Un bel dì vedremo on McLaren's album of the same year, "Fans". "Un bel dì vedremo" occurs in Act II in both the original and the revised version. The Italian text here below is taken from the very first version of the libretto (17 February 1904) as reconstructed by Julian Smith. Un bel dì vedremo "" ("One fine day we'll see") is a soprano aria from the opera "Madama Butterfly" (1904) by Giacomo Puccini to a libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa. It is sung by Cio-Cio San/Madama Butterfly (on stage with Suzuki), as she imagines the return of her absent love, Pinkerton.
Giacomo Puccini critics as to the artistic value of his work has always been divided. Grove Music Online described Puccini's strengths as a composer as follows: Puccini succeeded in mastering the orchestra as no other Italian had done before him, creating new forms by manipulating structures inherited from the great Italian tradition, loading them with bold harmonic progressions which had little or nothing to do with what was happening then in Italy, though they were in step with the work of French, Austrian and German colleagues. In his work on Puccini, Julian Budden describes Puccini as a gifted and original composer, noting