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| Leopoldo Metlicovitz, poster for Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly,” 1904. Public domain. |
So what went wrong? Part of the problem was length. The original second act ran for about an hour and a half without a break, and the audience grew restless.
Part of it, many believe, was hostility planned in advance. Puccini had rivals, and stories soon spread of a hired claque in the hall, ready to mock. Some of the jeers, accounts say, were aimed at the star herself, as her kimono billowed on stage.
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| Rosina Storchio, the first Cio-Cio-San, 1904. Photo: Varischi e Artico, Milan. Archivio Storico Ricordi (CC BY-SA 4.0). |
Puccini did not give up. He cut, rewrote and split the long act in two. Just three months later, on 28 May 1904, the revised opera opened at the Teatro Grande in Brescia, and this time the audience called him back to the stage again and again.
He kept polishing it for years, and the version most theatres perform today took shape in Paris in 1906.
Listen closely and you can hear what he was trying to do. Puccini studied Japanese melodies and wove several into the score, including a fragment of the Japanese national anthem. For Pinkerton he used something every American would recognise: a quotation from “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
In other words, the music itself tells you who these people are, before a word is sung.
The first time I heard “Un bel dì” in a theatre, I knew the plot and was sure I would stay composed. I did not. Everyone in the hall knows Pinkerton will not come back in the way she imagines. She is the only one who does not, and that is what makes the aria unbearable.
Today Madama Butterfly is consistently among the most performed operas in the world. The work that was booed off the stage in Milan is now one of the pillars of every major opera house.
For the full history of the versions, from Milan to Brescia to Paris, the Wikipedia article is detailed and well sourced: Madama Butterfly →
Butterfly waited three years for one fine day. Puccini waited only three months for his… and the opera has been arriving on that day ever since.
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Three Things Worth Knowing
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After Japan opened its ports to Western trade in the 1850s, Japanese woodblock prints, fans and porcelain flooded into Europe. Artists such as Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh and James McNeill Whistler collected prints and borrowed their flat colours and bold compositions. The French called the craze japonisme. Puccini’s opera arrived at the very end of this fascination, and it shows both its charm and its fantasies.
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Theater
The Producer Who Gave Puccini Two Operas
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David Belasco was the great showman of the American stage, famous for elaborate realistic sets and lighting effects. His one-act play Madame Butterfly (1900) gave Puccini this opera. A few years later, his Western melodrama The Girl of the Golden West gave Puccini another, which premiered at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 1910.
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Musical Theatre
Miss Saigon
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In 1989, the creators of Les Misérables, Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil, opened Miss Saigon in London. It moves Butterfly’s story to the end of the Vietnam War, with a young Vietnamese woman, an American soldier and a child left behind. The show became one of the longest-running musicals in West End history. Butterfly’s plot, it turns out, still works when you change the century.
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Curious & Controversial
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Was the 1904 fiasco sabotage? Puccini’s camp believed the audience had been stirred up by rivals, and accounts describe organised jeering from the start. Historians agree the reception was hostile, but how much was planned is still debated. |
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Today the opera is often criticised for its picture of Japan and of Japanese women, seen through Western eyes as fragile, exotic and self-sacrificing. Many modern productions try to address that directly; others leave it for audiences to judge. |
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Was Butterfly based on a real woman? The author of the original story, John Luther Long, drew on accounts from his sister, who lived in Nagasaki as the wife of a missionary. Nagasaki’s Glover House has long been nicknamed “Madame Butterfly’s house,” though the link is a legend. |
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The opera was dedicated to Queen Elena of Italy, and Puccini still expected a triumph on the night itself. He later said he never stopped believing in it, and called it the most heartfelt opera he had written. |
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Connoisseur’s Diary
Worth Seeing This Month
The Vienna State Opera is reviving Anthony Minghella’s celebrated production, with its bunraku-style puppet for Butterfly’s son, and with Ermonela Jaho, one of today’s great Butterflies, in the title role.
Where: Vienna State Opera, Main Stage. Performances on 15, 18, 20 and 24 November 2026; evening shows run about two hours and forty-five minutes, with one interval. Tickets: prices vary by seat and date; book through the State Opera’s own calendar. Insider tip: In America, Washington National Opera also stages the opera from 7 to 20 November, with the Korean soprano Karah Son making her company debut as Butterfly. Dates at wiener-staatsoper.at →
Worth Reading
Puccini: His Life and Works — Julian Budden (2002). The standard biography by a leading opera scholar, with a detailed account of Butterfly’s disastrous premiere and its rescue.
Explore Further
Browse: Washington National Opera: Madama Butterfly →, dates and details of the November run in Washington, D.C.
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