most infamously, perhaps, in Adrian Lyne's 1987 movie "Fatal Attraction," Butterfly's music amplifies the rage and sorrow of Glenn Close's Alex, another "other woman" who (in the director's cut of the film) stabs herself to death much like Cio-Cio-San.

In the world of opera, Madama Butterfly's place in the repertory and in audiences' affections is unchallenged, despite its rocky beginnings and the formidable difficulties posed by the title role. On stage, a great Butterfly must make a plausible 15-year-old and summon both the girlish credulity of the first act and the quiet dignity of the opera's dénouement; vocally, she must command the liquid cantabile of her first exchanges with Pinkerton, the sheer power of the climax of "Un bel dì," and the punishing intervals of "Che tua madre dovrà" and her death scene. The role requires stamina and delicacy in equal measure, along with a steely, almost superhuman control of one's emotions. One beloved Cio-Cio-San, Mirella Freni, made two magnificent recordings of the role and a powerful film (directed by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle), but never sang a complete Butterfly on stage, citing the part's devastating emotional toll.

Lyric Opera's first Cio-Cio-San was Maria Callas, who gave her only staged performances of the role in Chicago in 1955. This celebrated Norma deemed Butterfly's music "treacherous," admonishing her master class students: "Be careful not to oversing… You'll kill yourself."

Among the many great artists who recorded this opera, the late Dallas Morning News critic John Ardoin considered Callas, Renata Scotto, and Toti dal Monte to be the supreme exponents of the role: voices that could turn vinegary on occasion, but of myriad colors, wedded to redoubtable expressive abilities and musical imagination. Happily, though, audiences are always ready to welcome a new Cio-Cio-San into their hearts, and sopranos continue to cherish the grueling but infinitely rewarding challenges of this part. Their devotion to Butterfly echoes Puccini's own and testifies to the enduring, ever-renewed power of his heartbreakingly beautiful opera.