La Scala: Madama Butterfly

[Il Grande Inquisitor]

I was lucky enough to be invited to review the prima of La Scala's season last week, a new production of Madama Butterfly. Riccardo Chailly presented the original 1904 version of the score in a gorgeous production by Alvis Hermanis.

Hopefully my review (below) will whet a few appetites for the RAI broadcast, which can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ve82p1YRBg

https://bachtrack.com/review-madama-butterfly-chailly-hermanis-siri-hymel-scala-milan-december-2016

[gradus]

This production was broadcast on R3 yesterday and is as stated above the original 2 act version from 1904; fascinating to hear the differences and what was discarded.

[bluestateprommer]

I was lucky enough to be invited to review the prima of La Scala's season last week, a new production of Madama Butterfly. Riccardo Chailly presented the original 1904 version of the score in a gorgeous production by Alvis Hermanis.

Hopefully my review (below) will whet a few appetites for the RAI broadcast, which can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ve82p1YRBg

https://bachtrack.com/review-madama-...-december-2016

Thanks for your review; sounds as though it was worth the trip. However, it would have been the easiest and most narratively logical thing to slot the proper name of "Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton" in place of "Sir Francis Blummy Pinkerton", in a slight departure from the original text. Sometimes absolute slavish adherence to the original text is a bad thing, particularly when it makes no sense to do so. In the original John Luther Long story, Pinkerton's full name is Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton, so who knows what Illica and Giacosa were smoking when the "Sir Francis Blummy" name was in the original version of the libretto.

[LHC]

The Graham Vick production for ENO in the 80s also presented the original two act version of Butterfly. My recollection is that it presented a tougher, and less sentimental view of the protagonists than the standard version. Mind you, I don't recall Pinkerton being referred to as Francis Blummy in the ENO version.

[grandchant]

That's an interesting point about sentimentality. I've read a lot about 'Butterfly' and it all seems to focus on her 'despair' at losing Pinkerton. But Cio Cio San was Samurai. Suicide was an honourable death, preferable to a dishonourable life. Insofar as it's possible for westerners to understand the Japanese physche, I don't think despair would have had much to do with her decision. Puccini was an excellent composer and insightful when it comes to characterisation, so I've listened carefully to the music and concluded; well, nothing, I can't make my mind up. Any thoughts?

[bluestateprommer]

I've read up a bit on Madama Butterfly as well, and listened to it a few months back, probably more closely than I'd ever listened to it before. This last listen was a real eye-opener, and not in a way that's favorable to Butterfly's character. To be blunt, it finally really hit me that Butterfly is a deluded, blind fool, for falling so head-over-heels for a guy who was so not worth killing herself over. That's clearly a harsh assessment, but I have in mind what I'd read about the time of the unequal treaties between Japan and Western nations. One aspect of this period was these "arranged marriages" of convenience between Western men and Japanese women, where money was exchanged, but where the men really had only one thing in mind. A book by Jan van Rij about the history behind Madama Butterfly pulls no punches and describes these arrangements as "prostitution contracts". Writing as an European, van Rij commented that from a Japanese perspective, Butterfly's mindset makes no sense whatsoever, where in a way, Giacosa, Illica and Puccini imposed Western notions of romantic love on a nominally Japanese young lady, who should have approached this arrangement from a historically authentic Japanese perspective, based on actual socioeconomic history, rather than from a "la la la" romantic POV. van Rij takes the perspective that this skewed view of those types of contracts at the time is part of why Madama Butterfly has caught on much more slowly, if at all, in productions of Western operas in Japan. The Japanese would have had a much more accurate understanding behind the truth and history of those "prostitution contracts".

This isn't to excuse Pinkerton, of course, or his actions. But this shouldn't mean sentimentalizing Butterfly herself, who, again according to van Rij, brought this disaster on herself, by failing to grasp the true nature of this "marriage contract". One example of how self-deluding she is comes in this Act II passage where she spars with Goro about her actual stage of "marriage":

Goro: ".......per la moglie, l'abbandono / al divorzio equiparò..." (...by the law, abandonment / equates to divorce...")
Butterfly: "La legge giapponese... non già del mio paese." ("Japanese law, but not of my country.")
Goro: "Quale?" ("Which?")
Butterfly: "Gli Stati Uniti." ("The United States.")

[doversoul1]

bluestateprommer

I really wouldn’t take it so seriously. All Japanese know that the book on which the opera is based is an exotic fantasy written by an American author for an American readership of his time. Apart from the presence of Westerners in Nagasaki at the time, there is not an atom of social or cultural reality in the story of the opera. The characters’ names are as laughable as those in Mikado to start with.

Yes, women like Butterfly existed; they were common prostitutes* kept in the brothel set up especially to cater for the Westerners who were stationed in Nagasaki in order to prevent them from becoming involved with the local women. The prostitutes were most likely to have been daughters of poor farmers or fishermen who sold them to the brothel. There may well have been men like Pinkerton and they may well have provided for their ‘wives’ after they returned to their own countries but these prostitutes had no protection whatsoever and anything left or sent to them would have gone straight to the brothel owner. Butterfly would have gone back to her old job but if ever she had decided to take her own life, it would have been by drowning. Swords didn’t come into a common prostitute's life. These prostitutes were probably told to tell the Westerners that they were daughters of unfortunate samurais.
* not courtesans

I should just enjoy the music.