GIACOMO PUCCINI
MADAMA BUTTERFLY
CONTENTS
P.
4
SYNOPSIS P.
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OF COLOURS, QUESTIONS AND NUANCES PHILIPPE JORDAN P.
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THE VOICE OF A BUTTERFLY ANN-CHRISTINE MECKE
P.
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MADAMA BUTTERFLY AT THE VIENNA STATE OPERA OLIVER LÁNG P.
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THE MASKS OF MADAME BUTTERFLY SERGIO MORABITO P.
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IMPRINT
GIACOMO PUCCINI
MADAMA BUTTERFLY TRAGEDIA GIAPPONESE Text GIUSEPPE GIACOSA & LUIGI ILLICA After the play Madame Butterfly by DAVID BELASCO (1900), which is based on the story of the same name by JOHN LUTHER LONG (1898) ORCHESTRA
3 flutes (incl. piccolo) 2 oboes / 1 cor anglaise 2 clarinets / bass clarinet 2 bassoons / 4 horns / 3 trumpets 3 trombones / bass trombone timpani / percussion / harp violin I / violin II / viola cello / double bass STAGE MUSIC percussion / bird whistle viola dʼamore AUTOGRAPH Ricordi archive, Milan WORLD PREMIÈRE (1st version) 17 FEB 1904 Milan WORLD PREMIÈRE (2nd version) 28 MAY 1904 Brescia WORLD PREMIÈRE (3rd version) 10 JULY 1905 London WORLD PREMIÈRE (4th version) 28 DEC 1906 Paris PREMIÈRE AT THE HOUSE ON THE RING 31 OCT 1907 Vienna Court Opera DURATION
2 H 30 MIN
INCL. 1 INTERMISSION
MADAMA BUTTERFLY
SYNOPSIS ACT 1 On a hill overlooking Nagasaki, Lieutenant Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton of the U.S. Navy views a house with servants, which Goro, the broker, has organised for him. It is here that he will spend his honeymoon with his future wife Cio-Cio-San, known as “Butterfly.” The contract for house and wife runs for a period of 999 years but can be terminated by the American on any given month. The first wedding guest to arrive is the American consul, Sharpless. Pinkerton gushes to him about his noncommittal marriage; Sharpless, on the other hand, had overheard Cio-Cio-San’s lovely voice when she had visited the consulate the day before: He cautions his compatriot not to break her heart. Pinkerton toasts the day he will enter into “a real marriage” with an American wife. Butterfly arrives at the house with her friends. In conversation with Sharpless and Pinkerton, she explains that her once rich family had fallen into poverty, and she has had to earn her living as a geisha. Butterfly’s relatives have arrived in the meantime, judging the groom whispering amongst themselves. Butterfly shows Pinkerton her few possessions, including an object she is reluctant to talk about: the dagger with which her father took his own life at the Emperorʼs command. She tells Pinkerton that she secretly embraced his religion so she can fully share his life. The Imperial Commissioner reads the marriage agreement in the presence of a registrar, and the bride and groom sign, concluding the marriage; the official guests leave the party. Pinkerton, who sees Butterfly’s “rented” relatives as a nuisance, wants to get the family celebration over with, when Butterfly’s uncle, a Buddhist priest, storms in. He curses Butterfly for rejecting her ancestral religion, whereupon her relatives disown her. Pinkerton orders the guests away and is left alone with his weeping wife. Eagerly awaiting his wedding night, he tries to comfort his “toy.” His words are convincing, and she believes that he will take the place of her lost family. They spend their first night together. Previous pages: SCENE
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SYNOPSIS
ACT 2, PART 1 Three years have passed since Pinkerton left Japan. His and CioCio-San’s child, a blond, blue-eyed boy, was born after his departure. Cio-Cio-San, the child and and the servant Suzuki still live in the house on the hill, while Pinkerton has the consul pay the monthly rent. Yet the money for their cost of living is running out. Suzuki doubts that Pinkerton will return, but Cio-CioSan pictures the day of his arrival. Consul Sharpless visits Butterfly. He wants to read her a letter from Pinkerton that concerns her. They are interrupted by Goro, who has tried to find a new husband for Cio-CioSan since Pinkerton’s departure. She keeps insisting that she is not interested. Prince Yamadori, the most persistent of the new suitors, pays her a courtesy visit once again. Cio-Cio-San, trusting in the binding American marriage laws, continues to insist that she be addressed as ”Madama B. F. Pinkerton” and brushes aside his offer. Cio-Cio-San’s expressions of delight interfere with Sharpless’ efforts to read the letter, so that the main content is never read. Failing to see the obvious, Sharpless impatiently asks her what she would do if Pinkerton never returned. She has two options, says Cio-Cio-San: become a geisha again – or die. When Sharpless tries to persuade her to reconsider Yamadori’s proposal, Cio-Cio-San triumphantly presents the child she considers to be a guarantee for Pinkerton’s return. She describes the unhappy fate that would await the boy if she had to work as a geisha again. Sharpless promises to tell Pinkerton of the child. No sooner is he gone than a cannon shot is heard in the harbour announcing the arrival of an American naval ship: it is Pinkerton’s ship! Overjoyed, CioCio-San instructs Suzuki to pick all the flowers in the garden and decorates the house. She adorns herself with her wedding dress, then keeps watch for Pinkerton with Suzuki and the child. Night falls.
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MADAMA BUTTERFLY
ACT 2, PART 2 Morning comes and Pinkerton has still not arrived. Only when Cio-Cio-San withdraws with the child to get some rest does Sharp less sneak into the house with Pinkerton to ask Suzuki for help: She must convince Cio-Cio-San to hand over the child to Pinkerton and his American wife, Kate, who is waiting in the garden. Pinkerton is overcome with guilt and runs to avoid confrontation, while Kate assures herself of Suzuki’s support. Suzuki and Sharpless make it clear to Cio-Cio-San that Pinkerton has not returned for her sake, but to take the child. Cio-Cio-San agrees to hand over her son to Pinkerton if he himself comes to collect him. Left alone, she prepares to perform suicide using her father’s dagger. She blindfolds the child Suzuki has sent her before she stabs herself. Pinkerton finds her dying.
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ASMIK GIGORIAN as CIO-CIO-SAN FREDDIE DE TOMMASO as PINKERTON
PHILIPPE JORDAN
OF COLOURS, QUESTIONS AND NUANCES THOUGHTS ON A MULTI LAYERED MASTERPIECE
In terms of its musical language, Madama Butterfly can be far more readily classified as an impressionist work than as a verismo opera. Setting aside the overly specific, if every tiny umbrella, every teacup, every divine figurine, and basically every exotic element is not presented in naturalistic detail, the score turns into something wonderfully light, everything radiates with colour. And then the French influence becomes clear. Even in his Manon Lescaut, and more so in La bohème, we can see the extent to which Puccini was inspired by Claude Debussy. Here in Madama Butterfly, the direct relationship to Pelléas et Mélisande, for example, is obvious – especially in some of the chord sequences in the second part of act 2. Throughout his life, Puccini took a keen interest in musical developments all over the world and was accordingly always well informed. He can without doubt be described as an admirer of Wagner and learned a great deal from him, especially in terms of instrumentation. The slight similarity between the beginning of Butterfly and the overture to Smetana’s The Bartered Bride is certainly no coincidence, and Janáček’s compositional style, based on the mel-
ody of the Czech language, was not foreign to him either. This resulted in Puccini being subjected to attacks from conservative advocates of the national opera tradition, for example in a 1912 pamphlet by Fausto Torrefranca bearing the supposedly defamatory title: “Puccini and International Opera.” In his efforts to break new musical ground and enrich his own compositional vocabulary, non-European and to a significant extent oriental, Far Eastern influences were a great inspiration to Puccini, particularly when it came to creating the necessary local colour – as in Butterfly. This applies to him no less than to many of his contemporaries – we need only think of Ravel’s Shéhérazade or Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde. Puccini’s intensive study of East Asian cultures before he started composing is well known. We can forgive him for incorporating Chinese melodies (such as Butterfly’s “Io seguo il mio destino” in act 1) alongside clearly Japanese melodies – think of the Japanese national anthem heard when the imperial commissioner appears, or Japanese-sounding melodies and the perfect imitation of the Japanese speech pat-
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OF COLOURS, QUESTIONS AND NUANCES
terns (for example, with Suzuki’s first entrance “Sorride vostro onore?”): Puccini was concerned with atmosphere, with creating an exotic impression, and with describing a certain milieu. Madama Butterfly is therefore a typical example of a genre work. It is comparable to his dramaturgically similar, preceding operas La bohème and Tosca: in all three works, from the very first few bars of the music, the audience is drawn into the mindset and life experience of the characters, and a musical ambience is defined before the title character actually appears. The opening fugato at the beginning of Butterfly, which Puccini gives to Goro, and its melodics are intended to convey the bustling of the Japanese matchmaker, the proximity of the ever-busy harbour city of Nagasaki, and a foreign atmosphere, while the way in which the theme is developed illustrates the occidental. The focus here is on the contrast between West and East, and in the fugato these disparate elements are placed side by side and brought together. This cultural conflict is particularly obvious in Pinkerton and Sharpless’s “America forever”, a quotation from an originally English melody that later gained popularity in American military circles (it was only made the music of the American national anthem more than a quarter of a century after the Butterfly première), symbolising the programmatic non-conformity of the Americans in their Japanese host country. In retrospect, La bohème, Tosca, Madama Butterfly – three operas written one after the other, as it were Puccini’s “trilogia popolare” – can be regarded as the composer’s first Trittico: the lyrical, the dramatic and the exotic
complement each other antithetically, just as the tragic, the lyrical and the comic did later in Il tabarro, Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi. But even more than with the later three, which were conceived as a trio from the outset, a clear compositional development can be traced from Bohème to Butterfly (the first Puccini opus of the 20th century!). For Puccini, the opera stage was his true calling. He thought and felt to the very last fibre of his being in the terms of reference of (music) theatre. Every note, every fermata, every pause, every phrase, every colour therefore has its exact position and function in the interplay between stage and auditorium, between performers and audience. Accordingly, he was keen to experiment and expand on the experiences he had gained from piece to piece. For example, the interlude at the beginning of the second part of act 2 of Butterfly is something completely new in his oeuvre. Although there are symphonic-like intermezzi in Manon Lescaut and Tosca, they represent more modestly dimensioned atmospheric episodes and are not as directly linked to the psychology of the main character as here. In its elementary dramatic significance, this purely instrumental musical depiction of the tragedy of the title character’s futile hope cannot be compared to anything in Puccini’s previous work. The end of the opera – this unresolved B minor chord symbolising Pinkerton’s cry of despair – must also be understood as a search for a new theatrical means of expression. Many who know Madama Butterfly well have grown accustomed to this ending, but those hearing the work for the first time may be surprised. And the reuse of the very same melody (initially even in the same key)
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OF COLOURS, QUESTIONS AND NUANCES
when Sharpless reads Pinkerton’s letter in act 2 and a little later during the socalled humming chorus also falls into this category of experimentation. Here Puccini is working with the listener’s subconscious: when the audience hears the melody the first time, they generally pay more attention to the content of the letter but assimilate the melody unconsciously. When it then returns and is the actual focus of attention, it is already felt to be familiar and at the same time a connection in terms of content is created. In both cases it is about Butterfly’s fervent hope: in one case she is expecting (positive) news from Pinkerton, in the other his long-awaited return. An exciting, extremely successful musical bracket that Puccini has created here! The extent to which Puccini was also a master of the art of nuance can be seen by comparing the Mimì/Rodolfo duet at the end of act 1 of Bohème with the CioCio-San/Pinkerton duet at the end of act 1 of Butterfly. In both cases, a tremendous feeling of loving togetherness, but that of Bohème seems purer, more genuine, while in Butterfly it seems almost too beautiful to be true. This spring night in faraway Japan has something hypnotic, something magnetic.
But it is borne by images of two characters who are pursuing different ideals. Pinkerton is certainly no villain, young, fascinated for the moment by this seemingly fragile woman, but his “Vieni, vieni” is very much coloured by biological desire, while for her this night means much more. It is nothing less than the fulfilment of her dreams. Puccini managed to capture these two extremes and convey them in this love duet. It is said that a masterpiece can be recognised as such by the infinite number of possible interpretations, amongst other things; also by the fact that some of the questions that a performing artist poses of the score and also of performance tradition recur regularly and have to be answered anew with each production, varying with the constellation of those involved. Other questions arise unexpectedly after many years of work, revealing additional levels, details and perspectives; and it is often very difficult to identify a clear favourite passage, because from performance to performance, from life experience to life experience, new passages always come to the fore. For Madama Butterfly, all of these elements apply one hundred percent.
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ASMIK GIGORIAN as CIO-CIO-SAN FREDDIE DE TOMMASO as PINKERTON
ANN-CHRISTINE MECKE
THE VOICE OF A BUTTERFLY EXOTICISM AND PUCCINI’S MUSIC FOR MADAMA BUTTERFLY A WOMAN BETWEEN TWO CULTURES It would be superfluous to pursue the ideas about her that sprang from Pinkerton’s fertile imagination. He undoubtedly enjoyed married life with her, but for reasons that differed from hers. The consul thought how very amusing it seemed. It was just Pinkerton’s style to take this delicate, lively, eager, unformed material and mould it in accordance with his shamelessly droll ideas. John Luther Long, Madame Butterfly In John Luther Long’s short story Madame Butterfly, Lieutenant Pinkerton leaves a contorted woman behind. In her efforts to please her American husband, Cio-Cio-San adopted parts of his behaviour without really understanding them. She makes foolish jokes at the most inappropriate moment, repeats bizarre opinions which Pinkerton had voiced sarcastically at some point, and alternates abruptly between Japanese politeness and Pinkerton’s casual impertinence.
Both the American consul Sharpless and the Japanese marriage broker Goro fluctuate between sympathy, amusement and dismay when they interact with Cio-Cio-San – similar feelings to those of most readers. Even though Long lets his protagonist survive, he leaves us in no doubt that Pinkerton has distorted her into a being unable to be at home in either Japanese or American society. A literary sign of being lost between the two cultures is Cio-Cio-San’s language – a defective English rife with mispronounced Yankee platitudes. In David Belasco’s play based on Long’s story, much of the characterisation of Pinkerton is lost, because the action of the one-acter takes place long after his departure. The audience never sees how the irresponsible lieutenant moulds his “shapeless material”, and there are few hints of how the strange behaviour of the protagonist comes about. Belasco also avoided the ironic undertone of the story, and gave it a tragic ending. In the play Madame Butterfly, Japanese culture plays a dominant role. Cio-Cio-San lives in a house which is typically Japanese, and there is only the tobacco jar left
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behind by Pinkerton, decorated with a paper American flag. When the curtain rises, Cio-Cio-San is offering flowers and rice at a Buddhist house altar. Given the setting, her statement that she lives in a “’merican house” seem absurd. Belasco kept the protagonist’s broken English. While the title figure in the short story clearly does not belong in either of the two cultures, Belasco’s play emphasises the absurdity of her desire to be regarded as an American. When Giacomo Puccini decided to work with his librettists Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa to make an opera of this work (initially just the play, later the short story was included), he faced the task of inventing a musical counterpart not only to the setting of the action but also to the culture and personality of the protagonist.
PUCCINI’S SEARCH FOR JAPANESE SOUNDS Dear Gigi [Illica], I’ve sailed for Japan and will do my best to get there, but a few notes of popular music would have been more interesting than publications on customs and local dress! I looked for and found something like this, but there’s not much and what there is, is sketchy. Sincerely, G. Puccini Torre del Lago, 10 January, 1902 Japanese music was not easy to find in Italy around 1900. As Puccini was not satisfied with the available music, he contacted the Belgian musicologist Gaston Knosp, who was in Viet Nam at the time and was able to help with information on Japanese music. Puccini also met Oyama Hisako, the wife of the Japanese ambassador to Italy, in September
1902. She sang some melodies for him, which he noted down. She also advised the composer about some linguistic errors in the libretto, although this had no effect. Oyama Hisako also obtained recordings of Japanese music for Puccini, although these reached him too late for his work. Other sources of inspiration were performances by the theatre troupe centred on Sada Yacco, which Puccini saw in Milan in early 1902. They gave Puccini an impression not only of music played on original instruments but also of Japanese dance and theatre. In the opinion of musicologist Arthur Groos, the latter had the greatest influence on Madama Butterfly, although this was based on a misunderstanding. The troupe presented severely shortened versions of well-known Kabuki plays, taking into account the ability to accept these of European audiences who neither understood Japanese nor were familiar with the mimic and gestural signs of this form of theatre. There was accordingly little speech in the performances, the action focused on combat, dance and ritual suicide, with the latter arousing particular interest in European audiences. The result was a distorted impression of Japanese theatre. Many European visitors felt it was coarse and primitive and assumed that in Japanese theatre all conflicts led very quickly to a fatal end. When Puccini returned from his visit to Sada Yacco’s troupe, he was convinced of the need to shorten the planned opera drastically and get to the protagonist’s ritual suicide faster. He persisted in the face of protest by his librettists in dropping the planned third act at the American consulate. On 16 November 1902 he wrote to his publisher Giulio Ricordi: “the
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business with the consulate was a serious mistake. The drama has to run to its ending without interruption, hurried along, effective, horrific.” Despite initial difficulties, Puccini was able to gather many Japanese melodies and use them in his score. These were folk songs and similar popular tunes, including the Japanese national anthem Kimi Ga Yo. This is played at the entry of the Japanese Imperial Commissioner. Even better known in Europe was the song Miya Sama (Honoured Prince) which had been made popular in 1885 in the operetta The Mikado by Gilbert and Sullivan. Puccini used it for the entry of Prince Yamadori, which also has elements of comedy. In addition to the collected Japanese motifs, Puccini composed his own melodies and motifs in the style of the Japanese elements. For a long time, the origin of the individual melodies was a topic of musicological research, and the last puzzles were only resolved in 2012. One great surprise was the origin of the motif associated with the seppuku (ritual suicide) of Cio-Cio-San’s father, which is linked several times in the opera with patriarchal power. Previously, it had been assumed that Puccini had modified an unknown Japanese song, but Anthony Sheppard discovered that the composer had learned of this and another melody from a music box. This is a Chinese song.
MUSICAL EXOTICISM The term “exoticism” describes an adaptation of non-European music reduced to the page of musical notation, where the imperfection of the project is the actual characteristic of exoticism. Thomas Betzwieser
Taking as much trouble with the music of a foreign culture as Puccini did with Japanese music was a relatively new development. Over several centuries Western art music had occasionally used “exotic” elements to incorporate a generally “alien” sound in the actual music, regardless of whether the melodies, instruments or harmonies really played a role in the culture portrayed. In an article in the German musical encyclopaedia Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, Michael Stegemann summed up: “any unusual, ‘picturesque’, ‘barbaric’ or ‘primitive’ sound can give a score an ‘exotic’ touch.” “Turkish music” was for long the paradigm of the ‘exotic’, where “Turkish” could be taken to mean any inhabitant of the Ottoman Empire. Thanks to their long establishment in Western music, the characteristics of “alla turca” style can be very clearly described. They include unison passages, repeated notes, rhythmic ostinati and a dominating percussion with specific instruments used to imitate Janissary music. This style had little to do with actual Turkish music, but a lot to do with the impression which Turkish music made on Western audiences and the “wild” behaviour associated with Turks. Such increasingly conventionalised musical characteristics served in opera to designate a place or character in the action as “foreign.” Other settings such as China, South America or India played a marginal role, although these were less specifically characterised by exotic standards such as unison passages or wide leaps of pitch. It was only gradually that an interest emerged in the 19th century in distinguishing “foreign” by individual nationalities, discovering a musical
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“couleur locale.” The Paris World Exposition in 1889 fundamentally changed the relationship with non-European music. Music from remote regions, and particularly the French eastern Asian colonies, was available to Europeans for the first time, and many composers were inspired to incorporate similar sounds, harmonies or melodies in their own works. In this type of musical exoticism, the elements of non-European music were only marginally of interest as signs of the foreignness of a character, a landscape or a situation. Rather, they served as inspiration for expanding musical means of expression. Open fifths, whole tone and pentatonic scales were important elements, explored primarily in musical Impressionism. At the same time, there is growing interest in Japan in western Europe and America. After the imposed opening up of the country to international trade from 1854, not only was there interest among many Japanese for European and American culture, fashion and art, but also enormous growth in Europe in interest in Japanese objets d’art. European artists in particular were inspired by Japanese painting and woodcuts. In the course of Japonism, Japan was also made a setting and cultural phenomenon in opera, for example in Camille Saint-Saëns’ La Princesse jaune (1872), Pietro Mascagni’s Iris (1889), Messager’s Madame Chrysanthème (1893), and Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta The Mikado (1885), which was mentioned earlier. Puccini and his librettists were accordingly by no means pioneers when they started work in 1901 on making an opera of Madama Butterfly. However, Japanese music posed far more problems for European audiences
than the visual arts. For example, the Austrian photographer Raimund von Stillfried, who lived in Japan for a long time and whose portraits of Japanese men and women shaped European perception of the country wrote: “although Japanese music is not beautiful in our terms, we always found that when we were forced to listen for example to a Japanese dance that there were some common features with a Viennese waltz, in that both affected the feet – one, to dance, the other to flee.” There was a corresponding delay in acceptance of Japanese music by European composers, and often Japanese elements were limited to a few melodic quotes or the use of pentatonic and whole tone scales. Mascagni, who was a close competitor of Puccini’s, orchestrated Iris with Japanese instruments like the Japanese lute (shamisen) and Japanese percussion. Puccini also made some use of Japanese instruments, for example using a Japanese glockenspiel in the wedding ceremony. He used bells and tamtam to evoke Japanese sounds, and many pizzicato passages can be seen as an attempt to indicate plucked instruments – koto (Japanese zither) and shamisen. Although Puccini had said on his first encounter with Belasco’s play that this piece contained “the true Japan and not Iris”, he used Japanese music more as raw materials for his work, not to create authenticity in the modern sense. Even the plausibility of the Japanese elements was not a decisive category for him, as shown by the fact that the ambassador’s wife’s linguistic criticisms had no effect on the libretto. The libretto contains numerous corruptions and misunderstandings, the most striking in the course “kami
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sarundasico”, which is meaningless in Japanese, while what was presumably meant (Sarutahiko Okami) is a Shinto god’s name, and not a Buddhist curse.
THE WAY PUCCINI PRESENTS JAPANESE CULTURE Musical exoticism is a process of using music (whether it sounds exotic or not) to evoke a place, people or a society which is not merely imaginary, and which differs from the homeland or domestic culture in terms of attitudes and customs and practices. Ralph P. Locke Puccini’s use of musical exoticism – instruments, sequences of notes and harmonies – has been extensively researched and commented. The American musicologist Ralph P. Locke has pointed out that the presentation of “exotic culture” through music cannot be seen independently from the context of the opera, in other words reduced to the sound. For example, the music with which Butterfly and her girlfriends announce their first entrance is not exotic in the narrower sense of the term. Even so, Butterfly is characterised here as a tender, almost gossamer being, closely tied to her friends and characteristic of the nature of her homeland. It is only in the context of the action (Goro announces the arrival of a “swarm of women”, the women appear with colourful parasols) and the text (“There floats over sea and sky a joyous breath of spring”) that this becomes a characterisation of Japanese femininity which seems to justify the nickname “Butterfly” for the protagonist as much as Pinkerton’s description of his bride as “light as a slender glass […] like a figPrevious pages: SCENE
ure on a painted screen” – which are standard exotic metaphors. “Virtually all Asian femininity is reduced here to a vision of sweetness, as if she had been frozen for the pleasure of a Western gawker” is how Locke summarises the scene. While the musically portrayed delicacy and beauty of the protagonist evokes sympathy for her here (Pinkerton had, after all, previously said he would “damage the wings” of this delicate butterfly if necessary), Puccini has put us in Pinkerton’s position when the other guests appear. They talk so fast at the same time that you can hardly follow what they’re saying. They also repeat musical motifs apparently mechanically, building up harsh dissonances. This leads us to experience the relatives as Pinkerton does, a tiresome mob babbling incomprehensibly. An entirely different aspect of European ideas of Japanese culture is embodied in the entry of “uncle Bonze”, a Buddhist priest from the family, after the wedding ceremony. He announces himself acoustically at first “with strange cries”, and according to the stage directions also looks “strange.” Apart from the sounds of the tamtam, this scene is also free from musical exoticism, although the uncle is presented as extremely foreign. Something else that happens in this scene is that the other relatives – still babbling – instantly follow the uncle’s judgement, join in the ritual shunning, screaming “Oh!” and leaving the festivities. This makes them look like a foreign group, acting archaically without any exotic chords or scales. Pinkerton immediately talks of Cio-Cio-San’s tribù (tribe), which seems entirely logical – this is how they are described in the opera.
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PINKERTON IS ALSO A FOREIGNER Pinkerton is a comic figure, an ugly mix of national chauvinism and predatory sexuality. Susan Macclary When looking critically at exotic tendencies in Madama Butterfly, we should not forget that Lieutenant Pinkerton also belonged to a foreign culture for Puccini and his initial Italian audiences. Just as the Japanese official is presented to the Japanese national anthem, The Star-Spangled Banner – now the American national anthem, and the official anthem of the US Navy at the time of the opera’s creation – is played when the United States are mentioned, naturally scored in the style of a brass band. Puccini was explicitly attracted by the presentation of the two foreign worlds of Japan and America, and this was not least why an act was planned which was set in the American consulate. While working, Puccini wrote to Ricordi that he was trying “to have Mister F. B. [sic] Pinkerton sing like an American as far as possible.” In the libretto for his first aria “Dovunque al mondo” Pinkerton equates the conquest of foreign countries with the conquest of women. He frankly describes the “Yankee” goal in life as pleasure, business and plucking “flowers of every shore”, and then directly applies this statement to himself. In his notes, Puccini describes this aria in ¾ time as a “Boston waltz”, which emphasises Pinkerton’s craving for pleasure and shows Puccini’s intention of using “typical national music” in the broadest sense. The fact that Pinkerton interrupts his own entrance aria for the casual ques-
tion which of two typical American beverages he should have served to his guest has a comical aspect – Pinkerton seems not to be at home in either Japan or in opera as a genre. His seductive skills are also anything but subtle. He interrupts his wife four times in the duet with an impatient “vieni!” (“Come!”) while she is gazing at the starry heavens. At the same time he uses musical means to force her to continue singing in a higher key, evoking the ecstasy of a love duet. Musicologist McClary concludes, “Puccini portrays Lieutenant Pinkerton as an unmistakable boor. In addition, the other characters describe him as a boor, and ultimately he admits his boorishness himself. He resorts to the most shameless expressions of American patriotism and even wraps himself in The Star-Spangled Banner to justify his imperialistic exploitation of the Japanese in general and Cio-Cio-San in particular.” We should not make the mistake of thinking that in the spirit of the times Puccini and his collaborators would have basically felt otherwise about Pinkerton. The librettists were so critical of the fact that the tenor has such a churlish entrance in act 1 that they pushed for giving him more weight in act 3 than Belasco had done in his play. Illica wrote to Ricordi in 1901, “As support for my statement, consider the situation of the tenor! Woe! Forget it! Pinkerton is unlikeable!” In a later argument shortly before the world première, when the librettist Giacosa was disappointed that Puccini had not set several lines he had written for Pinkerton, Ricordi described Pinkerton as “an American good-for-nothing. He is nervous, afraid of Butterfly, of meeting his wife … and
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retreats.” However, a completely unlikeable tenor who absconds without an exit aria clashed too much with the conventions of Italian opera, and in the revisions after the disastrous world première Pinkerton was given his penitent but still egocentric aria “Addio, fiorito asil.”
A COMEDY OF FAILED ASSIMILATION? The opening scenes of act 2 in which Butterf ly is repeatedly embarrassed leave the protagonist with little prospect of a successful future as Mrs B. F. Pinkerton. Even so, these little scenes also set a framework for Cio-Cio-San’s struggle to escape the prison of Orientalism. Arthur Groos How does the opera present the abandoned Cio-Cio-San in act 2, where her characterisation takes up most space in both the underlying short story and Belasco’s one-acter? The play’s text contains numerous moments ranging from irritating to comical which show how little progress Cio-Cio-San has made in mastering the American culture. Many of these are retained in the opera’s libretto – Arthur Groos describes this aspect of the libretto as a “comedy of failed assimilation.” For example, Cio-Cio-San says at the beginning of act 2 that “the American god” would certainly be powerful, but perhaps did not know where she lives, so could not help her. Illica also included slapstick in the libretto. Immediately after she welcomes the consul to her “American home”, the consul grotesquely falls over a Japanese ottoman. Cio-Cio-San has her servant prepare a pipe for the
visitor, and takes a puff herself first – at which the consul declines the pipe. The libretto also describes Cio-Cio-San as naïve or even childish. She seems unable to grasp or even repeat abstract terms such as “ornithology.” And she seems unable to distinguish between fantasy and reality, she is so caught up in her thoughts. Her reactions are erratic, she shifts “wildly” between childish joy, sorrow and rage. Puccini’s music confirms these elements in part. For example, we hear “Japanese” music when Cio-Cio-San is trying to present herself as an American. She is addressed as “Madama Butterfly” twice in the opera, and both times she corrects this to “Madama Franklin Pinkerton”, while her corrections are accompanied by the Japanese melody O-Edo Nishinbashi (“The Nishinbashi bridge in Edo”), as if the music is expressing her Japanese roots. During the short pipe scene Miya Sama is played, which (as noted earlier) was well established in Europe as Japanese music. Her voice is particularly important in establishing Cio-Cio-San’s character. Even at the first casual encounter, Sharpless is fascinated by the “mystery of that voice”, recognising the true love in it. We in the audience also come into contact through Butterfly’s voice with her inner life, which is far more complex than a traditional image of an exotic woman would permit. In his short conversation with Pinkerton, Sharpless emphasises universal human feelings, chiding the lieutenant for comparing his wife with an insect. Her voice enables Sharpless to empathise with the unfamiliar, regardless of all cultural differences – it’s not for nothing that he says he only heard
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THE VOICE OF A BUTTERFLY
her, but didn’t see her. Simply the fact that she expresses herself in great arias raises her above the “little Madame Butterfly”, as she is still described in many guides to opera today. However, it takes a while for Puccini to give her this opportunity. While Pinkerton introduces himself with an aria in act 1, Cio-Cio-San is first introduced as a solo voice in a women’s chorus, and she subsequently answers questions and requests from the European men. It is only later that she reveals more of herself, in conversation with Pinkerton. Finally, “Butterfly’s attempt to construct a Western identity culminated in her first approximation of an aria in the Western style,” as Arthur Groos puts it. In “Io seguo il mio destino” Cio-Cio-San tells of her conversion to Christianity. At the climax “Amore mio” the stage directions have her holding back “as if she was afraid to be heard by the relatives.” At this moment the (originally Chinese) motif sounds in the orchestra, that first appeared at the mention of her father’s fate. In this way the music again expresses the conflict between Cio-CioSan’s desired identity as an American and her “original culture.” At the same time Puccini lets us feel impressively the risk that Cio-Cio-San has taken with this step. The identification of the music with the protagonist is much stronger in her great aria “Un bel dì” in act 2. First, however, we should remember that Cio-Cio-San trained as a geisha and has learned how to entertain men with acting and conversation. In many situations there is at least the possibility of regarding Cio-Cio-San’s behaviour as part of a carefully designed production. In particular, the emphatically “child-
like” behaviour in act 1, the “baby voice” she is supposed to sing in, the guessing game about her age and her comment “I’m already old!” could come from her repertoire as a geisha. In act 2 Cio-Cio-San plays three scenes which are presented explicitly as such. Besides “Un bel dì” there is a scene before the American divorce judge which she stages for Sharpless, Yamadori and Goro, and the monologue about her future as a singing and dancing beggar in the streets of Nagasaki, which she formally addresses to her son, but which is actually meant for Sharpless. In addition to these scenes explicitly marked as acted, there are other situations in which Cio-Cio-San seems at least to be playing as an actress – in her negotiations with Yamadori and finally her suicide, which she stages so that Pinkerton must discover her either dying or dead. The uncertainty over how far CioCio-San’s statements about herself are calculated for their effect on the listeners extends over the entire piece, in which the protagonist is only alone on the stage for a brief moment directly before her suicide. Even “Un bel dì” is not a monologue – Cio-Cio-San is presenting a vivid vision of her future for her servant Suzuki, who no longer believes that Pinkerton will return. Cio-Cio-San begins her little dramatic scene with the command “Listen!” and ends with “All this will happen, I promise you”, and it is entirely conceivable that this scene is a regular ritual for the women to shore up their morale during the waiting. The aria’s structure parallels Pinkerton’s “Dovunque al mondo.” This is also the first aria in the act, it is in the same key and time, and both arias describe a voyage. The lyrics for Cio-Cio-San’s
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THE VOICE OF A BUTTERFLY
great solo number point again to her erratic, infantile character. As in the underlying texts, she loses herself entirely in her imagination, picturing a childish hide-and-seek, although only “partly to tease and partly not to die at our first meeting.” Puccini makes this phrase – which occurs in neither the short story nor the play – a dramatic climax, so that the emotional music makes the coquettish remark an actual possibility. While John Luther Long, the author of the short story, takes a distant view of Cio-Cio-San’s fantasy, and even David Belasco makes a comic scene of how she imagines her husband’s arrival for her servant, Puccini leads the listener into the protagonist’s dream. Like her vague gaze at the sea, the music starts in soft high strings and winds and the harp. It is only with the words “e poi la nave appare” (“and then the ship appears”) that
the music takes on a solid foundation. The warship’s salute is heard in the music, together with the reminder of Pinkerton’s promise to return next spring. As a result, it is almost impossible to follow Cio-Cio-San’s dream with aloof amusement, and not to empathise with her in listening. In this way, Puccini closes the apparently unbridgeable gulf “between the cultures” that the protagonists in the underlying texts have fallen into. There are typical musical exotica such as pentatonic scales and unison passages, but these are integrated into Puccini’s harmonically expanded tonal language. Cio-Cio-San speaks the same language as Puccini’s other heroines. Her feelings and fantasies are no more foreign to us than those of Floria Tosca, Manon Lescaut or Sister Angelica.
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Following pages: SCENE
GI ACOMO PUCCIN I TO CA M ILLO BON DI A F T ER T H E DISA ST ROUS WOR L D PR EM I ÈR E , 1 8 F E B RUA RY, 1 9 0 4
“WITH SORROWFUL BUT UNBOWED HEAD I HAVE TO TELL YOU THAT I WAS LYNCHED. THESE CANNIBALS DIDN’T LISTEN TO A SINGLE NOTE. WHAT A FRIGHTFUL, HATE-BESOTTED ORGY OF INSANITY! BUT MY BUTTERFLY REMAINS WHAT IT IS: THE MOST HEARTFELT, EXPRESSIVE OPERA I HAVE EVER WRITTEN.”
OLIVER LÁNG
MADAMA BUTTERFLY AT THE VIENNA STATE OPERA The year is 1910. The German translation of John Luther Long’s Butterfly novella is published for the first time. The young Viennese writer Marianne Trebisch-Stein has carefully translated it from English. In her foreword, she enthuses about the “colourful, lively images” of the original, and the reader is also presented with the western, conventional image of Japan. We learn, among other things, that “family means much more there than here,” and: “Japanese women very rarely cry.” And for those particularly interested, there is a glossary at the end of the book with brief explanations of Japanese culture, from Musume to Fusuma. But the perception of Japan in Vienna has now become more acute and multi-layered, reinforced by the highly publicised Russo-Japanese War. While some still cling to the conventional image, for example at folk festivals à la Japan, others firmly resist a clichéd portrayal of the country. The liberal Viennese newspaper Zeit was outraged by the kitschy depictions: “the Japanese, the real people, not the Japanese SONYA YONCHEVA as CIO-CIO-SAN
on stage, are vexed by this theatrical Japan, which for all of Europe, with the exception of a few connoisseurs, is the only real Japan. One must ask oneself how it is that this operetta Japan has so completely displaced the real Japan in the European consciousness.” However, in 1910 interest in the translation of the novella remains modest; by now, Butterfly means Puccini, and the Viennese have been familiar with this Butterfly for some time. Starting in 1900, newspapers begin to circulate information that slowly becomes more specific about a corresponding opera by the composer; from 1902, people in Vienna have exact knowledge of this piece. The première in Milan in February 1904 is followed with great interest, and reports of the première’s failure are very detailed. “Puccini repeated himself musically,” says the Neue Freie Presse, “the motifs of his Madama Butterfly can all be found in his earlier operas, and it is not without reason that on the evening of the performance a voice from one of the box seats called out: “this is musical humbug!” Never-
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OLIVER LÁNG
theless, reports on the work continue to appear, commenting on developments and international performances. Just over two years later, in early 1907 it is Gustav Mahler – incidentally not a declared fan of Puccini – who tries to obtain the rights to the German première for the Vienna Court Opera. But Berlin has already secured the rights, and it takes until autumn of that year for Ricordi publishing house to send a performance permit and an official translation of the opera. The Austrian censors raise no objections, and Mahler, who was absent from the première, even invites the composer to the final rehearsals. The Viennese newspapers have much to say about this: about Puccini’s arrival in Vienna, about his arrival at the hotel, about his visits to the Court Opera, about the preparations. Then the première takes place: successful, cheered, although the reviews give an indication of some displeasure on the part of the critics. Julius Korngold, for example, sums up his detailed review in the Neue Freie Presse by saying that Madama Butterfly is less of an everlasting masterpiece than a “long, temporary marriage.” But that is still quite tame, as one reads in other daily newspapers that Puccini is only a “half-caste dramatist”, that he uses the “cheapest ploys” to create atmosphere; people talk of “maudlin sentimentalism” and “strange shrill sounds”, but also of “sophisticated music” and “gripping arias”: praise and criticism in equal measure. In keeping with review practice of the day, the opera, including the plot, is discussed in detail, with less focus on musical interpretation, and this despite the fact that soprano Selma Kurz, not only artistically impeccable but also a
darling of the salons, has stepped in to sing the title role. She plays the role with large gestures, bordering on the melodramatic – which, despite all the praise, is also criticised: where is the playfulness, the gracefulness? The rest of the cast for the première reveals, incidentally, the breadth of the repertoire of singers of that time: tenor Hermann Maikl plays Pinkerton. At that time, he was covering the major Mozart roles at the Court Opera, the Italian repertoire from Verdi to Puccini, and also Richard Wagner. Vienna’s first Sharpless is sung by Friedrich Weidemann, who was also seen in Vienna around this time as Wotan, Hans Sachs, Don Giovanni, Ford, Marcello and Wolfram. They all receive good reviews, and the stage design by Alfred Roller (with the collaboration of Anton Brioschi) also seems beyond reproach. It is a “repertoire spectacular”, one reads even before the première, “all the poetry of Japanese flowers and trinkets is on display.” Act 1 shimmers in pastel colours, with Pinkerton’s house on the left and blue mountain silhouettes in the background. Act 2 reveals the room, parallel to the fore-stage, with clean lines, finely chiselled naturalism everywhere and an attempt to capture the “essence” of the Japanese as realistically as possible. The floral element determines this aesthetic: “The huge trunks of the cherry trees should be mentioned in particular; their crowns, covered all over with blossoms, rise more than four metres high and are a work of art worth seeing in themselves. Added to this is the abundance of Japanese lilies, georgias, pelargoniums and many other flowers, which [...] are worked in the most lifelike way and executed in lavish splendour, forming an
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MADAMA BUTTERFLY AT THE VIENNA STATE OPERA
effective framework for the lively action on stage,” according to a contemporary report. Not only Roller’s stage designs have been preserved, but also detailed drawings of the props: vases, lanterns, dishes. Heinrich Lefler’s costumes also reflect a flawless little Japan, from the wooden sandals, the getas, to the kimonos resplendent in all colours. Only rarely is there mention of August Stoll, who was responsible for the staging of this first performance. Francesco Spetrino, the conductor for Italian repertoire at the Court Opera, conducts the first evening and is the first of generations of famous names. Bruno Walter will often conduct the opera later, but also Franz Schalk, Clemens Krauss, Josef Krips and Rudolf Moralt, and in the second half of the century Dimitri Mitropoulos, Herbert von Karajan, Armin Jordan, Georges Prêtre, Giuseppe Patanè, Marcello Viotti and Fabio Luisi. In the wake of the 1907 première, however, one also reads downright colonialist disdain: “Japanese imports represent a kind of yellow peril for Western art, with the addiction our musicians, painters and poets have for imitation. Foreignness, this German hereditary defect, leads to an overestimation of the foreign and a disregard for the indigenous. Without being immodest, we dare to say that the Japanese, as highly developed as their skills are, can still learn more from us than we can from them. They are clever enough to see that for themselves.” – And unfortunately, this is written by a well-known and otherwise commendable cultural journalist by the name of Max Kalbeck. Whatever the reviews of the Vienna première say: the opera is not just a hit
with audiences, but immediately becomes a popular repertoire piece. The 50th performance of Butterfly takes place already in May 1909, the 100th in 1913. Nevertheless, there is a break in performances from 1915 onwards, which only ends with the revival in 1920 – the stage production is directed by Erich von Wymetal. From then on, not a year passes in which the opera is not performed. After the opera house was destroyed in the Second World War, the opera was performed in June 1945 at the Volksoper, the opera house’s temporary quarters. Wymetal directs again for the revival. The opera was performed 31 times in 1945 alone, and with very few exceptions it has been performed every year from then on. 1957 saw just the second première of Madama Butterfly at the Vienna State Opera. It takes place in the flurry of burgeoning enthusiasm for Karajan’s direction, direction that sees operas performed in the original language (a novelty in Vienna!) and encourages the recruitment of singers from around the world. This switch to “internationally renowned performers” is also evident at this première: Giuseppe Zampieri as Pinkerton and Rolando Panerai as Sharpless are the very artists who had made their State Opera début with Karajan in the famous Lucia di Lammermoor guest performance at La Scala the previous year. Sena Jurinac in the title role represents the opera house’s ensemble admirably and receives high praise from the Viennese critics. And the music becomes the defining element of the evening. Several of the reviewers come up with a – from today’s perspective unexpected – vindication of Puccini and stress that
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MADAMA BUTTERFLY AT THE VIENNA STATE OPERA
he is an essential music dramatist, but also emphasise that it is precisely a conductor like Dimitri Mitropoulos who can offer a completely new, true view of the work. Josef Gielen’s production, on the other hand, is labelled conventional. The fact that Tsugouharu Foujita, a leading visual artist, is brought on board meets with surprisingly little reaction. What is more, some people are vexed by the realism of the stage design. “They show every detail, and because it comes from a Japanese artist, it’s probably completely authentic. But authenticity doesn’t equal beauty, and the theatre isn’t a museum. A stage designer such as Sepp Hintermoser would never have created such realistic designs (which is not important), but perhaps something with more atmosphere and
poetry, more taste. And that would have been worth a lot.” (Herbert Schneiber, Kurier). But what neither the management, the leading team nor the singers could have guessed on opening night: the production will define the Viennese view of the work for many decades to come. This Butterfly has been on the State Opera’s schedule around 400 times in more than six decades. It is not until September 2020, as the opening première for the new opera house director Bogdan Roščić, that a different view of the work was presented with the work of Anthony Minghella and Carolyn Choa. The fact that the new music director Philippe Jordan conducted the première series underscored the importance of this special evening.
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ASMIK GIGORIAN as CIO-CIO-SAN
BORIS PINKHASOVICH as SHARPLESS
SERGIO MORABITO
THE MASKS OF MADAME BUTTERFLY “I’m so often disappointed by Butterfly … what I mean is, I usually see it played by huge women in so much bad makeup …” – “Bad makeup is not unique to the West.” – “But who can believe them?” – “And you believe me?” – “Absolutely. You were utterly convincing.” A French diplomat tries to explain to a Beijing Opera singer his enthusiasm about her performance of the suicide scene in Butterfly, as “Here was a Butterfly with little or no voice – but she had the grace, the delicacy. I believed this girl. I believed her suffering. I wanted to take her in my arms – she was so delicate, even I could protect her.” Premièred in 1988, David Henry Wang’s play M. Butterfly sets this dialogue in the German embassy in Beijing in 1960. The play is based on the real case of a consular official who had an extramarital affair with a Beijing Opera performer who played female roles and succeeded in keeping his lover in the dark about his gender for 20 years. We need not concern ourselves here with the point of the play, which is seeing the
protagonist’s dream woman embodied in a man. It is, however, remarkable that the very dimension which is decisive in an Italian opera – the vocal aspect – has to be reined in here so that the imagined figure combines all the desires of the (Western) male in a “delicate Asian female.” Does Wang’s play put its finger on the laughable contradiction of this opera, which on the one hand anticipates the aesthetic of the talkies and on the other hand fails to meet its own attempt at an illusion of reality? In the scene where Butterfly introduces herself, the authors raise this to the level of a theatrical paradox. To end the silence after the enquiry of the two Americans about the geisha’s father, Sharpless asks the bride how old she is. With almost childlike flirtatiousness, Butterfly invites him to guess. Sharpless guesses ten (!), after a hint from Butterfly he doubles this to 20, but Butterfly corrects this to 15. With a touch of malice, she adds “I’m already old!”
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The opera’s act 1 repeatedly evokes the image of a child bride. At the same time, the image vacillates between naïveté and sophistication. The two variants of her professional name – “Madame Butterfly” is the translation of “CioCio-San” – point to the dual identity of the female lead. We can assume that she adopted this name in the course of her training as a geisha1, or it was given to her as a stage name 2; we do not learn her real name in the course of the opera. Cio-Cio-San has been trained as a geisha, trained to entertain a man not only through her conversation but also through song, dance and mime. CioCio-San’s act – the act of the character shown but also of the performer herself – is perceived as excessively artificial rather than natural. “Certo costei m’ha coll’ingenue arti invescato,” as Pinkerton admits, the geisha has him “captivated with her innocent arts” – the arts may be “innocent”, but they are not natural. Sharpless then talks about “quella divina mite vocina.” He speaks of hearing Butterfly’s “mild voice” when she visited the consulate the previous day, but he also calls it “divine”, which is itself a pun by the librettists on “diva.” And it is Butterfly’s child-like speech and behaviour which inflame Pinkerton, although his words do not necessarily mean that he is confusing this adopted behaviour with reality: “Con quel fare di bambola quando parla m’infiamma.” Can we assume that Sharpless is not actually asking about the age of the performer, but – accepting the geisha’s performance – about the age of the character she is presenting? In Japan, women were banned from pursuing a stage career for centuries for reasons of public morality, and in some
disciplines such as Noh plays this has largely persisted up to the present day. Kabuki also allowed only male performers from 1629. Female performers were forced into the subculture of the red-light district, where they could as geishas perform scenes of the Kabuki repertoire in tea houses or private parties. It was only with the start of Japan’s opening to the world in the Meiji period (1868-1912) that women made it onto the public stage, although initially there was a division between male and female troupes. Sada Yacco (1871-1946) trained not only as a geisha but also as an equestrian and judoka, and preferred to appear in pants parts and fight scenes, rather than shameful female roles. In 1893 she married the agitator and entertainer Otojiro Kawakami, whose amateur theatre caused a furore in Japan with period pieces, extravaganzas and melodramas in a naturalistic, Western-oriented style. This also followed a cultural policy task of the Meiji period, of beating the West at its own game. For an American tour in 1899 Kawakami arranged sequences of the classic Kabuki repertoire, focusing on their spectacular aspects and shortening them to fit the Western idea of an evening at the theatre. His wife Sada Yacco became an overnight star, travelling the world in the following years, and not least appearing in Milan in 1902, inspiring Giacomo Puccini to compose Madama Butterfly (a role which she later added to her own repertoire). The fact that Sada Yacco succeeded internationally in tragic love-lorn female roles rather than her favourite fighting and action roles, was due to the need to adapt to Western conventions and audience demands. This shows that the
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emancipation of the female performers was tied to the fixation on their biological gender, including in the eyes of the spectators. The fact that women were subsequently preferred as performers of female roles in Japan as well was not necessarily due to their artistic skills, but to the Western paradigm of naturalism, which has a certain sexist element. Sada Yacco saw her successors reach a level of exhibitionism in the role of Wilde’s Salome that she had no wish to compete with. The back and forth here between Western and Eastern theatre makers makes clear the need to be more careful with questions of authenticity than is currently the case, at least where the performing arts are concerned. However, as much as we as theatre people need to fight for gender and ethnic equity in social relationships, including in our own institutions, we still need to avoid the mistake of applying standards of authenticity to the makeup for a piece of theatre which take no account of the circumstances. Puccini’s Butterfly and Sada Yacco’s career both show that (and how) all theatrical arts juggle with accessories, quotes and gestures from the most diverse and heterogeneous sources. The cultures and traditions of all ages and locations are a cornucopia they help themselves from shamelessly. They twist and distort their finds to misinterpret them creatively. In this way they create the craziest and most ludicrous makeup styles which preserve the image and expression of painful human bondage and inequality, but which evade any unambiguous claim to reality. Today, these images and expressive media can neither be reproduced nor sanitised, but
only made to speak through considered display. We can distinguish between two strategies for a creative approach to an opera. First, there is a “literary” approach, following components which can be interpreted realistically, and trying to rationalise the action through a simulation of reality which the cinema has standardised for us – an apparently appropriate approach with Puccini, which ties in with the Hollywood moments in his dramas. Second, there is a “subversive” approach which joins with the assumed fixed meanings of the text in a game which seeks with relish to topple or even reverse the reflected relationships of strength and power. Examples of these alternative strategies are two of the cinematic versions of Madama Butterfly. One uses the conventional format of opera in film – Frédéric Mitterand’s 1995 Madame Butterfly has two Chinese women in the roles of CioCio-San and Suzuki and was filmed in northern Africa, with pieces of Japanese sets in natural panoramas. This created a simulated authenticity which tries to permanently conceal its own artificiality. The filming falls into the same trap of authenticity as the protagonist of Wang’s play. For the sake of an ”ethnic validation” of Madama Butterfly, it is necessary to ignore its artificial nature. It is clear that the debate about authenticity, with its ideology of originality and naturalness which forces it to deny its own synthetic efforts, is the greatest manipulation of all. The other film was made by JeanPierre Ponnelle in 1974 using genuinely theatrical techniques and would be more properly described as a filmed opera, as it not only cheerfully presents the artificiality of the genre and its de-
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sign principles, but even makes them a focal point. Unlike Mitterand, Ponnelle not only uses a conventional format but – like every real work of art – introduces his own distortion of reality. The film places Butterfly’s house in a bare and even sparse studio reproduction of a moor setting. In this no-man’sland with its constant mist, remote from all realistic coordinates, the butterfly catcher Pinkerton is on the hunt for pleasure – a charming, gum-chewing fellow who looks as good in a t-shirt as in a naval officer’s uniform. But the diva celebrating her eternal love degrades the tenor lead to an intellectually and emotionally overwhelmed prince consort who becomes a focus for her desires and fantasies. In a way it is Cio-Cio-San herself who creates the theatrical dream worlds of the piece and her changing identities from child bride to American housewife, from Italian mother to tragic heroine. With a few masterly touches to Pinkerton’s costume and makeup, Ponnelle transforms the clothes-horse figure for his return at the end as an everyday figure devastatingly punished by the diva’s suicide for his demonstrated inability to fulfil Butterfly’s dream of love. Ponnelle’s interpretation reveals the unusual compulsion with which the protagonist relegates all the other characters to peripheral status. Such a focus on the prima donna had been unknown in Italian opera since the days of Giuditta Pasta, the great Rossini inter-
preter and muse of Bellini, in the “primo ottocento”, the early decades of the 19th century. Norma (1831) was the last opera in which the female title role had dominated the action to a comparable extent. Since then, the opera world had seen the rise of the tenor legend. The fact that Puccini made no use of this in Butterfly was assumed to be one of the reasons for the fiasco of the 1904 world première in Milan, which motivated Puccini to “ennoble” Pinkerton’s forenames in the revised version (“Francis Blummy” became “Benjamin Franklin”) and to add an exit aria, which still barely hides the fact that Pinkerton only makes intermittent appearances, however powerful. The theatre has always taken a prankish approach to hierarchies and powers, turning them on their head. In this case, the target is the “favourite fantasy of the Western male”, the “submissive Asian female and the dominating white male”, as defined in Wang’s M. Butterfly. It is indicative that the librettists have turned all the manipulation by Pinkerton that Butterfly was subjected to in J. L. Long’s short story into autonomous decisions and actions by their heroine (for example, taking his name, or converting to Christianity). Puccini’s presumably familiar Butterfly should not be confused with her Orientalist interpretation but should be seen as an invitation to liberate and explore her unexhausted and inexhaustible potential dramatically in constantly new and constantly surprising ways.
1 For her training, a young woman becomes the apprentice of an older “big sister”, adopt ing a geisha name which mostly has the same root as her mentor. 2 To the present day the ceremonial bestowal of a stage name, which is done publicly, is one of the pinnacles of the Kabuki theatre’s year, and it attracts a particularly large audience. The ritualistic applause of a Kabuki performer by the audience is mostly done by calling out their stage name.
Following pages: PUPPET ARTISTS TOM YANG as SOLOIST ASMIK GRIGORIAN as CIO-CIO-SAN VIRGINIE VERREZ as SUZUKI
IMPRINT GIACOMO PUCCINI
MADAMA BUTTERFLY SEASON 2024/25 PREMIÈRE OF THE PRODUCTION 7 SEPTEMBER 2020 Publisher WIENER STAATSOPER GMBH, Opernring 2, 1010 Wien Director DR. BOGDAN ROŠČIĆ Music Director PHILIPPE JORDAN Administrative Director DR. PETRA BOHUSLAV General Editors SERGIO MORABITO, ANDREAS LÁNG AND OLIVER LÁNG based on the program booklet of the Vienna State Opera for the première of the 2020 production Design & concept EXEX Layout & typesetting MIWA MEUSBURGER Printed by PRINT ALLIANCE HAV PRODUKTIONS GMBH, BAD VÖSLAU TEXT & IMAGE REFERENCES The synopsis and the texts by Philippe Jordan, Ann-Christine Mecke, Sergio Morabito and Oliver Láng were original contributions for the program booklet of the 2020 première. IMAGE REFERENCES Cover image: Alfred Eisenstaedt / Getty Images. Cover image concept: Martin Conrads, Berlin. Performance photos: Michael Pöhn / Wiener Staatsoper GmbH. ENGLISH TRANSLATION Andrew Smith. Reproduction only with approval of Wiener Staatsoper GmbH / Dramaturgy. Holders of rights who were unavailable regarding retrospect compensation are requested to make contact.
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