Madam Butterfly

The work

In the summer of 1900, Giacomo Puccini was in London to supervise a performance of Tosca at Covent Garden. During his visit, he went to see a new play that was on at the Duke of York’s Theatre on nearby St Martin’s Lane: David Belasco’s Madame Butterfly. Though Puccini understood almost no English, the essence of the plot was simple enough to grasp. Pinkerton, an American naval officer stationed in Nagasaki, ‘marries’ a 15-year-old Japanese girl, Cio-Cio-San (Madam Butterfly). She believes their union to be legally binding, adopts American customs and gradually becomes isolated from her friends and relatives. For Pinkerton, however, the marriage is nothing but a game, and he casually abandons Cio-Cio-San, only to return later, ‘proper’ Western wife in tow, to retrieve his infant son. The only honourable course of action the distraught Cio-Cio-San can see is to end her life.

Puccini read voraciously about Japanese culture and listened to Japanese folk songs

Puccini found Belasco’s play deeply moving and was particularly attracted to. Puccini believed he had spotted in Belasco’s play all the ingredients for a guaranteed hit.