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In 1904, a fifteen-year-old Japanese girl named Cio-Cio-San marries an American naval officer named Pinkerton in Nagasaki. Pinkerton has made clear to the American consul that he considers the arrangement a local custom — pleasant and temporary. Cio-Cio-San converts to Christianity and waits. When she is asked what she will do if he does not return, she sings Un bel dì vedremo — one fine day, we will see — describing with absolute certainty the morning his ship will come back into harbor. The aria is devastating not because it is sad but because it is so completely convinced of something the audience already knows is wrong. Pinkerton does return, years later, with an American wife. Puccini's opera is among the most performed works in the entire repertoire, which suggests that something in this story — of loyalty, delusion, and abandonment — keeps bringing audiences back.