MILAN — The last time Puccini’s original version of “Madama Butterfly” was performed at the Teatro alla Scala here, it was over a century ago and it was a fiasco. The opera’s 1904 premiere was met with “grunts, growls, gibes, bellows, sneers,” one observer recalled, producing a “pandemonium, during which it was difficult to hear anything.”

Puccini described the evening as a “lynching” and withdrew the work, vowing never again to perform at La Scala. He hastily made adjustments to “Madama Butterfly,” and a revised version opened just three months later in Brescia, Italy. An immediate triumph, this formed the basis for the work’s evolution from failure to international classic.

Puccini never did work at La Scala again. But that composer’s controversial first go at “Butterfly” is about to get a second chance at the theater, where it opens the season on Wednesday in a production by Alvis Hermanis inspired by Japanese art and Kabuki theater. For the conductor Riccardo Chailly, La Scala’s new music director, reviving the original version is partly an act of contrition, a symbolic apology to Puccini for the historic rebuff 112 years ago.

“I am happy with this version,” Mr. Chailly told the audience at a recent rehearsal. “I believe in it.” The two versions are equally valid, he added, and “confirm the uniqueness of his genius.”