After the disastrous world premiere of Madama Butterfly at La Scala on February 17, 1904, Puccini made substantial revisions of the score. The revised version of the opera was staged in Brescia three months later, on May 28, where it was a huge hit. Though Puccini would continue to tinker with the score, he never really attained what we might call a “definitive” version. Puccini felt obliged to make radical interventions on the first version, which he had thought was well done enough, in order to achieve success in the theaters of his day. This “constraint” was mentioned in a 1920 letter to Giulio Ricordi, in which he expresses bitterness and fear at not seeing “his” Madame Butterfly, as it had been originally composed.  
In 1981 Ricordi commissioned musicologist Julian Smith to reconstruct the parts of Madama Butterfly that Puccini had “amputated”. The world premiere of the resulting version of Madama Butterfly took place at Teatro La Fenice in Venice in late 1982.

 
We asked Julian Smith to tell us about the work he did on the reconstruction, and what problems he faced in recovering what little material remained. 

The autograph full score (partitura) is in the Ricordi archive, and this, together with the first printed edition of the vocal score (spartito) were my main sources.  But the autograph full score contains also all the alterations Puccini made for the performances in Brescia.  There are some completely new pages as well as indications of cuts and alterations.  Sometimes the new paper has been stuck over the original page.  I had to work out what the original version was, guided of course by what the first vocal score shows.  Only a few bars, just after the humming chorus (coro a bocca chiusa), were completely missing from the autograph, and these I had to orchestrate myself.  


After the première flopped, all performing material was returned to Ricordi.  No copy full score has ever been found.  How did you go about reconstructing the original version? What material is it based on?

The first printed full score did not appear until 1907, after the “usual” version of the opera had been established in Paris.  All the alterations and cuts made by Puccini over this period of nearly three years had to be restored.  This necessitated copying over 1,100 bars of full score, and many of these sections were quite difficult to decipher, since Puccini’s handwriting was never particularly easy to read.   But he did write very accurately, hardly ever making a notational error. 


What were the parts that Puccini cut, that you had to reconstruct? What were the differences between the original and the revised version?

To list them all would take too long, but one of the most important differences between Milan and Brescia was the entrance music of Butterfly, which is re-used in the final of the Act 1 love duet.  It was in this music that Puccini had inadvertently used a phrase which was very similar to a couple of bars in the Act 3 quartet of Bohème.  The first night audience and the critics had noticed this, and Puccini had to change it, and also alter it whenever it returned later in the opera.  He had also included a short aria for the tipsy Uncle Yakuside.  He cut this after Milan.   Towards the end of Act 2 part 1 he made some cuts, and he changed the end of the humming chorus in order to bring the curtain down, before resuming with the intermezzo.  In the first performance the curtain remained up, and the second act ran for around eighty minutes, with Butterfly on stage for nearly all that time.  (Act 1 lasts about 55 minutes in the original version).


In your 1979 Tribulations of a Score, which was reissued in 1984, you wrote that “The original Butterfly was a daring opera, unconventional in its structure, and unsparing in its delivery of what for its time was an unusually pointed moral and social message.” Can you tell us why?

As I have indicated, the length of both acts of the original version was unusual for Italian opera at this time.  (Remember Verdi thought that Act 1 of Otello was too long at 42 minutes!).  But the other important difference between the original and the “usual” version is in the character of Pinkerton, and, to a lesser extent, Kate.  Pinkerton is rude and patronizing to the Japanese in the first version.  He insults Butterfly’s servants (calling them “Musi [mugs] 1, 2 & 3”).  He ridicules the Japanese delicacies served to the guests at the wedding, and generally exhibits boorish behavior.   Kate, who comes face to face with Butterfly, is focused on getting the child.  In the first version Mr. and Mrs. Pinkerton don’t exactly demonstrate traditional American values, but their characters are softened by the alterations that Puccini made by the time of the Paris performances in 1906.