February 17th...This Day in History (Now with links to other events)

Madame Butterfly premieres 1904

 

 

On this day in 1904, Giacomo Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly premieres at the La Scala theatre in Milan, Italy.

The young Puccini decided to dedicate his life to opera after seeing a performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida in 1876. In his later life, he would write some of the best-loved operas of all time: La Boheme (1896), Tosca (1900), Madame Butterfly (1904) and Turandot (left unfinished when he died in 1906). Not one of these, however, was an immediate success when it opened. La Boheme, the now-classic story of a group of poor artists living in a Paris garret, earned mixed reviews, while Tosca was downright panned by critics.

While supervising a production of Tosca in London, Puccini saw the play Madame Butterfly, written by David Belasco and based on a story by John Luther Long. Taken with the strong female character at its center, he began working on an operatic version of the play, with an Italian libretto by Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica. Written over the course of two years–including an eight-month break when Puccini was badly injured in a car accident–the opera made its debut in Milan in February 1904.

Set in Nagasaki, Japan, Madame Butterfly told the story of an American sailor, B.F. Pinkerton, who marries and abandons a young Japanese geisha, Cio-Cio-San, or Madame Butterfly. In addition to the rich, colorful orchestration and powerful arias that Puccini was known for, the opera reflected his common theme of living and dying for love. This theme often played out in the lives of his heroines–women like Cio-Cio-San, who live for the sake of their lovers and are eventually destroyed by the pain inflicted by that love. Perhaps because of the opera’s foreign setting or perhaps because it was too similar to Puccini’s earlier works, the audience at the premiere reacted badly to Madame Butterfly, hissing and yelling at the stage. Puccini withdrew it after one performance. He worked quickly to revise the work, splitting the 90-minute-long second act into two parts and changing other minor aspects. Four months later, the revamped Madame Butterfly went onstage at the Teatro Grande in Brescia. This time, the public greeted the opera with tumultuous applause and repeated encores, and Puccini was called before the curtain 10 times. Madame Butterfly went on to huge international success, moving to New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 1907.

 (More Events on This Day in History)

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• Civil War

• 1865 Sherman sacks Columbia, South Carolina

• Cold War

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• Crime

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• Disaster

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• General Interest

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• 1957 Gromyko becomes foreign minister
• 1979 China invades Vietnam

• Hollywood

• 1982 Lee Strasberg dies

• Literary

• 2000 Dave Eggers’ Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius debuts

• Music

• 1966 Brian Wilson rolls tape on “Good Vibrations,” take one

• Old West

• 1820 Senate passes Missouri Compromise

• Presidential

• 1801 Thomas Jefferson is elected

• Sports

• 1996 Kasparov defeats chess-playing computer

• Vietnam War

• 1966 Taylor testifies on Operation Rolling Thunder
• 1968 U.S. casualty rate reaches record high

• World War I

• 1915 Zeppelin L-4 crashes into North Sea

• World War II

• 1944 U.S. troops land on Eniwetok atoll