The metamorphosis of a butterfly has four stages, but Puccini's Madama Butterfly had more: its principal versions result from the disastrous first performance at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan (17 February 1904), followed by revised versions at the Teatro Grande in Brescia (May 1904), the Opéra-Comique in Paris (December 1906), the Metropolitan Opera in New York (February 1907) and the Teatro Carcano in Milan (December 1920). But the transmutations of Madama Butterfly are not limited to post-première additions and subtractions: transformations, both dramatic and musical, are so deeply embedded in the structure of the work that they take on a thematic quality of their own. The plot can be seen as the growth of a young Japanese girl into her own conception of an American wife and mother, finally emerging as a full-fledged tragic heroine. But this opera also marks a dramatic change in Puccini's mature style away from both his use of the MPI and adherence to unequivocal tonal closure at a work's end.

The score, as a whole, exhibits a gradual reshaping and loosening of organizational musical elements even more marked than that of Manon Lescaut or La bohème. Puccini, who originally conceived of two long acts with parallel beginnings and endings, wrote the openings of Acts I and II in fugal style (the first is a strict fugal exposition for four voices, while the second is a three-voice fugato.) But by the end of both original acts, the sonic landscape has shifted to one of progressive, Modernist irresolution. (It was not until the Paris version that the opera was divided into three acts.) So if the opera commences with Western music's strictest rules, its most basic one (that of final tonal resolution) is put in doubt by the end.

contrapuntal subjects

In the later nineteenth century, fugues were most often associated with the sacred and “learned” styles. Lavignac, writing in 1899, notes that “the fugue is not an operatic form: it can never be dramatic. Its home is the church.” However, there were exceptions, such as the prelude to Gounod's 1867 Roméo et Juliette, and the finale to Verdi's 1893 Falstaff. Wagner also used a fugal exposition in the prelude to Die Meistersinger, an opera that the younger composer knew well, having made cuts to it for the first Milan production at Ricordi's behest.