Puccini's Madama Butterfly runs on the Main Stage at Covent Garden from 4 to 24 July 2027.
The first night of Madama Butterfly, at La Scala in February 1904, was one of the great disasters in opera. The audience jeered, whistled and made animal noises; Puccini withdrew it after a single performance, revised it heavily, and it succeeded three months later in Brescia. What he had written was a story taken from an American short story taken from a French novel: a fifteen-year-old girl in Nagasaki married by an American naval officer who regards the arrangement as temporary, and who returns three years later with an American wife.
It is the cruellest of Puccini’s operas because it withholds nothing from the audience. Everyone in the house understands the situation in Act One. Butterfly does not understand it until the final minutes, and the whole of Act Two is spent watching her wait. Puccini revised it five times and the version everybody now hears is the fourth or fifth, softened from a first act that made the officer considerably more brutal than the audience would accept.
Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier’s production runs on the Main Stage at Covent Garden from Sunday 4 to Saturday 24 July 2027. It is one of two operas closing the Royal Opera’s year, alternating with Elektra through the second half of July — Puccini’s abandoned girl and Strauss’s avenging one, on the same stage in the same fortnight.