Madame Butterfly
Composer: Giacomo Puccini

 

The Evolution of Madame Butterfly
After the great popular successes of Manon Lescaut (1893), La Bohème (1896), and Tosca (1900), Puccini found himself a composer without a subject or, more accurately, with too many subjects. He considered several different possibilities, but, as he wrote to his friend and publisher Giulio Ricordi in November 1900, "In fact, I have not yet found my subject.
I despair of it and am tormented in spirit." Actually Puccini had found his subject and was anxiously waiting to sign a contract for it.
During the summer of 1900, while in London for the English premiere of Tosca, he had seen a one-act play, Madame Butterfly, a dramatization by American playwright David Belasco of John Luther Long's short story of the same name. Although Puccini knew very little English, the clarity of the stage action and the power of the characters' emotions at
once convinced him that this was his subject. Belasco's memoirs, which cannot always be trusted, describe Puccini rushing backstage after the performance, his eyes filled with tears, clinging to the playwright's neck and pleading for the rights to set Madame Butterfly
to music.

Although it was fourteen months before the contract was signed, by November Puccini
had already obtained a translation of Long's story, which he forwarded to his librettist,
Luigi Illica, in March 1901, with the note: "Read it and tell me what you think. I'm
completely taken with it." Finally, in September 1901, the contract was signed, and
Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica, the librettists who had worked on Manon Lescaut, La
Bohème and Tosca, began writing the text of the new opera.
For the plot, the librettists went back not only to Long's story and Belasco's play, but also
to the semi-autobiographical novel Madame Chrysanthème (1887), by the French writer
and adventurer Pierre Loti (1850-1923). Loti had served with the French navy in the
Orient. Taking advantage of the rage for everything Japanese that spread throughout
Europe after Matthew Perry and the American navy opened Japan to trade with the West
in 1853, Loti had written an extremely popular series of Oriental novels and stories. One
of these was Madame Chrysanthème. Loti's Madame Chrysanthème presents the same
basic situation as Puccini's opera. On his arrival in Nagasaki, Pierre, a young and worldweary
French naval officer, "led on by ennui and solitude," decides to take a Japanese wife
for his amusement. A Japanese marriage broker, who like his counterpart Goro wears a
Western-style business suit, is happy to oblige and arranges for a bride - Ki-Hou-San,
Madame Chrysanthemum - and a house overlooking Nagasaki harbor, both on convenient
monthly terms. After a brief ceremony, the couple retire to their home, and the remainder
of the novel, until Pierre is ordered to sail for China, is taken up with descriptions of Japan
and its "quaint" customs, tailor-made to satisfy the late nineteenth-century taste for the
exotic. But Loti's main characters are very different from Puccini's B.F. Pinkerton and Cio-Cio-
San. Pierre is bored with life, and never has sentiments like the brash optimism that is
expressed in Pinkerton's first aria, "Dovunque al mondo" ("Everywhere in the world").
Pierre is not in love with his bride, considers his marriage a "joke," makes insulting
remarks about the Japanese and frequently responds to Chrysanthemum's attentions with
irritation: "All this, which I should find amusing in any one else-any one I loved-irritates
me in her." Only at the end of the novel does he show even the slightest attachment to his
"wife" and his "little house buried among the flowers."

Ki-Hou-San is even more different from the operatic character based on her. She is three
years older and not the least bit naïve about the eventual outcome of her marriage.
Although she enjoys Pierre's company and feels real sadness at his departure, rather than
respond to it with suicidal despair, Chrysanthemum accepts it as the natural conclusion of
a business arrangement. As Pierre comes to bid his "wife" farewell, he hears a strange
clinking noise accompanying her cheerful song. It is Chrysanthemum, testing with a little
hammer each of the silver coins he has given her to make sure they are real.
Loti, of course, was not alone in feeding the public's appetite for Japanese things. There
were a lot of paintings, travelogues, plays, novels and operas on Japanese subjects. Among
those contributing to the trend was John Luther Long (1861-1927), a Philadelphia lawyer
and writer of short stories and plays.

Although Long had never visited Japan, his sister was the wife of a missionary in
Nagasaki and wrote her brother letters filled with anecdotes about life and customs there.
In one of these letters she told the story of a Japanese geisha who converted to Christianity
after having been abandoned by her husband, and Long combined this "Madam Butterfly,"
which was published in The Century magazine in January 1898.
Long tells the story much as we find it in opera. The same characters and plot details,
down to such incidents as Butterfly's question to Sharpless about when robins nest in
America and the inscription on Butterfly's suicide dagger, all exist in the magazine story.
Even the scenes which would become major musical numbers, for example, "Un bel dì"
(One beautiful day) and the Flower Duet, are easy to identify. But Long's story is not the stuff of which great operas are made. Pinkerton, who appears only at the beginning of the story, is a thoroughly unemotional and distasteful character.

At times he is downright cruel in his domination of his innocent wife. He is "impervious" to
emotion; hardly a character to be transformed into an operatic tenor. And Butterfly,
although sympathetic in her faithful love for Pinkerton (a real advance over Loti's heroine)
and in her naiveté, is too simple to achieve heroic stature. At times the dialect Long has
her speak, a very unrefined pidgin-English, makes her almost comical. Although we may
pity her, we are not deeply moved. For example, in the scene that Puccini and his
librettists turned into "Un bel dì," their Butterfly's supreme statement of faith, Long's less
heroic character describes a joke she will play on her returning husband:
"Just when we see him coming up that hill -so-so-so-so….then! We hide behine the shoji,
where there are holes to peep." She glanced about to find them. "Alas! They all mended
shut! But" -she savagely ran her finger through the paper - "we soon make some, aha, ha,
ha! So!" She made another for the maid. "Then we lie quiet lig mice, an' make believe we
gone 'way. Better n't we leave liddle not: 'Gone 'way foraever. Sayonara, Butterfly'? No;
that's too long for him. He git angery those way on the first word, an' say those remark
'bout debbil, an' hell, an' all kind loud languages. Tha's time, bifore he getting too angery,
to rush out, an' jump all roun' his nack, aha!"

From an operatic point of view, more important than Long's failure to provide sympathetic
characters is the way his plot differs from the libretto on two crucial points. First, the short
story fails to engage the reader's emotions because it omits any scenes of real love between
the pair. Second, the reader is left with the distinct impression that Butterfly does not
actually commit suicide, that the sight of her child convinces her to live before she has
mortally wounded herself. In other words, Long's Cho-Cho-San never becomes a tragic
martyr for love. Instead, she seems likely to become the future Princess Yamadori or
another Madame Chrysanthemum, testing her silver coins.
David Belasco (1853-1931) was probably the most important figure in the American
theater of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He had too sure a sense of
business to let Long's story be dramatized by another, and he had too good a sense of
theater to let it remain with its weaknesses. He successfully bid for the rights to the story
and, in collaboration with Long, produced his one-act play, Madame Butterfly, which
opened in New York only a few months before Puccini saw it in London.
His play is a great improvement on the short story and is almost a line for line parallel to
the opera's second and third acts. As in the opera, Pinkerton does reappear at the end, just
in time to discover the dying Butterfly, who does actually commit suicide.
Belasco's Pinkerton is much more appealing than Loti's Pierre or Long's Lieutenant. The
first part of Long's story is eliminated, the part which portrays Pinkerton as cold and cruel;
and he is truly shocked and stricken with remorse by the tragic outcome of his marriage to
Butterfly.

More importantly, the play gives us an inkling of the love story behind the tragedy.
Pinkerton's letter to Sharpless reveals that he really did feel something for his Japanese
wife: Find out about that little Jap girl. What has become of her? It might be awkward now. If
little Butterfly still remembers me, perhaps you can help me out and make her understand.
You won't believe it, but for two weeks after I sailed, I was dotty in love with her.
To which Madame Butterfly responds: "Oh, all the gods, how it was sweet!" Puccini and
his librettists expanded this hint of the love story behind the tragedy into the entire first act
of the opera. They knew that if the audience saw Butterfly only when she was waiting for
Pinkerton's return, they would pity her, but if they saw her when she was falling in love,
they would sympathize with her.

Puccini and his librettists took the basic outlines of the story from Loti, Long and Belasco,
but they emphasized the characters' emotions, particularly Butterfly's love for Pinkerton.
By making the characters more sympathetic and by concentrating on the emotional side of
the story, they made Madame Butterfly the moving experience which it is. To achieve this,
a few key plot points were changed. The introduction of Sharpless, the American Consul,
was moved to a much earlier point in the plot, even before the first appearance of
Butterfly. In this way, he could serve as a prophet for Pinkerton and the audience of the
approaching tragedy. Butterfly, rather than turning to Christianity after she is rejected by
her family, adopts Pinkerton's religion as a gesture of pure faith and love. And of course
the composer and librettists added the beautiful love duet of Act One, which for the first
time allowed the audience to see Butterfly at a time when she is truly happy, making her
yearning for Pinkerton's return more sympathetic and her suicide more tragic by
comparison.

The characters, as well, were changed to make them appealing to the audience. Pinkerton,
although hardly "heroic," is portrayed as impulsive, ardent and innocently unaware of the
tragedy he may cause, rather than as cold and cruel. Whether with love or with lust,
Pinkerton is "afire" for Butterfly, as he tells Sharpless. His comforting words to her after
her family's rejection and his passion during their long love duet reveal tenderness and
warmth. Finally, he is truly remorseful for the unhappiness he has caused.
More importantly, Butterfly herself becomes a figure of real stature and a woman with
deeply felt emotions, rather than a quaint porcelain doll. She may still naively ask when
the robins nest in America, but the deeply felt emotions of her aria "Un bel dì" and her
final scene, "Tu? Piccolo iddio!" (You? My little idol!) raises her from the pitiful to the
heroic.

So sure was Puccini of the achievement of Madame Butterfly that even after its disastrous
La Scala premiere (on February 17, 1904), he defended it and presented it again, only
three months later, on May 18th, in Brescia, with only minor changes. This time there
were cheers rather than boos throughout the performance, and Madame Butterfly has been
one of the world's most popular operas ever since. It remained the composer's personal
favorite, and it was the last of his own operas Puccini heard before his death on November
29, 1924.

Courtesy of The Metropolitan Opera, International Radio Broadcast Center