The process of orientalizing the musical context for Madama Butterfly began almost immediately after rapidly rising celebrity maestro Giacomo Puccini had seen the London remount of New York playwright/impresario David Belasco’s Broadway sensation, Madame Butterfly: A Tragedy of Japan, in July 1900.
Research and creative development would preoccupy him for the better part of four years.
Two prominent visitors to Europe from the Far East, the celebrated geisha turned kabuki actress Sada Yacco and Isako Oyama, wife of the Japanese ambassador to Rome, spent long hours with Puccini, sharing firsthand knowledge, sketching cultural differences, regaling him with traditional songs. The Milan offices of superagent/publisher Giulio Ricordi, the man responsible for stage managing and mass marketing the bulk of Puccini’s career, was further enlisted to order some of the earliest examples of cutting edge Victor Talking Machine wax cylinders from Tokyo, an invaluable source of authentic musical insight, however limited the supply.
The task of developing a new musical mode of expression, recognizably Italianate yet colourfully exotic, proved taxing in the extreme. Puccini would write five versions of Madama Butterfly, a compositional undertaking dramatically at odds with earlier works; Manon Lescault, La bohème and Tosca among them — the latter two both penned by unflappable Butterfly librettists Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa. The 1904 La Scala premiere was a disaster. Re-emerging from a sweeping rewrite shortly thereafter in sleeker, more comprehensive 3-act form, the budding verismo classic fared significantly better when presented in Brescia. Still Puccini was dissatisfied. Shipped to the Metropolitan Opera in 1906, transplanted to Paris a year later with yet another round of minor detailing to come, Madama Butterfly finally settled into posterity.
And a long, often hostile history of controversy.
A tale of victimization and abandonment, a shockingly young geisha forced by crushing circumstance into a sham marriage with a feckless American naval officer, Madama Butterfly still startles and horrifies. The accusations of egregious emotional manipulation, the perception of socially justified misogyny made all the more acute today by decades of relentless battles for women’s rights have failed to blunt its turn of the century edginess. The controversy here is not about contemporary political alignment. It is about clarity of expression, the upholding of fundamental humanitarian values, the vital prosecution of a ceaseless struggle on the part of the powerless and the oppressed for dignity and survival as expressed on the international opera stage.
A number of singularly venturesome companies, primarily in the US, have responded to the increasingly troubling issue of ethnocentricity and chauvinism deeply embedded in Puccini’s overwhelmingly Romantic dramma per musica — call it the Butterfly factor — with a variety of often startling approaches to art design and production in a pressing attempt to address the ongoing contentious debate.
Cincinnati Opera presented the work as the product of a video gamer’s overactive imagination, donning a VR headset to become B. F. Pinkerton. Boston Lyric Opera set the piece partly in a seedy 1940s San Francisco nightclub, partly in a Japanese internment camp. Opera Philadelphia elected to showcase Cio-Cio San as a Bunraku-style puppet, real life soprano posted nearby. New Orleans Opera chose to rewrite Illica and Giacosa’s bluntly genderized ending, banishing the notion of seppuku to allow Butterfly to flee, her child clutched tightly in her arms.
The Canadian Opera Company’s response to operatic renovation is infinitely more guarded. The Madama Butterfly currently on stage at the Four Seasons Centre essentially avoids any hint of radical performative reinvention in favour of a single, fleeting textual change elevating Cio-Cio San’s self-confessed age from 15 to 18. In a single stroke of the editor’s blue pencil, Revival Director Jordan Lee Braun —Michael Grandage originating the production in 2010 for Houston Grand Opera —effectively clears the pre-existing theatrical atmosphere of its ghastly air of pedophilia while, at the same time, leaving us somewhat adrift in terms of characterization. Deprived of an impressionable adolescent prone to extravagant fantasy, our attention promptly shifts to a more mature, more worldly wise Cio-Cio San — she will be 21 when Pinkerton ultimately returns — her need to believe her own overpowering, self-assumed narrative, fractured by the stark reality of her helplessness, a bitter half-hidden fact of life never quite overlooked.
The actorly demands at play here are enormous. Appearing as Puccini’s doomed principal, soprano Eri Nakamura undertakes the challenge with great spirit and determination only occasionally missing her theatrical footing particularly evident in her notably reticent, almost pinched rendering of Puccini’s glowing anthem to precious dreams, Un bel di (“One fine day”).
While Nakamura’s performance occasionally falters — substantially more assured in her final appearances in Act III — set design and deployment consistently disappoint
È la dimora frivola… È una casa a soffieto, (“So this ridiculous litte place… Is a concertina house”), Pinkerton remarks of his alien love nest; Goro, meddling, predatory marriage broker splendidly inhabited by tenor Julius Ahn, on hand to finalize rental arrangements. A moveable wall of multiple shoji screens. Inside turned outside. Outside brought indoors. A shifting, mutable dwelling, unfamiliar and confusing to a Westerner. But the conceit, clever and revelatory at first, soon grows tiresome, the same wall sliding back and forth scene after scene, always assuming the same configuration, always producing the same dramatically innocuous effect. Designer Christopher Oram’s immense creaky rotating hilltop garden only adds to an over-riding sense of profoundly exasperating physical disorientation.
Thankfully, singing is greatly more centred.
Tenor Kang Wang is a fine, ringing Pinkerton, bass-baritone Michael Sumuel, a warm, engaging Sharpless. Mezzo-soprano Hyona Kim contributes an excellent Suzuki, consistently vocally and dramatically on point. Baritone Gene Wu, all plainspoken monk’s robes and hefty staff, sings a robust Bonze, his confrontation with Pinkerton ablaze with moral outrage. Fellow baritone Samuel Chan sings a shining, unexpectedly vulnerable Prince Yamadori. 5-year old Naleya Sayavong captivates and charms as Cio-Cio San’s precious Sorrow — purposeful, focused, delightfully still.
Singing from the wings, the men and women of the Canadian Opera Company Chorus grace the evening with a lovely, tranquil rendition of Puccini’s sublime Humming Chorus.
The Canadian Opera Company Orchestra, sensitively led by visiting conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson, plays with glorious, inexhaustible emotion; strings and woodwinds, whispers and tears; brass, honed steel and desperation; taiko-tuned percussion, the heartbeat of a broken world.