Italian opera Madama Butterfly after watching 500 words! Thank you!

Classmate, you are not from Wuhan University.

Synopsis:

The story is set in Nagasaki, Japan in the early twentieth century, and the U.S. Navy officer Pinkerton is introduced by a marriage broker to marry the fifteen-year-old Japanese geisha Qiao Qiao-san (i.e., Madame Butterfly), but the Yankee has a playful attitude towards this marriage, and returns to the United States with the fleet shortly after the marriage. When Pinkerton returned to Japan three years later, he brought his real American wife with him and asked to take away the child he had with Madame Butterfly, who complied with her "husband" and ended the tragedy of the marriage by committing suicide.

This Madama Butterfly is different from traditional operas: the overture is short. When the curtain opens, it's immediately clear that it's a way to set off the hectic atmosphere of a wedding.

Somehow, it didn't sound pleasant, but rather a faint sense of unease.

The story takes place in the Meiji era of Japan, around 1900, in the port area of Nagasaki in Kyushu, Japan.

Madama Butterfly is one of Puccini's great lyrical tragedies. The play is set in Japan, and tells the story of the heroine Jojosan and the U.S. Navy officer Pinkerton who stayed in the boudoir after marrying, but what they were waiting for was their backs, and Jojosan ended the relationship by suicide. Madame Butterfly has a lyrical interior style.

It does not pursue complex plots and external stage effects, but strives to portray the psychological activities of the heroine Qiao Qiaosan. In the play, Puccini directly used Japanese folk songs such as "Edo Nihonbashi", "Lion Dance", and "Cherry Blossoms" to show Qiao Qiaosan's geisha identity and naïve psychology, which has a unique ** color. He also skillfully blends Japanese melodies with Italian styles without giving a sense of incongruity.

Jojosan's aria "Sunny Day" is one of the most popular songs in Puccini and the most common soprano repertoire in opera selections. It uses a long recitative lyrical tune and depicts Madame Butterfly's belief that Pinkerton will return and reunite with good happiness in a delicate and apt manner, reflecting the superb creative technique of Puccini, the master of color in opera. However, the premiere of such a great opera ended in a fiasco.

It is recorded that the premiere of Madama Butterfly turned into a farce of the audience, whose ridicule and howls were often drowned out**, and some people even cheered and hysterically invected, so much so that the show had to be stopped halfway through. Puccini was very sad and disappointed in this, but he did not lose confidence, and he believed that the reasons for his failure were many, including his personal treatment of the drama and the use of techniques that were not refined enough, as well as the differences in the audience's aesthetic expressions and the reasons for not adapting to the new style. As a result, Puccini made major changes to Madama Butterfly, and it was performed again in Brescia, Italy, in May 1904.

The performance was an unexpectedly successful success. Since then, Puccini's lyrical opera has become one of the most enduring repertoire on the world opera stage.