Ermonela Jaho as Cio-Cio San (with Elizabeth DeShong as Suzuki) performs Un bel dí vedremo in Madama Butterfly. Find out more at www.roh.org.uk/
Giacomo Puccini was entranced by David Belasco’s play Madame Butterfly (based on a popular short story by John Luther Long) when he saw it in London in 1900. He collaborated with librettists Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa (with whom he had created La bohème and Tosca) to adapt Cio-Cio-San’s (Butterfly’s) tragic tale for the operatic stage. Although the premiere at La Scala, Milan, in 1904 was poorly received, that same year Puccini revised and restaged the opera for performances in Brescia, to great acclaim. Madama Butterfly quickly became a hugely popular opera with performers and audiences alike, and remains one of Puccini’s best-loved works.
Puccini drew on Japanese folk melodies for the score, one of his most evocative and atmospheric. In Act I, Cio-Cio-San expresses her radiant happiness in ‘Ancora un passo’, and the lovers rapturously declare their love for each other in the passionate duet ‘Viene la sera… vogliatemi bene’. In Act II, set three years later, the dominant mood is one of yearning; in her Act II aria ‘Un bel dì vedremo’ Cio-Cio-San longs for the ‘fine day’ when her husband will return to her.