Madame Butterfly Premieres: Puccini's Tale of Betrayal
Giacomo Puccini's Madama Butterfly premiered at La Scala in Milan on February 17, 1904, and was booed into silence by an audience that included his professional rivals. The opera ran three hours without an intermission, and the hostile crowd jeered, hissed, and made animal noises throughout the second act. Critics savaged it. Puccini immediately withdrew the work and spent three months revising it, splitting the long second act in two, cutting nearly an hour of music, and refining the orchestration. The revised version premiered in Brescia on May 28, 1904, to thunderous applause. Today Madama Butterfly is one of the most performed operas in the world, its story of a Japanese woman betrayed by an American naval officer resonating across cultures. Puccini always believed the La Scala audience had been organized against him by jealous composers, and surviving evidence suggests he was not entirely wrong.
February 17, 1904
122 years ago
Key Figures & Places
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