Inspirations

In 1897 a story was published in Century Magazine called Madame Butterfly. It was written by John Luther Long. It is probable that Long had read a popular novel of the time called Madame Chrysantheme by a French Navel officer, Piere Loti. The novel was based on Loti's stay in Japan and told of his short lived contract marriage to a Geisha girl in Nagasaki. The magazine story was a great success and it was from this that the American playwright and producer David Belasco created a one act play also called Madam Butterfly. The play premiered in New York in 1900, it took the public storm and a month later it was taken to London where it opened at the Duke of York's Theatre.

Puccini was in London for the premier of TOSCA and went to see the play. He immediately realised its potential as an opera. On 17 February 1904 Puccini's Madame Butterfly premiered at La Scala, Milan.

Alain Boublil and Claude Michel Schönberg were first inspired by a photo, taken a few weeks before the fall of Saigon, of a women giving up her child at Saigon airport in the hope of a new life in America. This photo led them back to the story of Madame Butterfly and then to its source, Madame Chrysantheme. This in turn inspired them to write their own version of the story, Miss Saigon.

"This Photograph was for Alain and I the start of everything..." Claude-Michel Schönberg, October 1995

I well remember the autumn afternoon in Paris. Between two chords of the keyboard, I broke for coffee and thumbed through a magazine someone had left on the piano.
I had no idea how important this simple action would be for me. There was no way I could predict the impact of this photograph.

The silence of this woman stunned by her grief was a shout of pain louder than any of the earth's laments. The child's tears were the final condemnation of all wars which shatter people who love each other.

The little Vietnamese girl was about to board a plane from Ho Chi Minh Airport for the United States of America where her father, and ex-GI she had never seen, was waiting for her. Her mother was leaving her there and would never see her again.

Behind this particular picture lay a background of years of enquiries and bureaucratic formalities, in order to find the ex-solider from the other side of the world, with whom the woman had shared a brief moment of her life.

She knew, as only a mother could that beyond this departure gate there was both a new life for her daughter and no life at all for her, and that she had willed it.

I was so appalled by the image of this deliberate ripping apart that I had to sit down and catch my breath. I suffered for the mother as though I might see my own little boy leaving me forever and I suffered for the child as though in my early youth I had been forcibly removed from my parents. Was that not the most moving, the most staggering example of 'The Ultimate Sacrifice', as undergone by Cio-Cio San in Madame Butterfly, giving her life for her child?

This photograph was for Alain and I, was the start of everything...