After introducing the servants, including Suzuki, Goro describes the upcoming wedding-as well as the long list of relatives who will attend. Goro, a marriage broker, is showing Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton, an American naval officer, the house that Pinkerton has just bought for his honeymoon with his new Japanese bride, Cio-Cio-San (Madame Butterfly). “The Act I curtain fell to a mixture of hissing and scattered applause.” Cast and composer came out to “torrents of derisive laughter.” The Butterfly, Rosina Storchio, was heckled for looking pregnant, presumably from her publicized affair with conductor Arturo Toscanini. “Puccini’s detractors cried out, ‘Bohème, Bohème!!,’” writes music theorist Chadwick Jenkins. Some derided the Japanese folk elements.” Trouble began when listeners detected similarity between Butterfly’s entrance and the Act III duet of Bohème. “The audience found its Wagnerian-length acts too long, and objected to the absence of a tenor aria. Puccini described the experience as ‘a real lynching.’ According to The New York Times the opera was “booed off the stage.”. “The premiere was greeted by ‘roars, howls, laughter, bellowing, and guffaws.’ Almost none of his music could be heard, and any applause was answered with shouts of protest and jeers. FebruMadama Butterfly had its premiere at La Scala in Milan-“a date that marks one of the worst fiascos in the history of opera,” Mary Jane Phillips-Matz writes in The Puccini Companion.
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