The true and tragic tale behind the popular opera

A comprehensive guide to Puccini's MADAMA BUTTERFLY, featuring insightful and in depth Commentary and Analysis, a complete, newly translated Libretto with Italian/English side-by side, and over 20 music highlight examples.

Giacome Puccini's tragic grand opera-one act playbased on Long's story.

David Henry Hwang’s beautiful, heartrending play featuring an afterword by the author – winner of a 1988 Tony Award for Best Play and nominated for the 1989 Pulitzer Prize Based on a true story that stunned the world, M. Butterfly opens in the cramped prison cell where diplomat Rene Gallimard is being held captive by the French government—and by his own illusions. In the darkness of his cell he recalls a time when desire seemed to give him wings. A time when Song Liling, the beautiful Chinese diva, touched him with a love as vivid, as seductive—and as elusive—as a butterfly. How could he have known, then, that his ideal woman was, in fact, a spy for the Chinese government—and a man disguised as a woman? In a series of flashbacks, the diplomat relives the twenty-year affair from the temptation to the seduction, from its consummation to the scandal that ultimately consumed them both. But in the end, there remains only one truth: Whether or not Gallimard's passion was a flight of fancy, it sparked the most vigorous emotions of his life. Only in real life could love become so unreal. And only in such a dramatic tour de force do we learn how a fantasy can become a man's mistress—as well as his jailer. M. Butterfly is one of the most compelling, explosive, and slyly humorous dramas ever to light the Broadway stage, a work of unrivaled brilliance, illuminating the conflict between men and women, the differences between East and West, racial stereotypes—and the shadows we cast around our most cherished illusions. M. Butterfly remains one of the most influential romantic plays of contemporary literature, and in 1993 was made into a film by David Cronenberg starring Jeremy Irons and John Lone.

Giacomo Puccini?s opera Madame Butterfly has enjoyed tremendous popularity in Europe and America since its debut in 1904; and has also inspired a global-level debate about whether the tragic heroine ?Cho-Cho-san? is based on a real-life model. As the setting of the opera, Nagasaki holds answers to this mostly ill-informed debate and yet has remained virtually silent on the topic, in large part because the story of Madame Butterfly was created by and for Westerners and evokes cultural stereotypes that are absurd if not repugnant to many Japanese.This book delves into the history of Nagasaki and into the literature from which the opera springs, based on a wide variety of primary sources in both Japanese and Western languages. It looks at the controversy about the identity of the opera?s heroine and presents compelling evidence that in fact there was no real life Cho-Cho-san. Penetrating beyond the discussion of Madame Butterfly as a work of art, Burke-Gaffney discusses the opera in the context of its importance as a window on Japan?s changing relationship with Europe and America from the seventeenth century through the post World War II period and as a vehicle for persisting misconceptions about Japan in particular and Asia in general.Finally, the book looks at the present state of Nagasaki sites related to the development of Madame Butterfly and demonstrates that despite the cultural disparities evoked by the opera, buried in the history of Nagasaki are many untold tales of true international romance and cooperation.

Best known as the story from the 1904 Puccini opera, the compelling modern myth of Madame Butterfly has been read, watched, and re-interpreted for many years. This volume examines the Madame Butterfly narrative in a variety of cultural contexts - literary, musical, theatrical, cinematic, historical, and political.