Giacomo Puccini. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
Giacomo Puccini was the first composer in history to wreck a car, which hardly surprises anyone who knows the man: he was the most modern of Italian musicians even in what he spent his money on, motorboats, hunting rifles, and automobiles at a time when only a few hundred people in Italy owned one. On the evening of 25 February 1903, returning from Lucca to his home at Torre del Lago, his car, driven by the chauffeur, left the road on a downhill stretch near Vignola and rolled over an embankment.
The chauffeur broke a leg; his son Tonio and his companion Elvira got off lightly. Puccini was found under the car, half asphyxiated by petrol fumes, with a fractured right tibia. The convalescence was long and miserable: the fracture knit badly and he had to be operated on again, he was immobile for months, and tests also revealed a diabetes that had gone unnoticed until then. The maestro limped for the rest of his life. And since an almost finished Japanese opera sat on his worktable, the accident entered music history by way of the score: the orchestration of Madama Butterfly, stalled for half of 1903, slipped a season.
What followed is one of the great lessons of musical theatre. The premiere, at La Scala on 17 February 1904, was an organised disaster: whistles, shouts, animal noises, an evening so hostile that Puccini withdrew the opera after a single performance, reimbursing the theatre. Three months later, in Brescia, with a few touch-ups, the long act split in two and one more aria for the tenor, the same opera triumphed, and it has not left the world’s stages since, Naples included, this year with Özpetek directing. The difference between a fiasco and an immortal masterpiece: ninety days and four adjustments.
What remains is the mischievous question Puccinians have been asking for a century: how much of the accident made it into the opera? Butterfly is Puccini’s stillest and most inward work, an opera of waiting written by a man kept in an armchair for months. Biography, as we said of Debussy, does not explain the notes; but sometimes it supplies the laboratory conditions. A very fast composer, forced into slowness, wrote his most patient music. Then he healed, and bought another car straight away.