The premiere in Milan was a fiasco, as Puccini's sister, Ramelde, wrote in a letter to her husband:[21]
At two o'clock we went to bed and I can't sleep one bit; and to say that we were all so sure! Giacomo, poor thing, we never saw him because we couldn't go on the stage. We got to the end of it and I don't know how. The second act I didn't hear at all, and before the opera was over, we ran out of the theater.
Called "one of the most terrible flops in Italian opera history", the premiere was beset by several bad staging decisions, including the lack of an intermission during the second act. Worst of all was the idea to give audience plants nightingale whistles to deepen the sense of sunrise in the final scene. The audience took the noise as a cue to make their own animal noises.[22]
Madama Butterfly has been criticized by some American intellectuals[23] for orientalism. Despite these opinions, Madama Butterfly has been successfully performed in Japan in various adaptions from 1914.[24]
Today Madama Butterfly is the sixth most performed opera in the world[25] and considered a masterpiece, with Puccini's orchestration praised as limpid, fluent and refined.[26][27]
