Madame Butterfly: A Song History

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"Madame Butterfly" here means a theme from Giacomo Puccini's opera Madama Butterfly, set to an Italian libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa and now among the most often staged of all operas.[1] Its story began as "Madam Butterfly," a short story by the Philadelphia lawyer John Luther Long that appeared in the Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine in January 1898; Long credited incidents told to him by his sister, a missionary's wife in Nagasaki, though the Columbia University Opera Project suspects a debt to Pierre Loti's 1887 novel Madame Chrysanthème.[2] David Belasco turned the story into a one-act play, and Puccini, who knew no English and had never been to Japan, saw it in London in 1900 and was drawn to it as an opera subject.[3][4]

Japanese woodblock print of a decorated ship with flags in a harbor with mountains beyond

Utagawa Hiroshige II, Dutch and Chinese Ships in the Harbor at Nagasaki, woodblock print, 1859. Nagasaki harbor, where Puccini's opera is set.

The premiere at La Scala in Milan on February 17, 1904, was a famous failure, and Puccini had the score withdrawn.[1][5] A revised version, with the second act divided in two, succeeded at the Teatro Grande in Brescia in May 1904, on the 28th according to Columbia's Opera Project and San Francisco Opera, though OperaVision gives the 24th.[3][4][5] Puccini went on revising, and the version usually performed today is his fifth and last, from 1907.[4] According to San Francisco Opera, he consulted Madame Oyama, wife of the Japanese ambassador, and worked Japanese melodies such as "Sakura Sakura" into the score.[3] The first two bars of Pinkerton's aria "Dovunque al mondo" come straight from "The Star-Spangled Banner."[4]

Shelley Stevens includes a "Madame Butterfly" theme in Classical Music For Mountain Dulcimer, a Fingers Of Steel collection first issued as The Three String Orchestra, Vol. II, written in DAD tuning with both standard notation and tablature; the listing does not say which of the opera's melodies she chose.[6]

Our book that contains the song "Madame Butterfly"

Sources

  1. Britannica: "Madama Butterfly".
  2. Columbia University, Opera Project: "Puccini: Madama Butterfly - John Luther Story".
  3. San Francisco Opera: "Madama Butterfly Source Material".
  4. OperaVision: "5 things to know about Madama Butterfly".
  5. Columbia University, Opera Project: "The Fiasco of Madama Butterfly's First Performance".
  6. Fingers Of Steel: "Shelley Stevens, Classical Music For Mountain Dulcimer".
  7. Image: Utagawa Hiroshige II, Dutch and Chinese Ships in the Harbor at Nagasaki, woodblock print, 1859. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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