After the successes of Manon Lescaut, La bohème and Tosca, the time has come for Puccini to conquer the temple of Italian opera as well. The subject of Madama Butterfly - an opera which debuted with an initial failure at the Teatro alla Scala on February 17, 1904 - he had chosen himself after having witnessed a similar drama by David Belasco in London, based on a short story by John Luther Long. The story of the young geisha seduced and abandoned by an American naval officer immediately struck Puccini's imagination. With the librettists Illica and Giacosa, Puccini decided to focus the work on the figure of Cio-Cio-San, creating a real monodrama that follows her psychological evolutions from the initial and disarming naivety to the tragic and heroic final resignation. Madama Butterfly is an individual drama but it is also an emblem of opposed worlds and cultures: on the one hand the docile but at the same time resolute geisha, who will pay the price of her life for the mistake of falling in love with a man who is foreign to her tradition of belonging, and on the other hand the Yankee Pinkerton, the cynical adventurer unable to feel real emotions and devoted solely to the satisfaction of his passions. Although opposed in the drama, East and West are perfectly combined in the music that is very rich in heterogeneous contaminations: oriental sounds skillfully recreated with the adoption of traditional Japanese melodies, pentaphonic and hexagonal scales, very refined timbral combinations but also compositional elements of the Western musical tradition (such as the fugato or the Leitmotiv, for example, or the direct quotation of the American anthem).

New staging

The performance of the 24th October, 2024, will be streamed posponed on Rai Radio 3.