Madama Butterfly Survives a Disastrous Premiere

On 17 February 1904, Giacomo Puccini's Madama Butterfly opened at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan and was greeted with open hostility. Accounts of the night describe hissing, jeering and catcalls through much of the performance. Puccini was by then the composer of La bohème and Tosca, and his path to the stage had begun in 1876, when he walked to Pisa to see a production of Verdi's Aida.

The opera's direct source was a magazine story by the American lawyer John Luther Long, which the playwright David Belasco adapted for the stage. Puccini saw Belasco's play in London in 1900, while he was in the city for a production of Tosca, and asked for permission to turn it into an opera. Puccini's regular librettists, Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica, wrote the Italian text.