Puccini's Madama Butterfly, born from one of opera's great first-night disasters, closes the Royal Opera's season at Covent Garden.
Puccini’s Madama Butterfly closes the Royal Opera’s season at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden from Sunday 4 July 2027. Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier’s production runs to Saturday 24 July.
Madama Butterfly premiered at La Scala in February 1904, and the audience jeered, whistled and made animal noises. Puccini withdrew the opera after a single performance and revised it heavily, and it succeeded three months later in Brescia.
The story came from an American short story, itself taken from a French novel. A fifteen-year-old girl in Nagasaki is married by an American naval officer who regards the arrangement as temporary. He returns three years later with an American wife.
Puccini revised the opera five times. The version now heard softens a first act that made the officer more brutal than the audience would accept.
Everyone in the house understands the situation in Act One, and Butterfly does not understand it until the final minutes. The whole of Act Two is spent watching her wait.
The production alternates with Strauss’s Elektra through the second half of July. Puccini’s abandoned girl and Strauss’s avenging one share the same stage to close the Royal Opera’s year.