In Madama Butterfly (Milano 17th Feb 1904) based on David Balasco's one-act play after a magazine
story by John Luther Long, which in its turn is based on a real incident, Puccini was most strongly
attracted by the character of the heroine, the very image of a typically Puccinian 'little woman'
with most intense feeling; and the exotic atmosphere fascinated him. It's the first opera of his in
which he used authentic folk tunes; (Japanese) the first performance at La Scala was a fiasco almost
unique in the annals of opera and we are now certain that it was engineered by Puccini's many rivals.
After revision in which the second and final act was divided into two parts, with an interval between,
and various other cuts and alterations, Madama Butterfly achieved an enormous success at
Brescia a few months later in May 1904.
In January 1909 there occurred a great tragedy in the Puccini household the consequences
of which affected the composer to such a extent that for some time to come his creative power
and desire to work was seriously impaired.
Their maid Dora, completely unnerved and made distraught by the persecution of Puccini's
wife who suspected her, wrongly, of being the composer's mistress, committed suicide.
After his latest opera, Puccini wanted to turn his back on tragédie larmoyante and attempt
something of a harder more virile fibre such as he had done in Tosca. This he found in Belasco's
wild west melodrama, The girl of the golden west, which plays among the miners in the Californian
gold rush round 1849. Its mixture of stark realism and sentimentality appealed to the composer,
and since the opera takes place in America it was appropriately first produced at the
Metropolitan N.Y in December 1910. Caruso and Destinn sang the leading roles and Toscanini
conducted, it was a success with the public but not with the critics. In all technical respects,
notably in its Dubussian harmony and Straussian Orchestration, the opera is a masterpiece in
which Puccini also made pointed use of American and Native American tunes.
But it lacks sufficient lyrical incandescence, which is probably the reason that outside
Italy it has never established itself in the regular repertory.
Puccini emerged into the twentieth century music world as the "King of Verismo," not through the conducting background of Mascagni or through the skilled compositional ability of Giordano, but as a master of theater. Puccini wrote solely for the operatic stage and he understood the dramatic intensity and melodic poignancy of real life subject matter. Critics have sometimes dismissed his work as overly impassioned, melodramatic, and sentimental. The composer himself proclaimed, "The only music I can make is that of small things," although he admired the grander stylistic abilities of Verdi and Wagner. Despite that admiration, Puccini chose to concentrate on life's familiar bittersweet passions and intense emotional storms.
La Scala
The Teatro alla Scala was founded, under the auspices of the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, to replace the Royal Ducal Theatre, which was destroyed by fire on 26 February 1776 and had until then been the home of opera in Milan.
The cost of building the new theatre was borne by the owners of the boxes at the Ducal, in exchange for possession of the land on which stood the church of Santa Maria alla Scala (hence the name) and for renewed ownership of their boxes.
Designed by the great neoclassical architect Giuseppe Piermarini, La Scala opened on 3 August 1778 with Antonio Salieri's opera L'Europa riconosciuta, to a libretto by Mattia Verazi.
The early period of the theatre's artistic history is linked to the tradition of "Neapolitan" opera buffa, whose leading exponents were Giovanni Paisiello (1740-1816) and Domenico Cimarosa (1749-1801). Among the numerous operas performed may be mentioned La frascatana (1780), Il barbiere di Siviglia (1786) and Nina pazza per amore (1804) by Paisiello, L'italiana in Londra (1780) and Il matrimonio segreto (1793) by Cimarosa.
The theatre's repertoire was renewed between 1793 and 1798 with L'oro fa tutto by Ferdinando Paër (1771-1839) and Un pazzo ne fa cento by Giovanni Simone Mayr (1762-1845). Thus La Scala opened towards the neoclassical French taste and to the subsequent, more radical evolution of musical theatre. Paër and Mayr historically represented the junction and passage between opera buffa and the romantic opera of Gioachino Rossini (1792-1868). With the advent of Rossini in 1812 (La pietra del paragone), the Teatro alla Scala was to become the appointed place of Italian opera seria: of its history dating back more than a century and of its subsequent tradition up till the present. The catalogue of Rossini's works performed until 1825 included: Il turco in Italia, La Cenerentola, Il barbiere di Siviglia, La donna del lago, Otello, Tancredi, Semiramide, and Mosé.
During that period the choreographies of Salvatore Viganò (1769-181) and of Carlo Blasis (1795-1878) also widened the theatre's artistic supremacy to include ballet.
As for its foreign repertoire, outstanding were the productions, in 1816, of Die Zauberflöte, one of the operas by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) given during the nineteenth century, and, in 1822, of La vestale by Gaspare Spontini (1744-1851).
In 1806 Alessandro Sanquirico (1777-1849) was appointed director of stage design. He renewed the theatre's concept of productions by adjusting them to the new romantic tendency. In 1814 the depth of the stage was increased, to occupy part of the site of a demolished convent in what is now via Verdi.
In 1821 the candle lighting at La Scala was replaced by a large central chandelier with safety lamps (called "argants"), which remained in use until the gas lighting system was introduced in 1860.
An exceptional new season of serious opera opened between 1822 and 1825, with Chiara e Serafina by Gaetano Donizetti (1797-1848) and Il pirata by Vincenzo Bellini (1801-1835). The later operas of Donizetti performed at La Scala were (until 1850) Anna Bolena, Lucrezia Borgia, Torquato Tasso, La figlia del reggimento, La favorita, Linda di Chamonix, Don Pasquale, and Poliuto. These were followed (until 1836) by Bellini's I Capuleti e i Montecchi, Norma, La sonnambula, Beatrice di Tenda, and I puritani.
Among the foremost artists of the Rossini, Donizetti and Bellini repertoire should be mentioned the sopranos Isabella Colbran (1785-1845), Teresa Belloc (1784-1855), and Giuditta Pasta (1797-1865), the mezzo-soprano Maria Malibran (1806-1836), the tenor Luigi Pacini (1767-1837), the male sopranos Gasparo Pacchiarotti (1740-1821) and Giovanni Battista Velluti (1780-1861). In ballet, three of the greatest stars in the Scala's history rose to fame: Maria Taglioni (1804-1884), Fanny Cerrito (1817-1909) and the Austrian Fanny Elssler (1810-1884), who in 1848 was forced to leave the Theatre due to suspicions that she was a police informer. With them must be mentioned the Frenchman Marius Petipa (1822-1910), who also achieved fame for having created in St Petersburg The Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake by Tchaikovsky.
In 1839 Oberto Conte di San Bonifacio inaugurated the cycle of operas by Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901), the composer whose name is linked more than any other to the history of La Scala. After the dismal failure of Un giorno di regno, in 1842 Nabucco was performed. It was the first, decisive triumph of Verdi's career. At the same time, the strong patriotic feelings stirred by Nabucco founded the "popularity" of opera seria and identified its image with the Scala. After two more operas (I Lombardi alla prima crociata and Giovanna d'Arco), in 1846 Verdi's collaboration with La Scala came to an abrupt halt. For many long years the works of Verdi were performed elsewhere. But after 1869, reconciliation gradually came, with productions of the master's new version of La forza del destino. In 1872 the first "European" performance of Aida was given at La Scala, and in 1874 Verdi conducted his Requiem there. In 1881 he presented the revised Simon Boccanegra. In 1887 and in 1893, the Scala gave Otello and Falstaff, the last two masterpieces resulting from the composer's collaboration with Arrigo Boito (1842-1918).
Among the greatest historic singers of Verdi opera at the Scala must be mentioned the soprano Giuseppina Strepponi (the maestro's wife, 1815-1897), Adelina Patti (1843-1919), Teresa Stolz (1834-1902), Francesco Tamagno (1850-1905, the first to play Otello), and the baritone Victor Maurel (1848-1923, the first Falstaff).
In 1881 Luigi Manzotti (1835-1905) and Romualdo Marenco (1841-1907) created ballo Excelsior, one of the masterpieces of scenography at the Scala and still part of its repertoire today.
In 1883 the lighting of the auditorium and stage was fully electrified.
In 1898 the Theatre's financial troubles led to the first experiment in modern management techniques, implemented by Duke Guido Visconti di Modrone, Arrigo Boito and Giulio Gatti Casazza, who was entrusted with the general management (a role later covered by the Superintendent).
Arturo Toscanini (1867-1957) became the artistic director and introduced radical reform into the theatre, both in its organisational aspects and in its relations with the public. Toscanini, one of the great conductors of all time, took up Verdi's musical inheritance and launched a tradition of interpretation that continued uninterruptedly and was renewed during the twentieth century. It was he who reappraised and regularly performed at the Scala the works of Richard Wagner (hitherto only belatedly and inadequately recognised). He also firmly extended the Scala's orchestral repertoire to include symphonic music.
Operas by Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924) were given at the Scala in 1884, starting with Le Villi. This was followed by the others, Manon Lescaut, Madame Butterfly, La fanciulla del west. In 1926, Toscanini conducted the premiere of Turandot (1926), a work regarded as conclusive to the history of Italian serious opera. In 1891 Cavalleria rusticana marked the first appearance, in the Scala's repertoire, of Pietro Mascagni (1863-1945) and of musical realism. It was followed by numerous other titles by him (Iris, Parisina, Le Maschere), and by the principal works of Ruggero Leoncavallo (1857-1919), Francesco Cilea (1866-1950), and Umberto Giordano (1867-1948). The performance, in 1906, of Richard Strauss's Salome came both as a turning-point in the theatre's repertoire towards the new musical movements, and as a decisive opening towards foreign composers. The next few years saw performances of operas or music by such composers as Igor Stravinsky, Claude Debussy, Ferruccio Busoni, Ippolito Pizzetti, Riccardo Zandonai, and Ottorino Respighi. The new artistic trend, one of whose protagonists was the conductor Tullio Serafin (1878-1968) afterwards became a permanent part of the theatre's repertoire.
 View opera LA BOHEME
Jose Carreras and Teresa Stratas
in Franco Zeffirelli's stage production
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