Scandals in the operatic community don't often surpass or even match the foibles of cinematic celebrities, but the Puccini family, thanks to Puccini's wandering eye and Elvira's raging temper, splashed across the tabloids and unintentionally entertained scandal-mongers in Europe and America, ironically, at the moment of Puccini's greatest international fame and prestige.Įlvira, increasingly suspicious of the fondness of her husband for the teenage maid Doria Manfredi, threw both of them out of the house in 1908.
Living happily ever after wasn't part of the storyline for Puccini, however. Italian opera, which had been making inroads into America for nearly a century, had become a fixture of urban American culture, and Puccini was one of its living manifestations. The audience and management at the Metropolitan Opera in New York particularly adored him, and he was soon at work for his American fans on a new piece with an American subject and setting - La fanciulla del West ("The Girl of the Golden West"), his "wild west" opera. Both Puccini and Madama Butterfly recovered soon after the composer crossed the Atlantic for the first time, and became, by 1905, the darling of the thriving operatic cult on both sides of the ocean. (Bizet's Carmen and Rossini's The Barber of Seville suffered similar opening-night failures). And, at about the same time that he finished Madama Butterfly, he married the recently widowed Elvira Bonturi Gemignani, his longtime mistress and mother of his son Antonio.Īs every Puccini buff knows, Butterfly debuted in one of those notorious opening night fiascos that Fate reserves for operas destined to be spectacularly successful. Puccini, trapped under an overturned vehicle, nearly died from the fumes when he regained consciousness, he immediately muttered, "Poor Butterfly, poor Butterfly." Temporarily crippled (he was on crutches and canes for three years) he continued to work on his current project, an opera about a geisha and an American naval lieutenant. Along about 1903, Giacomo Puccini's life began to resemble an opera plot - and not so much a Puccini plot as a full-blown Verdi-style entanglement, with crippling injury, family scandal, lawsuits, a suicide, and the intervention of international politics.įirst came the automobile accident on a slippery mountain road in Italy on a foggy night in February.
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