Madama Butterfly

What's different

The original two-act version, withdrawn by Puccini and his publisher after one performance. The evening was a fiasco, and Puccini wrote to a friend that the audience had not listened to a note. Why it failed has never been settled: scholars have found it hard to explain against the Brescia version three months later, which was received as a triumph, and both Puccini and Giulio Ricordi believed the hostility had been organised in advance. The version is staged occasionally, and opened the Teatro alla Scala's season in December 2016.

What's different

The revision made in the ten weeks after the fiasco, and the version from which the opera's performing life begins. The second act was divided into two parts, passages were cut and others inserted, and the melodic writing was changed in places. Pinkerton gained an aria of farewell in the closing scene, the vocal line of Cio-Cio-San's death was rewritten, and the small role of Il bambino was dropped. The new division of the second act is often described as the making of a third act. It is not: this version is in two acts, the second in two parts, and the three-act designation belongs to the Paris version below.

What's different

Cuts in the first act, additions in the second and substantial changes to the closing scene. The Opéra-Comique gave it in French, in Paul Ferrier's translation, and the Paris score divides it into three acts rather than two. The version is entered as Italian because the text Puccini settled is Italian and the French was how one house performed it. It is primary because it is the text still played, which is also why it is the version most readers will have heard. How many versions the opera has is disputed, and the answer depends on what is being counted. The Centro Studi Giacomo Puccini, which produces the national edition, recognises the three entered here. Scholarship following Cecil Hopkinson's bibliography of 1968 distinguished four, identified by Ricordi's vocal scores rather than by stagings, the additional one being an English edition of 1906 long assigned to the first London performance of 10 July 1905. Dieter Schickling has shown that the assignment cannot stand, the edition having appeared almost a year after that performance, which was sung in Italian, and having been prepared for Henry Savage's English-language company in the United States. Schickling's own conclusion is that no version is definitive, since practically every revival Puccini attended between 1904 and 1907 carried new and larger cuts. Two later texts sit outside the three on that reasoning. The Metropolitan Opera's first performance, on 11 February 1907, was of a further revision in two acts, and the Centro Studi files it among significant performances rather than as a version. In December 1920, for a performance at the Teatro Carcano in Milan, Puccini restored Yakusidé's arietta and other material cut earlier; Ricordi never published that text and it is not heard.