Tag Archives: Giacomo Puccini

Madama Butterfly

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I wrote about Puccini’s Madama Butterfly recently for the Dallas Symphony, which performed the entire opera as a semi-staged production. The artwork is all from Wikipedia Commons.

Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924): Madama Butterfly (complete)

In Madama Butterfly, as in so many Italian operas, a beautiful and blameless victim suffers at the hands of her selfish exploiters. Her death, foretold from the start, is a genre requirement, a device that delivers her from evil once she unleashes her climactic closing aria. Seduced and abandoned, the soprano is sacrificed so that we can grieve her. The engine of our collective catharsis, she lets us rage against the cruelty of a world where impoverished children are sold to men who use them like toys and discard them like trash. Is the misery of the teenage geisha sold to Lt. Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton substantially different from any redacted Epstein victim’s pain? If the details vary, the moral remains grimly consistent. Madama Butterfly is a century old, but its world is our world.  

Despite his status as the most successful opera composer of the 20th century, Puccini once seemed fated to play the organ in his native Lucca. He was descended from a 200-year line of cathedral organists, and he showed early promise on the instrument. But in 1876, when he was 17, he walked 15 miles, from Lucca to Pisa, to attend a performance of Aida. Just like that, Verdi’s darkly alluring spectacle made the young man forsake church music for the stage. In 1880 he enrolled at the Milan Conservatory, Verdi’s alma mater. 

Like Verdi, Puccini loved literature, particularly plays, a frequent source of material for his operas. In 1900 he attended a London production of a one-act tragedy called Madama Butterfly by the New York dramatist David Belasco. Belasco, known for his gritty realism, adapted the play from an 1898 magazine story by the American lawyer and writer John Luther Long, who in turn based the plot on a supposedly true story recounted by his missionary sister in Japan. (In 1927 Long’s New York Times obituary quoted his own description of himself: “a sentimentalist, and a feminist, and proud of it.”)

Deeply moved by the heroine’s plight, and intrigued by the creative possibilities associated with the setting, Puccini began sketching out an eponymous opera. He logged countless hours of research, all in the service of dramatizing the lead characters’ tragic clash of cultures. He wanted his score to reflect the singers’ essential personalities, the singular ways they provoke and misunderstand one another. He reunited with the librettists Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica, who collaborated on his previous hits La bohème and Tosca, and the first version of Madama Butterfly debuted on February 17, 1904, at La Scala, in Milan.

Unfortunately, this Butterfly fluttered briefly and failed to take flight. The audience jeered, bellowed, and disrupted the arias with crude animal noises. The star soprano collapsed in tears, unable to distinguish her cues through the din. Never mind that the chaos was mostly engineered by two of his rivals: Puccini was bitterly disappointed by the early response. He never doubted the quality of his score, however. “Those cannibals didn’t listen to a single note,” he complained to a friend. “What an appalling orgy of lunatics, drunk on hate! But my Butterfly remains as it is: the most heartfelt and evocative opera I have ever conceived!”

Even so, he withdrew it from production. He revised the opera at least five times, testing each iteration in select international venues, until 1907, when he was finally satisfied.

Settling on a final form for Madama Butterfly must have come as a relief to the composer, who had recently experienced a barrage of momentous life changes. In 1903 a serious car accident left him unable to walk for several months, and early in his recovery he was diagnosed with diabetes. A year later, one bright spot: his long-anticipated marriage to Elvira Gemignani, the mother of his son. The couple had been forced to postpone their wedding until the death of her first husband, who never granted her a divorce. In 1906, months before the final version of Madama Butterfly was staged, his valued collaborator and librettist Giacosa committed suicide at age 58.

A Closer Listen

Puccini may have been capitalizing on the japonisme craze that consumed late 19th-century European (and British and American) culture, but that doesn’t detract from the originality of the execution. Unlike so many of his fellow cultural appropriators, he approached his topic with humility and respect, researching every detail to the best of his abilities, from the colors of the flags to the timbres of the folk instruments and the cadences of the local dialects. To simulate the sound of his heroine’s native music, he asked a neighbor, Hisako Oyama, the wife of the Japanese ambassador to Italy, to sing traditional songs for him. He interviewed a musicologist about the finer points of meter and pitch, met with the Japanese actress Sadayakko when she toured Milan, and took in several performances by the Imperial Japanese Theatrical Company. In early 1902 Puccini wrote to Illica about the field research that he was planning to do in the interest of authenticity: “I’ve now embarked for Japan and will do my best to portray it, but more than publications on social and material culture, I need some notes of popular music.” 

To depict Butterfly and her culture, Puccini chose melodies derived from the pentatonic scale and other non–Western-sounding modalities. This Japanese-inspired music deepens and differentiates her character and also serves as aural stage design. The instrumental passages range from transparent watercolors to vivid pen-and-ink narratives, as richly detailed as a master’s landscape. To set up maximal contrast, the opera begins with a concise prelude in the form of a fugue, arguably the most Western of procedures. As exacting as a math puzzle, the fugue formalizes the union of different voices, weaving together seemingly disparate components to create new contrapuntal patterns. But the fugue is a rigorous and unforgiving form, one that dominates as it explores, whereas Butterfly values the natural world, the spontaneous and heartfelt gesture. 

Any listener who notices this dichotomy, or even registers it subconsciously, understands that poor Butterfly is doomed before she’s midway through her first song. Some dumb and undeserving, clumsy-pawed clod is going to smear all the fine iridescent powder off her wings, leaving her flightless, helpless, crawling around in the dirt. But knowing that her pure and tender love is misplaced doesn’t detract from its power. Puccini makes us adore her before she even appears onstage: as with so many of his greatest heroines, her glorious introductory aria precedes her. Her love is so wild, ardent, and free that we fool ourselves into hoping, against our better judgment, that she can convert a callow playboy into a reliable husband. 

Puccini created an equally distinctive musical language to convey Pinkerton’s national identity, his endless appetites and supreme Yankee entitlement. Careful listeners will detect traces of “The Star-Spangled Banner” in the orchestral introduction to his first aria, in which he boasts about his many global conquests. Not yet the national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner” was at that time widely associated with the U.S. Navy, and therefore a natural choice for Pinkerton. 

Butterfly’s musical vernacular evolves as the action unfolds: in Act I, thanks in part to the strategic accompaniment of a harp, she sounds significantly more Japanese than she does in Act II, which takes place three years into her self-styled metamorphosis from Butterfly to Mrs. Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton. By the end of Act III, when she sings her exquisite suicide aria, she briefly re-assumes her Japanese identity, as if to resurrect the unspoiled girl from the opening act. 

Synopsis
Act I: In imperial Nagasaki, at the turn of the 20th century, U.S. Navy Lieutenant Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton reviews his living arrangements with Goro, a local landlord and marriage broker. When the American consul, Sharpless, shows up, Pinkerton gloats about the terms of his lease (999 years, with the option to leave whenever he wants) and the terms of his impending marriage (valid only until he decides to exchange her for a “real” wife). Pinkerton’s boorishness makes Sharpless uneasy, and he warns the lusty lieutenant to be careful of the girl’s feelings. 

Pinkerton is presented with the 15-year-old geisha whom he recently bought: an enchantingly sincere girl named Butterfly, or Cio-Cio-San, who, inexplicably, has fallen instantly, deeply, and permanently in love with him. Although she comes from noble stock, her family fell into poverty after her father committed suicide at the emperor’s request. She proudly announces that she has changed her religion: as a newly minted American wife, she intends to worship only the American god. Toward the end of the simple wedding ceremony, the powerful priest Bonze, Butterfly’s uncle, shows up and curses the bride for her treachery. Pinkerton orders Butterfly’s relatives to leave, and they all denounce her as they depart. After Pinkerton caresses and consoles Butterfly, they sing a long and passionate love duet.

Act II
Three years have elapsed, and Pinkerton is long gone. Butterfly and Suzuki are nearly destitute. When the long-suffering Suzuki prays to the gods for grocery money, Butterfly accuses her of trusting “lazy Japanese gods” instead of her husband, who left soon after their wedding but promised to return in spring. The consul Sharpless arrives with a break-up letter from Pinkerton in hand, but before he can complete the painful task, Goro appears with the wealthy Prince Yamadori, who hopes to procure Butterfly for himself. She serves the pair tea but rebuffs them, insisting that her beloved American husband would never betray her. 

After the Japanese men leave, Sharpless tries once again to read her the letter and tactfully suggests that she might want to reconsider Yamadori’s proposition. By way of response, she introduces Sharpless to her blue-eyed toddler son, explaining that his current name is Sorrow; she plans to change it to Joy when his father returns. She makes Sharpless promise to tell Pinkerton about their child, and he agrees. After a cannon shot sounds in the harbor, Butterfly and Suzuki use a telescope to read the name of the ship, rejoicing when they confirm that it’s Pinkerton’s. They adorn the house in fragrant blossoms from the garden. As night descends, Butterfly, Suzuki, and little Sorrow await Pinkerton’s return to the distant strains of the sailors’ monotonous humming. 

Act III

In the morning Suzuki urges Butterfly and Sorrow to retire to their chambers. While mother and son rest inside, Suzuki greets Sharpless, who is accompanied by Pinkerton and his new American wife, Kate, who wants to adopt Butterfly’s child and raise him as her own. Older and wiser than her mistress, Suzuki is heartbroken but unsurprised. She promises to discuss the offer with Butterfly after Pinkerton admits that he is too weak to confront her himself. He takes a moment to reminisce about their time together, then flees the scene like a coward. 

Hearing his voice from inside the house, Butterfly rushes out to embrace him. Instead, she finds Kate and intuitively understands who she is and what she wants. Butterfly tearfully agrees to hand over her son, but only to Pinkerton directly. In the meantime, she dons her wedding kimono and takes out the ceremonial dagger that her father used to absolve his shame and restore his honor. But before Butterfly can reenact the gruesome ritual, her son appears at her side. She embraces him one last time, covers his eyes with a blindfold, and assures him that she is sacrificing herself to ensure his future happiness. After she plunges the blade into her body, the last sound she hears is the approaching voice of Pinkerton, uselessly calling her name.  

Copyright 2026 by René Spencer Saller. Originally published by the Dallas Symphony. All rights reserved.

Leopoldo Metlicovitz, 1904
Adolfo Hohenstein, 1914

Verdi and Puccini (plus Respighi)

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Left to right: Giacomo Puccini and Giuseppe Verdi, Italian opera legends and supreme silver foxes 

Giuseppe Verdi was the most influential and successful Italian composer of the 19th century. He wrote more than 20 operas, roughly half of them masterpieces. Over a six-decade career, he kept refining his talent, exposing it to new ideas. He produced many of his greatest works when he was in his 70s, at a time when 60 was considered old.

Verdi read widely and deeply, always hunting for the next opera plot. He worked closely with his librettists to achieve minimal flab and maximal feeling. In the world according to Verdi, rage and terror rule, desire redeems and destroys, but the tenor loves bravely forever. (If that sentence doesn’t make sense, wait for the singing and you’ll understand.)

Giacomo Puccini was born 48 years after Verdi, but the two composers’ lives overlapped significantly. Puccini, the most successful opera composer of the 20th century, seemed destined to play the organ in his native Lucca. He was descended from a 200-year line of cathedral organists, and he showed early promise on the king of instruments. But in 1876, when he was seventeen, he walked 15 miles, from Lucca to Pisa, to attend a life-altering performance of Verdi’s Aida. Verdi’s darkly alluring spectacle made young Puccini forsake church music for the stage. In 1880, he enrolled at the Milan Conservatory, Verdi’s alma mater. Like Verdi, Puccini loved literature, particularly plays, a frequent source of his opera subjects.

Unlike the other two composers on this program, Ottorino Respighi is known for his orchestral works, not for his eight (rather underwhelming) operas. His bold sonic palette pays tribute to Rimsky-Korsakov, with whom he studied orchestration while playing professional viola in Russia. Aside from Puccini, Respighi was the leading Italian composer during his lifetime. He might not have mastered the dominant genre, opera, but he doled out plenty of drama in a purely symphonic language. There’s a reason that soundtrack composers have been ripping him off for the past century.

Overture to La Forza del destino

Beginning with three menacing unison brass blasts, the overture to Verdi’s La Forza del destino (The Power of Fate) compiles several of the four-act opera’s most potent earworms. Although La Forza was premiered in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1862, Verdi revised it seven years later, giving it a somewhat less violent ending and a longer, more comprehensive overture. This version, all sensuous menace and massive hooks, is a staple of the symphonic repertory. Listen to how the fate motive—that brassy opening assault—clashes and colludes with the gentle rising melody linked to Leonora, the mandatory tragic soprano.

Prelude to Aida and “Celeste Aida”

Set in ancient Egypt, Verdi’s grand opera Aida (1871) involves a tragic love triangle, his favorite dynamic. Aida, an enslaved Ethiopian princess, and Amneris, the princess of Egypt, are both in love with Radames, an Egyptian officer. Radames loves Aida but doesn’t want to betray his country. No one can love openly; everyone suffers alone. At last, in the final scene of the fourth act, Aida and Radames get their lovers’ duet, but by that point they’re sealed in a shared tomb and running out of oxygen.

The prelude is all about establishing character. Gossamer string textures evoke the heroine, and a doomy falling motive represents the Egyptian priests. The tender “Celeste Aida,” from the first act, finds Radames dreaming of military victory and his secret love, the enslaved Aida—two irreconcilable desires. It’s one of Verdi’s most famous tenor arias, and notoriously tricky. The hardest thing about it is also the softest: its radiant close, which calls for a high B-flat to be sung very quietly and morendo (“dying”; that is, slowly fading away).

“Die quella pira,” from Il Trovatore

“Die quella pira” (“from this pyre”) is a short, thrilling aria for tenor—more specifically, a cabaletta, which was used to convey intense emotion. Here, Manrico, in the last scene of the third act of Il Trovatore (1853), vows to save Azucena, the old gypsy woman he thinks is his mother, from being burned alive. He swears that he’ll douse the flames with the blood of his enemies, even if it kills him too. Flamenco rhythms and a bell-bright final high C make “Die quella pira” the ultimate rage aria.

Triumphal March and Ballet music from Aida

Verdi’s most famous triumphal march closes Act II of Aida. The simple but powerful trumpet-voiced theme reflects Verdi’s antiquarian interests. After learning that simple valveless horns had recently been excavated in Egypt, the composer imagined the type of fanfares that these ancient instruments might sound at a victory ceremony. Soon after Aida‘s Cairo premiere, this ersatz bit of Egyptian antiquity was prominently quoted in the country’s brand new national anthem. The ballet sequence, also from the second act, is equally rich in Orientalist ear candy.

Preludio Sinfonico

Puccini wrote the Preludio Sinfonico in 1882, when he was still a student at the Milan Conservatory. Rhapsodic and vivid, his second major orchestral work mixes Impressionistic harmonies; soulful, cantabile melodies; and cutting-edge chromaticism.

“The Spectre” (“La Tregenda”) from Le Villi

“La Tregenda,” sometimes translated as “Witches’ Sabbath,” is one of two symphonic intermezzi from Puccini’s first opera, Le Villi (1883). This symphonic interlude, originally accompanied by narration, depicts the frenzied dance of witches as they work their black magic. As it picks up speed and intensity, the feverish music enacts the fate of the accursed, who is compelled by vengeful fairies to dance himself to death because he broke a good woman’s heart.

“Ch’ella mi creda” from La Fanciulla del West

Based on a play by David Belasco, The Girl of the Golden West, Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West (1910) is a supercharged Italian melodrama set in California during the Gold Rush. Whiskey drinkers, vigilantes, and outlaws abound. The heroine, Minnie, is resourceful and brave, a pistol-wielding proto-feminist. She has two rival suitors: the local sheriff, Jack Rance, and the man she secretly loves, the sexy bandit Ramerrez (who sometimes goes by Dick Johnson). Instead of succumbing to the usual fateful forces that slay Puccini sopranos, Minnie stands down a lynch mob and rescues her lover before literally riding into the sunset with him.

Right before that happens, the heroic antihero (originally played by superstar hearthrob Enrico Caruso) lets loose with the notoriously tricky tenor workout “Ch’ella mi creda” (“let her believe”). With a noose around his neck, Ramerrez asks his captors to let Minnie think he’s not dead but off somewhere atoning for his sinful past. His last words to her, before his surprise rescue, are “You’re the only flower of my life.” This nuanced aria hovers between sorrow and bliss.

“Nessun dorma” from Turandot

When Puccini died, in 1924, his magnificent final offering, Turandot, was still incomplete. Arturo Toscanini led the posthumous premiere, which concluded abruptly, with the conductor turning around and saying to the audience, “At this point the master laid down his pen.” But thanks to Puccini’s detailed sketches, Franco Alfano was able to finish the opera, in a convincing approximation of Puccini’s style. Set in ancient Peking, this savage and strange love story pits Princess Turandot against basically everyone, but particularly Calaf, who successfully answers her impossible riddles and, to her horror, wins her hand in marriage.

Before launching into “Nessun dorma,” probably the most famous tenor aria in operatic history, the hero has just heard his murderous darling declare that no one in the kingdom will sleep until she learns Calaf’s name, the answer to the riddle that will get her out of marrying him. If no one figures it out, everyone gets beheaded. Calaf, undeterred, muses over her threats, imagining how he’ll tell her his secret name while kissing her. In the electrifying final moments, he cries out, “At dawn, I will win!/I will win! I will win!” The tenor emits two gasp-worthy high notes, both sustained in performance, though not in the original score. Those last ringing syllables, a B and an A, have made and broken many a tenor’s career.

Luciano Pavarotti’s signature song, “Nessun dorma” is adored by sports fans, reality-television contestants, opera connoisseurs, and your grandmother. No one ever tires of it. It made headlines several months ago, after Pavarotti’s widow and daughters publicly demanded that Donald Trump stop using recordings of the legendary tenor’s performance of the aria during campaign events.

Respighi’s Roman Festival

Resphighi’s Feste Romane, from 1928, is the last installment of the composer’s “Roman” trilogy of symphonic poems. The first two works, Fontane de Roma (1916) and Pini de Roma (1925), pictorial tributes to the fountains and pines of Rome, respectively, were so wildly popular that Respighi could have retired and lived off the royalties. Instead, he taught composition, directed a music conservatory, and toured the world as a pianist and conductor in performances of his own works. After finishing Feste Romane, he decided to stick to smaller, more intimate forms. “It is impossible to achieve more,” he wrote, “and I do not think I shall write any more scores of this kind.”

In true program-music tradition, Respighi left a detailed written description for each of the four movements. These explanatory notes aren’t essential—you’re in for a voluptuous listen either way—but they’re fun:

  1. Circenses (The Circus Maximus). A threatening sky hangs over the Massimo Circus, but it is the people’s holiday: “Ave Nero!” The iron doors are unlocked; the strains of a religious song and the howling of wild beasts float on the air. The crowd rises in agitation: unperturbed, the song of the martyrs develops, conquers, and is lost in the tumult.
  2. Il Giubileo (The Jubilee). The pilgrims trail along the highway, praying. There finally appears from the summit of Monte Mario, to ardent eyes and gasping souls, the holy city: “Rome! Rome!” A hymn of praise bursts forth, the churches ring out their reply.

III. L’Ottobrata (The October Festival). The October festival in Roman Castelli covered with vines: hunting echoes, tinkling of bells, songs of love. Then in tender evening comes a romantic serenade.

  1. La Befana (The Epiphany). The night before Epiphany in the Piazza Navone: a characteristic rhythm of trumpets dominates the frantic clamor: above the swelling noise float, from time to time, rustic motives, saltarello cadenzas, the strains of a barrel-organ of a booth and the appeal of the proclaimer, the harsh song of the intoxicated and the lively stornello in which is expressed the popular feelings. “Lasstece pass! Semo Romani!” —“We are Romans! Let us pass!”

A slightly altered version of these program notes, minus all the hyperlinks, appeared in the printed program notes for a recent concert by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, which included all these pieces.

Copyright 2016 René Spencer Saller