February 17

In literary history

• 1904Puccini's Madama Butterfly was booed off the stage at La Scala, the audience jeering through Butterfly's aria and making farmyard noises at the dawn scene. Puccini called it a lynching, revised the score, and the opera has not left the repertoire since.

The Daily Canon for February 17

Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais (1564).