One fine day...

Beautiful music, for a shocking story. There’s a theme through Puccini’s operas of misuse of women, especially powerless women.  But none so specifically about misogynism as M. Butterfly.  Discussants vary on whether it’s more about racism or American colonialism, and certainly this plot, which grabbed Puccini when he saw it as a play in London, is about all three. It’s also, of course, about the cruelty of religious exclusion – Butterfly’s pre-wedding conversion to Christianity (why? Pinkerton didn’t even know or presumably care) begins her descent into lonely exclusion.

from Houston Grand Opera to Brisbane, 2016 - production by Michael Grandage

And it’s about women and children as victims of male power. That's clearly depicted (right) in the original 1904 poster for the first production, by Adolfo Hohenstein.

Now listen to that love duet, (in an extract from the 1995 film directed by Frédéric Mitterrand and starring Soprano Ying Huang, a childlike Butterfly, as Puccini saw her).

Puccini didn’t make this story up – indeed the original source was apparently semi-autobiographical,  an 1887 French novel Madame Chrysanthème by Pierre Loti, hugely popular in Europe.  It led to a short story "Madame Butterfly" (1898) by John Luther Long, and then a play, Madame Butterfly: A Tragedy of Japan, in New York then London, where Puccini saw it in the summer season.

Nor was Puccini easily satisfied with the opera, which was a flop at its premiere in 1904 at La Scala. He revised it four times in the next three years. And since then, it has remained at the hugely popular top of popular operas. The western opera houses almost always have a production scheduled – we’ll watch a Royal Opera House production (2014) that is still in play. The lead directors almost all have a Butterfly production, despite the challenges, especially these days, of portraying the contrast of Japanese and American culture subtly or, increasingly unsubtly.  (We’ll watch in our second session the Australian production on Sydney Harbour in 2014, set controversially in more recent times, shockingly highlighting the cultural contrasts.  (More about that production in next week’s post.)

That story

Here’s the synopsis of the opera – without interpretative additions. 

And do you have a free five minutes?  Here’s a video from Live From Lincoln Center in 2008 in which soprano Susan Graham tells the story of the real Madam Butterfly.

 Or return to Houston Grand Opera (our different opera house for the week) for an illustrated account of the various versions of this small sad story.

The famous music

Puccini never went to Japan.  Or indeed ancient China, ( Turandot), or the Colorado gold mines (Fanciulla del West), and probably while he knew France he didn’t explore the American desert where Manon Lescaut dies. But he was fascinated by different musical characterizations of culture, and in Butterfly we find leitmotifs that doubtless account in part for the opera’s popularity. 

Listen here to Antonio Pappano on the magic of the music – with the soprano Ermonela Jaho from our 2017 production, displaying it.

The long-running  ROH production

This production was codirected by Moshe Leiser and Patrice Courier,  ROH doing a co-production with Barcelona. It stars Albanian soprano Ermonela Jaho, who had already won favour in London - see Opera Today review.

This production was praised for its beauty and colour, as well as the singing. Guardian review here. But Jaho is the centre of all the commentary. "Jaho is ideal for the part, hollow-eyed and fragile with stylised white makeup accentuating her vulnerability. She sings with so much imagination and vocal colour, as well as living every second of the part." More here. Guardian critic Tim Ashley, is unusually emotional: " Ermonela Jaho, one of the great verismo interpreters, brings uncompromising veracity to the title role, and the combination of vulnerability and torrential emotion just tears you in two." More here.

Marcelo Puente (Pinkerton), Ermonela Jaho (Cio-Cio-San). Photo : Bill Cooper.

One fine day … Ermonela Jaho as Cio-Cio-San with Scott Hendricks as Sharpless. Photograph: Bill Cooper

A version to watch in your own time?

There’s a full opera version on film with Mirella Freni Herbert Von Karajan conducting the Wiener Philarmoniker, staged and directed by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle. Placido Domingo plays Pinkerton, Christa Ludwig is Suzuki.    

Mirella Freni is superb, though the movie setting is of course surprising.  Here’s a review.