Giacomo Puccini

"An American lieutenant marries a beautiful young geisha, to the dismay of her family. Shortly after the wedding the lieutenant departs for America, and his wife bears him a child, alone. Three years later she excitedly awaits his return, only to find to her shock and despair, that he is returning with an American wife."--Container.

During the Cultural Revolution in China in the mid-1960s, a French diplomat falls in love with a singer in the Beijing Opera, not knowing that the object of his affection is a man. Interwoven with allusions to the Puccini opera "Madama Butterfly", a story of love and betrayal unfolds.--Adapted from imdb.com.

The pathos of this heart-rending story about a sweet-natured Japanese girl and the caddish American naval lieutenant who marries then deserts her has seldom been conveyed with such emotional directness. In his sumptuous filming of Puccini's opera, director Jean-Pierre Ponnelle uses an array of cinematic effects to evoke the protagonists' irreconcilably separate lives and worlds. As Butterfly, Mirella Freni is unbearably moving in one of the finest...

Performed at Covent Garden, featuring Placido Domingo and Kiri Te Kanawa, supported by Italian conductor Giuseppe Sinopoli.