Madama Butterfly is an opera in three acts by Giacomo Puccini, with an Italian libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa. It is based on the short story "Madame Butterfly" by John Luther Long, which in turn was based on stories told to Long by his sister Jennie Correll and on the semi-autobiographical 1887 French novel Madame Chrysanthème by Pierre Loti. Long's version was dramatized by David Belasco as the one-act play Madame Butterfly: A Tragedy of Japan, which, after premiering in New York in 1900, moved to London, where Puccini saw it in the summer of that year.
The pathos of his heart - rending story about a sweet-natured Japanese girl and the caddish American naval lieutenant who marries then deserts her has seldom been conveyes with such emotional directness. In his sumptuous filming of Puccini’s opera , director Jean -Pierre Ponnelle uses an array of cinematic effects (including a memorable dream sequence) to evoke the protagonists’ irreconcilably separate lives and worlds. As Buttefly , Mirella Freni is unbearably moving in one of the finest performances of her career, while Placido Domingo makes Lt. Pinkerton a more sympathetic figure than usual.
The pathos of his heart - rending story about a sweet-natured Japanese girl and the caddish American naval lieutenant who marries then deserts her has seldom been conveyes with such emotional directness. In his sumptuous filming of Puccini’s opera , director Jean -Pierre Ponnelle uses an array of cinematic effects (including a memorable dream sequence) to evoke the protagonists’ irreconcilably separate lives and worlds. As Buttefly , Mirella Freni is unbearably moving in one of the finest performances of her career, while Placido Domingo makes Lt. Pinkerton a more sympathetic figure than usual.
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