Madama Butterfly is a problem for opera houses today, despite its immense and enduring popularity. How to handle this "nasty story about an American naval officer’s seduction and subsequent abandonment of a 15-year-old Japanese geisha"? So writes Oliver Mears, ROH opera director.
"Puccini, in his work that was premiered in 1904, did what the best opera composers do: craft the most potent of dramatic situations and collisions to wring the maximum emotion from an audience, while writing music of unbearable emotion and dramatic effect." And it worked.
It also lasted.
"For the better part of a century, Cio-Cio San, the abandoned lover of Giacomo Puccini's opera tragedy Madama Butterfly, was the de facto face of Japanese womanhood. Her plight - married at 15 to a foreigner she idolises, only to be discarded - was a sensually loaded one in those high-buttoned times and no less irresistible to those seeking metaphors for colonial adventurism.
"But if there was ever a real Cio-Cio San, it is certain Puccini never met her. She is a figment of the Western imagination. Like most cultured Europeans of the late 19th century, Puccini was enthralled by the art of Japan, by the very idea of Japan. Butterfly was a fiction whose time had come.
"By the time Puccini wrote his opera, Europe had been in love with Japan for four decades. But it had fallen for a deftly manufactured, custom-designed image, says Rebecca Suter, senior lecturer in Japanese studies at Sydney University. "You had Japanese artists creating beautiful images of Japan for Europeans, that were reflecting back images of Japan produced in Europe."
Madama Butterfly presented a docile and beautified image of Japan that was a response to a general uneasiness about the country's rise, Suter says. A Western delusion? Read more here.
Put in historical context, the fascination with the story of this opera - then and now - makes sense Here's a thoughtful account from Cedar Rapids Opera, in Iowa, (home of western delusion?) - your surprise opera company of the week.
And put in the contexts of current examination of idealisations of women, and their exploitation, of racism and global power games, the story of course becomes a minefield of debate. There's a substantial literature examining the historical and current meanings of both the story and its presentation by Puccini - and by western opera companies since. In particular, commentators have noted how the beautiful opera and its message of romantic (and tragically destroyed) love softens the harsh truth of the sex trade Pinkerton cheerily exploits.
"It may be possible to argue that, rather than obscuring the more repugnant aspects of treaty-port prostitution, the opera delivers an openly ethical message: it promotes sympathy for girls exploited by Westerners availing themselves of the Asian sex trade, bringing their plight to the attention of audiences. However, Butterfly is inseparable in Western imagination from her character as it was performed before audiences. The child victim is somewhat obscured by the persona of the virtuoso operatic performer, whose voice and delivery commands empathy for the abandoned Butterfly but does not draw attention to Western male exploitation of a Japanese child." More here.
If you're not running out of time, and want a less radical interpretation, try this one!
Re-locating verismo
So what to do with this opera of beautiful music and nasty, controversial story? (Here's a complex plain English discussion of the challenges.) ROH responded to the criticism about stereotyping by importing cultural advisers before they repeated in 2022 the 2017 production we watched. Seattle Opera organised workshops around racist distortions of Asians in American culture. But the opera retains its story.
Change the opera? Inevitably, directors have updated the story to encourage audiences to reinterpret it. Palo Alto opera director inserted a shadowplay in the humming chorus waiting song, a flashback showing the receipt by Pinkerton of Sharpless’ letter revealing the existence of the child, and the decision by Kate, his 'real' (American) wife, that they should go to Japan to rescue the child - and then a new ending in which Butterfly reaches for Pinkerton's gun...
Update the story so we can see it more clearly? One such attempt was Opera Australia's 2014 production on Sydney Harbour - which we'll be viewing this week. Reviews almost all enthused. Timeout described it as "a world-beating triumph, surely one of the most spectacular outdoor operas ever staged anywhere". But most of the enthusiasm was for the 'spectacle'. Why? OA brought in Spanish director Alex Ollé and his company La Fura dels Baus. Famous for large scale shows, they focussed on the drama of the Harbour setting. And the opera's drama? According to Timeout, Olle "still presents a highly intelligent and original take on Puccini's now clichéd tale."
How? "The contrarian Ollé here discards the libretto's very Italian orientalism, and gives Puccini a maximal dose of his own verismo by keeping it real and making it contemporary. He transposes Butterfly from her home town of Nagasaki around the time Puccini set librettist Luigi Illica's adaptation (1904) to the here and now of Sydney with our prevailing domestic dreams: a harbourside outdoor wedding, shoddily built flats with water views bought off the plan, cranes bearing the phone numbers for enquiries, a familiar taxi."
Bachtrack's reviewer also uncritically accepted the reworking of the plot as "thought-provoking". The reinvention of Pinkerton as a property developer and of the traditional authoritative religious leader, the Bonze, as an armed crime figure surrounded by threatening thugs who trash the wedding feast and threaten the guests "magnified the story of a deserted and betrayed child-wife in Imperial Japan into a tale of corporate greed and environmental pillage." More here.
Other reviewers directly praised the analogies - "Likewise Goro becomes Pinkerton’s architect and Butterfly’s uncle The Bonze is a yakuza gangster. They are bold translations of Puccini’s opera by the La Fura dels Baus team, and yet maintain the integrity of the opera superbly," wrote Arts Hub's reviewer. (The libretto is a challenge of course, for any such reinvention! For the English translation go here.)
Thus magnified, the fate of Cio-Cio San is tangled with the environment. The waiting music that holds us in suspense as she clings to her dream of reunion with her husband ("humming chorus") instead accompanies trudging urban refugees from ruined developments. The costumes for Japanese soprano Hiromi Omura change from traditional robes over a delicate butterfly body-stocking 'tattoo' to a trailer trash tshirt and cut off jeans. How much is added to our understanding by these "bold translations of Puccini’s opera"? We may ask whether they "maintain the integrity of the opera" superbly - or just confuse it?
But wait - has this reinvention of the plot offered what all those PC workshops tried for - an awareness that this is a story of race-based paedophilia, sexual exploitation of a child? Omura's glorious, subtle soprano perfectly handles Puccini's demanding music, but unlike the great divas of western opera who have sung the part, she creates in Cio-Cio San all the sweet moodiness and stubborn passion of a damaged, still-dreaming teenage girl.
Puccini enters another century
Butterfly was a watershed for Puccini, the last of his operas attacked for his old fashioned romanticism and tuneful music, and the first to meet new attacks on his increasingly modern and strange music.
After its disastrous premier in 1904, he rewrote it six times, and there was no new opera from him until 6 years later. He lived for another 20 years - this year is the centenary of his death. The operas of those years are very different verismo. More here.
Compared to the ever popular M. Butterfly, La fanciulla del West, (The Girl of the Golden West) is hardly known, features no hit-songs that everyone recognises. It's another story of a vulnerable lone woman, but she's a very different woman, and it's a story with a very different ending. That's where we are going next week.
Lyn, 15/5/24
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