EVENT NAME: Madama Butterfly

EVENT PLACE: Teatro del Maggio 

EVENT DATE: from 24 October to 2 November 2024

EVENT DESCRIPTION:

After the successes of Manon Lescaut, La bohème and Tosca, the time seems to have come for Puccini to also conquer the temple of Italian opera. He had chosen the subject of Madama Butterfly - an opera which debuted with initial failure at the Teatro alla Scala on 17 February 1904 - after having attended 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 had immediately struck his imagination.

Flanked by the proven tandem of librettists Illica and Giacosa, Puccini decided to concentrate the opera on the figure of Cio-Cio-San, creating a true monodrama that follows his psychological evolution from the initial and disarming naivety to the tragic and heroic final resignation .

Madama Butterfly is an individual drama but is also the emblem of diametrically 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 foreign to her tradition of belonging , and on the other the Yankee Pinkerton, the cynical adventurer incapable of feeling real emotions and dedicated solely to the satisfaction of his own passions. Although opposed in the drama, East and West are perfectly combined in the music which is very rich in heterogeneous contaminations: oriental sounds skilfully recreated with the adoption of traditional Japanese melodies, pentaphonic and hexatonal scales, very refined timbral combinations but also compositional elements of the Western musical tradition ( like the fugato or the Leitmotif, for example, or the direct quotation of the American anthem).

EVENT TICKETS: https://www.maggiofiorentino.com/events/madama-butterfly-2024