Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Puccini: Madama Butterfly

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

Would you believe that the audience at La Scala jeered and heckled Rosina Storchio while she tried to sing the role of Cho-Cho San publicly for the first time in the premiere 1904 production of Puccini's immortal Madama Butterfly? A hostile clique in the opera house seems to have made that initial performance such a terrible failure. Puccini made some quick revisions in the score for a second production of Butterfly three months later in Brescia. Every succeeding performance from that point onwards put audiences in tears and brought the house down with thunderous applause. We know Madama Butterfly best nowadays in its further revised 1906 "Paris version."

The original La Scala version was recorded in 1997 with Günther Neuhold conducting the Bremen Philharmonic State Orchestra and Bremen Theatre Chorus. A Ukrainian soprano Svetlana Katchour is heard as Cho-Cho San, opposite British tenor Bruce Rankin as the duplicitous American naval officer, B. F. Pinkerton. Naxos Records released the 1904 ur-version of Madama Butterfly on two CDs in 2002. I last broadcast this, the original Butterfly, on Sunday, September 8th of that same year.