The 1904 première of Madama Butterfly at La Scala was a catastrophic failure. According to one eyewitness, the Milanese audience greeted the performance with “grunts, roars, howls, laughter, bellowing, and guffaw.” Shocked by this unexpected show of disapproval, Giacomo Puccini and his librettists, Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa, immediately withdrew the opera from further performance. However, the team soon set out to revise the work, and the opera achieved an enthusiastic reception only three months later. After further revisions, which continued for the next couple of years, Madama Butterfly became one of the most popular operas of the twentieth century.

While anecdotes of atrocious opening nights of now popular operas are not uncommon, the troubled beginning of Madama Butterfly is puzzling. Many Puccini biographers have speculated that the fiasco was orchestrated by jealous rivals of the composer. Indeed, there were many reasons to be envious of Puccini, who by 1904 had emerged as the leading composer of opera in Italy after Verdi. At the time of Verdi’s death in 1901, the younger Italian opera composers, including Puccini’s most promising contemporaries Mascagni and Leoncavallo, had achieved few permanent successes outside of Italy. By contrast, all of Puccini’s recent works, including Manon Lescaut (1893), La bohème (1896), and Tosca (1900), had earned considerable international acclaim.

As in his earlier works, Puccini’s immediate inspiration for Madama Butterfly was a literary one. In 1900, the composer saw a performance of the American playwright David Belasco’s one-act play Madame Butterfly, based on a short story by a Philadelphia lawyer and amateur author, John Luther Long. Long wrote his work after having a conversation about life in Japan with his sister, who lived in Nagasaki with her missionary husband. He also modeled his short story on the novel Madame Chrysanthème, an autobiographical account by the French naval officer Pierre Loti about his “marriage” to a Japanese girl in Nagasaki. In adopting the short story, Belasco condensed Long’s narrative, eliminating the scenes from Cio-Cio-San and Pinkerton’s married life and focusing almost exclusively on the heroine’s longing for her husband’s return. He also altered the conclusion, closing the play with Butterfly’s tragic suicide rather than her enigmatic disappearance as in Long’s short story.

Puccini soon realized that Belasco’s play was too short for a full evening’s entertainment and suggested that librettists integrate elements from Long’s short story and Loti’s novel. Accordingly, Illica and Giacosa based many of the details in the first half of the opera on Loti’s impressions of Japanese customs, which, to his European eyes, appeared quaint and exotic. In the second half, they remained faithful to Belasco’s play, preserving elements that the playwright stressed, such as Cio-Cio-San’s vigil and her sensational suicide. These scenes proved to be particularly suited for Puccini, becoming the basis of some of the opera’s most memorable moments: the humming chorus and the subsequent orchestral depiction of the sunrise in Act II and Butterfly’s heartrending farewell to her son at the conclusion. The libretto’s unsympathetic portrayal of Pinkerton is unusual for a romantic hero of an opera. This and Sharpless’s moralizing remarks, betray Long’s, and perhaps his sister’s, ambivalent attitude toward their countrymen’s participation in the sex trade that existed in Japan at that time.

Like the libretto which relies on sources that are based on Western observers’ actual experience in Japan, Puccini’s music for Madama Butterfly contains adaptations of authentic Japanese melodies which the composer gathered for the project. Many of the tunes Puccini quotes in the opera continue to be familiar to modern Japanese audiences. Some songs, such as “Sakura” and “Miyasan,” are probably recognizable for many non-Japanese listeners as well. Other tunes are largely forgotten but can be found in nineteenth-century musical sources. Puccini employs these melodies, not only to contribute to the local color of the opera, but also to convey dramatic situations and express different emotional states of the characters. In Act I, Goro’s announcement of Butterfly’s arrival, based on the traditional tune “Echigojishi,” abruptly interrupts Pinkerton’s toast to his future “American wife.” In order to create a jarring musical effect underscoring the fundamental incompatibility of Pinkerton’s desire and Cio-Cio-San’s expectation, Puccini chooses to set the tune with minimal harmonic support. Furthermore, the use of the Japanese song at this point contrasts with the quotation of “The Star Spangled Banner” in Pinkerton’s earlier aria. In the poignant letter scene in Act II, Sharpless asks Cio-Cio-San what she would do if Pinkerton does not return. Butterfly, plunged into a state of extreme despair, answers with an aria, “Che tua madre,” composed of three different Japanese melodies “Jizuki-Uta,” “Suiryō-Bushi,” and “Kappore Hōnen.” The dark, mournful tone of the aria contrasts sharply with Cio-Cio-San’s earlier optimism for Pinkerton’s return expressed in “Un bel dì,” which lacks obvious references to Japanese tunes. Throughout the opera, this fluctuation between the borrowings of Japanese melodies and Puccini’s normative style parallels Butterfly’s unstable emotional state, wavering between extreme euphoria and anguish.

In recent criticism, Puccini’s Madama Butterfly has been understood as an expression of racist, misogynist, and orientalist attitude toward Asian people. It is certainly true that, on one level, the audience is expected to revel in the exoticism of the opera. It is hard not to be delighted (or repulsed) by witnessing the colorful spectacle of Cio-Cio-San and her friends’ entrance in Act I or Suzuki’s curious religious ritual in the opening of Act II. Yet Illica and Giacosa’s libretto and Puccini’s music both stress the profound psychological transformation of Butterfly from a naïve child-bride to a tragic heroine. Perhaps it is this tension—the contradictory impulse to present Cio-Cio-San as the objectified Orient and the desire to empathize with her on a deep emotional level—that has continued to fascinate the audiences of Madama Butterfly over the past one hundred years.