Transfixed with a Pin - Opera Orlando's "Madame Butterfly"

On October 3rd I saw Opera Orlando open their season with a performance of Madame Butterfly at the Dr. Phillips Center.  Despite Butterfly being part of the opera pantheon I had never seen it before.

Probably not shockingly I really enjoyed it.  In addition to the show being worthy of discussion as a fantastic production of a work that has great music and compelling emotional drama, there's also a lot of interesting stuff surrounding the opera itself, from its composition to its place in the repertoire.

And probably even less shockingly, I have lots of thoughts that I am now going to inflict on you.  Sorry in advance for this.

Background

Madame Butterfly is a 1904 Italian language opera by Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924), with a libretto by frequent collaborators Luigi Illica (1857-1919) and Giuseppe Giacosa (1847-1906.)   This trio also created Tosca and La Boheme which, along with Madame Butterfly, are in the top ten most performed operas in the world.  Pretty good hit rate, I'd say.

Madame Butterfly has a long chain of origin.  While in London in 1900, Puccini saw the one act play Madame Butterfly: A Tragedy of Japan written by American playwright David Belasco which was an adaptation of John Luther Long's short story "Madame Butterfly" from 1898.  Long's story was partially inspired by an 1887 French novel by Pierre Loti called Madame Chrysanthème.

Though Puccini did not speak English, Belasco's play made enough of an impression that he decided he wanted to base an opera on it.  He acquired the rights in 1901 and set to work.   Puccini researched Japanese folk music, turning to Belgian musicologist Gaston Knosp and Hisako Oyama, the wife of the Japanese ambassador to Rome, while Luigi Illica traveled to Nagasaki, Japan to do research for his libretto.

Madame Butterfly premiered in Milan in 1904 and bombed.  There were jeers, boos, hisses, and bad reviews.   Puccini reworked the opera and his first revision premiered 3 months later and did really well.   He kept tinkering with it, creating a third version in 1906, and a fourth and fifth versions in 1907.   

The 1907 version is apparently the standard version performed today, but Opera Orlando's Artistic Director Grant Preisser told me that the Opera Orlando production was not this "standard" version.  I don't remember if he said it was Puccini's 3rd or 4th version.  I asked him why it wasn't the last revision and he smiled and said it was because the changes in version 5 were "pretty unnecessary."

Plot Overview

The opera is set in 1904 in Nagasaki, where American douchebag Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton is about to have a, from his perspective, temporary marriage to the 15 year old geisha Cio Cio San, (Cio Cio means "Butterfly" in Japanese.)  Pinkerton has every intention of leaving Cio Cio San soon after the wedding and going home to the States to get a "real" wife.  They consummate their marriage at the end of Act 1.

Act 2 picks up 3 years later with Cio Cio San still believing Pinkerton, who did indeed leave, is going to come back to her, despite what anyone else says.  Pinkerton, with his American wife Kate, does return to Nagasaki but he only comes to Cio Cio San to collect the son that he had by her.  He sends Kate to get the boy but Cio Cio San says she will only turn him over if Pinkerton comes to ask himself.

After Kate leaves, Cio Cio San sends her maid Suzuki away and then stabs herself.  Pinkerton runs into the room in time to see her die.  The end.

A Sidebar about Orientalism that Got Away from Me

Though Madame Butterfly is one of the most popular and frequently performed operas in the repertoire, in recent years there has been some back and forth about its more, let's say "problematic" aspects.  A good and succinct assessment of some of the discourse around Madame Butterfly is from musicologist and pianist Kumi Shimozaki in "Madame Butterfly: A Japanese Perspective:"

When a narrative is set within a foreign culture, it’s always difficult to avoid perpetuating cultural and ethnic stereotypes.

On a larger and sort of deeper scale the re-evaluation around Butterfly is centered on it as an Orientalist work.  Orientalism is a big academic topic which University of Hawai'i professor Mari Yoshihara, in a panel discussion for Boston Lyric Opera's "The Butterfly Process" series, summarized this way:

[O]rientalism is a concept that was most powerfully theorized by cultural literary critic Edward Said in his book called Orientalism, originally published in 1978. And to put it very simply Orientalism is a Western discourse, so to put that even more plainly, [the] Western ways of understanding and representing the so-called "Orient"... that's premised on two most basic assumptions. One is the essential difference between the East and the West, and also the essential power and quality between the East and the West.

...[S]ome of the most common expressions of Orientalism include things like exoticization of the Orient. So even when the Orient is treated and understood as something that is attractive and appealing, it's always assumed that it's essentially and fundamentally different. ...

Another manifestation is that Orientalism typically objectifies the Orient, as the place, culture, people, object, et cetera, is seen as something that is the essential other object that is to be either consumed or appropriated for the interests of the West

Orientalism typically treats or sees the Orient as a feminized object. And then another feature of Orientalism is that it homogenizes the quote unquote Orient. So not only are Japan, China, Korea, all treated the same, but whether ... it's East Asia or Southeast Asia or South Asia or even the Middle East, they're all kind of seen as this undifferentiated mass called the Orient.

One of the more obvious Orientalist tropes that is explicit in the text of Madame Butterfly is the concept of the "Asian Doll" which reduces Asian women to being passive, submissive, and fragile.  This is also paired with them being portrayed as sexual objects to be fetishized.

And the thing with these sort of cultural assumptions is that they are systemic with their own inertia and they permeate into art regardless of the intent of the creators.  Puccini and Illica did research and were attempting respect and verisimilitude and that does matter but it doesn't erase the Orientalism in the final text or provide a "get of discourse free" card.  Also, at the end of the day, Puccini's making decisions for the fictional opera in his head, and he was a European circa 1900, so there is still some "eh, close enough" in there.

Zachary Woolfe, in his article "Puccini’s ‘Butterfly’ and ‘Turandot’: More Than Appropriation," says

it is clear, for example, that Puccini had no problem using melodies from China and Japan in his depiction of Cio-Cio-San, the Japanese protagonist of “Madama Butterfly.”  He was interested in authenticity — but only to a point. He and most of his audience didn’t (and still don’t) know or care about the specifics of this material much beyond it being identifiably “Oriental.”

Madame Butterfly does ask a Western audience to empathize with Cio Cio San, and that's not nothing, but the opera is still a product of its time and perpetuates exoticized and infantilized stereotypes.

Beyond the text of a work, Orientalism can also manifest in its productions.  With Madame Butterfly some of it, like the Asian Doll thing, is just present in the libretto.  If you don't make big changes you have to make peace with that if you're going to perform it.  But a production of a work set in a foreign culture can be handled more or less respectfully by, for example, not just grabbing whatever Asian looking costumes and set dressings are lying around because "whatever, close enough."

Opera Orlando, for their part, is clearly aware of the complications of performing Madame Butterfly and have done some legwork, as they say in the show program:

So, what do we do with Madame Butterfly, then? Well, a helpful step is to rely on the expertise of cultural consultants and Japanese specialists who can advise on the approach to handling orientalist aspects of the opera, leading to a greater celebration of Japanese culture married with Puccini’s powerful score.

Western art also has a long history of using yellowface, which is white actors pretending to be Asian characters, sometimes in really exaggerated and cartoonish ways.  This goes back at least to Gilbert and Sullivan's very popular, and popularizing, comic opera The Mikado but continued with Puccini's Madame Butterfly and Turandot, to the Charlie Chan movies in the 1930's and 1940's, Breakfast at Tiffany's in the 1960s, the Kung Fu television series in the 1970s, the live action Ghost in the Shell film from 2017 etc etc.

For an underrepresented demographic, this sort of erasure is of course not ideal to say the least, so s company can, like Opera Orlando did, cast Asian actors in the Asian roles.

Impacts

For a member of the majority culture, it can be tempting, even from a casual good faith perspective, to say "Why does any of this matter?  It's from 120 years ago, so what?"

This is a big question I should probably stay out of but I think at least a partial answer is in the self-perpetuating inertia of these tropes as laid out by Mari Yoshihara in that Boston Lyric Opera discussion series:

...Orientalism keeps producing and reproducing these tropes, right? Tropes, or vocabularies, or narratives about the Orient that then inform each other.  So in terms of Madame Butterfly, Madame Butterfly was originally just this one story written by this one guy, but then it was turned into this play and then, and especially with Puccini's opera, it became such a powerful and influential narrative that then got reworked in so many ways.

... Certain kinds of narratives become authorized and canonized.

These tropes don't stay confined to the art they are in and these canonized narratives become perceptions.  Hell I have a friend of Asian descent who had someone tell her that she must be docile because of her heritage.  And this was only like 7 years ago.

In a world where we had lots of different kind of stories about Asian culture by Asians, then whatever, Madame Butterfly would be one of many singular stories and its representation would not have become a lens that an entire demographic is filtered through.   

And this is something that I also vaguely understand how a good faith person of a majority culture wouldn't get.   For example, I am a white male American.  I see portrayals of people who look like me all the time in a lot of different modes, and so has everyone else.  If, however, the only time I, or most people, saw someone who looked like me in media was as an abusive meth addict, I might be more aware of how representation matters to my own self image and what the larger culture will assume about me.

I think at the very least being aware of the tropes or cultural assumptions that a work is using, be it intentionally or not, is a valuable part of media literacy and, to quote Dan Olsen in another context "mak[es] us better equipped to vocalize the messages that media is presenting us with."

The Opera Orlando Production

Note: The translation Opera Orlando used for the supertitles is not the same as the librettos I found online.  Spot checking from memory, the differences don't seem to be substantive but most of the quotations I've used are from the online librettos and so won't be word for word exactly what was in the show.  Anywhere I remembered the exact line I saw, I used that instead.

Staging

In line with my now baseline expectation after 9 years of Opera Orlando performances, the production design was clearly given a great amount of thought and was full of interesting and really purposeful decisions.   Hats off to Stage Director Rebecca A. Herman.

The Opera Orlando production was on a raked stage of simple wood, canted so the front (i.e downstage) part was the lowest point and then sloped up towards the back (i.e upstage.)   The set was stark, with little bits of scenery that suggested locations, like a few panels of Japanese shoji room dividers to suggest being in a house.   The back well was a screen that generally just had a simple single color projected onto it, though there were sometimes clouds, sometimes a night sky, etc.

All the way in back, hidden from view of the audience, were stairs leading to the stage so actors could enter a scene from the back.  This was a really cool effect that, to me, added a touch of realism, or at least a simulacrum of realism.  In a lot of theater setups there's an accepted artificiality in that people are always neatly entering from the sides so even just this small element made it feel more like a real location, even on the minimalist set.

It also made for longer and more dramatic entrances as you see people's heads, then bodies, etc as they start to become visible coming up the stairs and you see them approaching for a while before they are actually on stage.  This works in reverse too and allows for some good visual storytelling, like when Cio Cio San's family rejects her after learning of her conversion to Christianity and then exits to the back.  They get smaller and farther away and since its on same axis as the audience sight line, it makes you feel the growing distance between them and her more viscerally.

A moment I really liked was during Cio Cio San and Suzuki's duet "Tutti i fior?," or "All the flowers," where after Cio Cio San sees Pinkerton's ship in the harbor and thinks they are about to finally be reunited, she asks Suzuki to decorate the room with flowers for when he comes.  The stage had no props at this point and began to be bathed in warm pink light and then flower petals started cascading down from the ceiling as they sang of hope and renewal.

This scene is diegetically occurring in the house and this abstract, metaphorical staging visually brings us into Cio Cio San's world, a world where her sorrow, her poverty, her longing all melt away and she's almost floating in a comforting and beautiful Spring.  And its unreality reflected the unreality of Cio Cio San's hopes; what she thinks is happening is just as much of an illusion as what the audience is seeing.

Right after this she sets up a vigil on a futon in the center of the otherwise bare stage.  Puccini's music here is a fairly long instrumental intermezzo and the production kept Cio Cio San on stage and showed the night's progress by changing the light's color temperature and also by having servants slowly bring in spherical Japanese lanterns and set them down.  The stage lighting was getting darker while the lanterns accumulated on stage which was a really striking visualization of the night passing while Cio Cio San sat motionless.

Also, right before the curtain dropped, the light on the stage floor turned blue with a shadow pattern that made the lanterns and Cio Cio San look like they were floating on water.  It was really stunning.

All that to say I agree with the Orlando Sentinel's Matt Palm when he says in his review of the show that:

[Scenic designer Grant Preisser] once again displays his penchant for creating gorgeous imagery.

The Performances

Also in line with my baseline expectations for the company, the performances were all great with nary a weak spot in the principal cast.  Yeawon Jun as Cio Cio San was incredible.  I don't know if Cio Cio San is a demanding role, in part because Yeawon Jun made it seem effortless.  There's a part in the love duet between Cio Cio San and Pinkerton where she is singing high but also very light, somehow being loud enough to hear clearly from the cheap seats without belting.  Even to a layman like me it demonstrated an incredible amount of vocal control.

The love duet in general and Cio Cio San's very famous "Un bel di" aria were obvious standouts but I was also really impressed with Jun's "Tutti i fior?: duet with Yoojin Lee as Suzuki.  The harmonies were really beautiful and their voices blended really well and complemented each other.  I did not hear even a moment of wobble in said harmonies.

Isaac Hurtado, though he's absent for a large chunk in the middle of the opera, sounded great and really sold Pinkerton as a douchebag in Act 1, though he was also convincingly romantic with Cio Cio San.  I could understand why the poor woman, who didn't hear Pinkerton talk about finding a "real wife" when he went back to the States, could be convinced of his genuineness.  Damn tenors.

Opera Orlando General Director Gabe Preisser sang the part of the Consul Sharpless and I can't really articulate why but this role really suited his voice.  Like he put on the gravitas of an elder statesmen type without covering up his fundamental good-naturedness, which was fitting for the only non jerk-ass male character in the opera.  Damn baritones.  (Also, one of these days I'm going to spell Gabe and Grant's last name correctly on the first attempt.)

Weirdly, I had the same experience that Matt Palm described of the previous night's performance where at the very beginning the orchestra was kind of overpowering the vocals.  And by beginning I mean like the first minute and a half and I didn't have any trouble hearing anyone after that.  It's not a big deal but it's weird that it happened twice.  Maybe the orchestra naturally comes out blasting with Puccini's intense and kind of busy fugue-adjacent prelude and it just takes a bit to calibrate once the singers come in?  Shrug.

I also thought the non verbal acting was really good and legible, even from the balcony.  Some of this, of course, overlaps with the stage direction but the actors are doing it so I'm putting it here.  There was a lot of really nice small moments that affected the framing of the characters in an interesting way.

For example, in Pinkerton's first scene with Sharpless, he first tells the Consul about the house he's bought, saying:

I have bought it for nine hundred and ninety-nine years,

with the option, each month, of annulling the contract.

Sharpless doesn't give this too much thought, essentially saying "A wise play" while nonchalantly sipping his whiskey.  Pinkerton later describes his plans for Cio Cio San with a direct callback:

So I’m marrying in Japanese fashion for nine hundred and ninety-nine years.

Except that I can free myself every month,

At this, Sharpless snap-turned his head back towards Pinkerton with a look on his face that distinctly said "What the hell, dude?"  The conversation had been easy going and casual and this moment felt like a small inflection point.  And later when Sharpless leaves, right before he says "Be careful" he gives Pinkerton an "I've got my eye on you" gesture.  Both of these moments were small and would be easy to miss but I think they add a lot and show what the characters will later tell us about where their heads are at.

And, God, Pinkerton's such a shit.  He couldn't even turn fully to look at Suzuki at the beginning.  Oh and I really liked how Hurtado played the moment at the start of the love duet when Cio Cio San says:

They say that in other countries if a butterfly is caught by a man,

she is transfixed with a pin, and fastened to a board!

This is very close to Pinkerton's earlier line to Sharpless that

she flutters like a butterfly and settles with such silent grace

that I am seized by a wild desire to pursue her,

even though I should crush her wings in doing so.

When Jun sang this, Hurtado froze for just a moment and looked discomfited like he'd been called out.  He then quickly composed himself and goes back into seduction mode, redirecting with:

And do you know why?

So that she won’t fly away.

Damned tenors.  Also, during the curtain call after a few seconds of applause the crowd boo'd Hurtado pretty heartily, which he seemed very amused by.

There were lots of good acting moments like this from the entire cast; these are just the ones that I remembered offhand.

Structure and Subtle Shifts

The Madame Butterfly librettos I've found are in three acts, with the first intermission coming  after the consummation of Cio Cio San and Pinkerton's "marriage," Act 2 starting after the three year time jump and ending with Cio Cio San's all night vigil when she finds out Pinkerton has returned, and Act 3 starting after the vigil when Sharpless, Pinkerton, and Kate arrive to get the child.   

The Opera Orlando production was in two acts with first ending after the 3 year time jump pretty much right after Cio Cio San sings "Un Bel Di," her powerful and gorgeous song of longing and faith that Pinkerton will return.

Having not seen the three act version I don't have a strong opinion on the Act division change but I do think it's nice to leave the audience at intermission with "Un bel di" in their heads.  It also makes you more viscerally feel how long her vigil has been.  In the three act version, Act 2 begins and reveals the time jump, Cio Cio San sings "Un bel di" and then shortly after she sights his ship.   Diegetically Sharpless arrives with Pinkerton's letter and Pinkerton's ship itself arrives like a day after "Un bel di" but I think it's pretty potent how Opera Orlando's two act structure soft peddles that and makes the audience feel the lonely waiting, too.

Since I've only seen this version of Madame Butterfly, and only once at that, I cannot give even a remotely thorough analysis of the differences from the libretto and their dramatic implications but there are two pretty obvious ones I think are interesting .

The first has to do with the very end of the opera.  The librettos I found have this stage direction for the ending:

The door in the right is forced open. Pinkerton and Sharpless rush into the room, and run towards Butterfly, who with a feeble gesture points to the child and dies. Pinkerton kneels, while Sharpless takes the child and kisses him, weeping.

In the Opera Orlando production Cio Cio San is already dead when Sharpless and Pinkerton arrive and her son is not on stage.  Kate also enters with the men.  The lighting was very dramatic with Cio Cio San in the center lit up, small and alone on the bare stage with an almost confining shadow pattern on her, while everything else was just in silhouette.

I like this change a lot.  It feels more isolating and tragic as there will be no closure for Pinkerton (or Cio Cio San) with regards to the other.  When he abandoned her 3 years ago, it really was the last time he'd ever see her alive.  And as the son isn't really a character its nice that this ending completely is centered on Cio Cio San and the closing image is of her, not Pinkerton or Sharpless.

The production also cut this exchange from Act 1:

Sharpless

How old are you?

Butterfly

Guess.

Sharpless

Ten.

Butterfly

Higher.

Sharpless

Twenty.

Butterfly

Lower. Fifteen, exactly fifteen; I’m already old!

Sharpless

Fifteen years old!

Pinkerton

Fifteen years old!

Sharpless

The age for games…

Pinkerton

And for sugared almonds!

I think that cut was a good call.  To quote Lucille Bluth: "Let's not add that to the charges."  As much of a manipulative jerk as Pinkerton is, Cio Cio San not being a child makes him so much less predatory and the story works just fine without her being 15.  One can even argue that her reading as older gives her decision to kill herself a less impulsive sense and, if you squint a bit, even some actual agency.  The Orientalist Asian Doll infantilization of her is still present because its all throughout the libretto, but that by itself is still better than that plus actual child brides.

Thoughts on the Source Material

The Music

It's hard, especially for a layman like me, to say anything original about Puccini's music.  I feel very stupid saying this but... yeah, Puccini's music is really good.  He's a giant for a reason.

I really liked the Japanese folk songs Puccini incorporated throughout the score.  As I mentioned above, not all of the Eastern music he used was Japanese and I don't know if he wrote his own pastiches as well, but I definitely recognized the authentic Japanese melodies of "Echigojishi" and "Sakura."

Puccini made really good use of the orchestra here and the Japanese music is really well integrated with the European style ensemble.  It never felt like parody or condescension.

For the Americans, Puccini used motifs that are clearly interpolated from the Star Spangled Banner, really emphasizing the brass section in these parts.  This did kind of sound like Puccini was poking fun at the Americans and their over the top nationalism which, you know...fair.  I like how this American theme plays when Cio Cio San insists that though Japanese law says she's effectively divorced if she's been abandoned, the law of her country (i.e. the United States) doesn't work that way.

And of course Puccini gets a lot of mileage out of the very beautiful "Un bel di" melody.  I honestly applaud his restraint; if I had written that I'd have used it every 5 minutes for the entire show.

Overall, the music had some unexpected dissonances and a couple of augmentations I want't expecting even in the more chipper music.  It was subtle but it gave sort of a foreboding feel as, in the middle of a pretty straightforward harmonic sequence, there'd be an almost subtextual moment of tension.  Almost like an anxiety in the score.   

This show is also interesting because the flow between narrative and aria was pretty seamless.  Arias are vaguely analogous to asides in Shakespeare, where a character stops and communicates to the audience what they are thinking and feeling, and it is often understood to be not heard by the other characters.

"Un bel di" is the aria that stands out in my mind but even that one is incorporated into a conversation Cio Cio San is having with Suzuki.  This isn't particularly surprising as Puccini frequently wrote in the opera verismo tradition, which generally strove to integrate the music with the drama.  Essentially, the narrative doesn't pause so a character can have aria.

Some Thoughts on the Story

Madame Butterfly is a really focused story that is very much dominated by Cio CIo San and it is essentially a character study of her.  Pinkerton is a big presence at the beginning but then he  vanishes for a good hour in the middle and, because he's a cowardly douche, he isn't a huge presence after his return.  Cio Cio San's maid Suzuki is on stage with her a lot but is kind of an accessory and, similarly, Sharpless mostly stands off the the side of the action and reacts to it.  I don't know the actual breakdown of lines by character but it certainly feels like Cio Cio San has way more lines than anyone else.

One thing that I found interesting looking at the libretto is how pervasive the Asian Doll trope is in the stage directions.  The libretto repeatedly infantilizes her describe how she moves with  "childlike submission" "childlike grace" and "childlike warmth."  I'm not completely surprised this stuff is in the libretto but I think its kind of revealing as to the cultural perception of the writers because, really, they're not that useful as stage direction.

How does an actor convey childlike warmth or grace in this setting?  This isn't a movie, there's no closeups.  Even if Yeawon Jun had the most doe-eyed and naive expression on her face during these moments I, and most of the audience, sure as shit wouldn't have been able to see it.  And productions can just not even attempt it and really nothing changes so these stage directions are kind of just an artifact of the writers' milieu.

And speaking of infantilization, I do wonder how Pinkerton marrying a 15 year old played to Puccini's original audience.  A paper I found called "Historical trends in female nuptiality in Italy and analysis of possible underlying reasons" by Jesús Sánchez-Barricartea and Roberta Pace found that the mean age for a woman's first marriage in Italy in 1900 was about 24.  So would the marriage have stood out as weird to Puccini's audience or would they have not batted an eyelash because....Asian Doll Orientalism?  Pinkerton's line about fifteen being "an age for sugared almonds" is a reference to Italian marriage tradition but apparently in real life it was almost a decade too early.

Framing Pinkerton

Pinkerton obviously does Cio Cio San dirty but I have seen a few things that talk about how he perhaps shows some regret for his actions late in the play.  Maybe I'm a cynic but screw Pinkerton.  To me his "regret" is centered on how he feels not the harm he has done.  This is up for interpretation depending on the production and the perspective of the viewer.  The opera almost invites you to fill in how repentant you think he actually is because he's just not in it very much after he returns.  As I said earlier, the focus is on Cio Cio San and after she dies Pinkerton doesn't get to say anything before the show ends.

Personally it's hard for me to get past how Pinkerton describes Cio Cio San as "a little girl with eyes full of enchantment" and says things like

To think that little toy is my wife!

But she displays such grace

that I am consumed by the fever

of a sudden desire.

:: Shudder ::

This, once again, reinforces the Orientalist portrayal of Asian women that pervades the text of the opera.  One potential defense I could see someone saying is "But the show portrays Pinkerton as being in the wrong!" and that is true but, again, not a get out of discourse free card.     

If there was a movie that used the "women in refrigerators" trope (i.e  female characters only exist to get assaulted, maimed, hurt, or killed just to motivate the male characters to action) even if the violence was done by the villains and is framed as bad, it still uses a pervasive and crappy trope and treats the women like props.

And in Madame Butterfly's case that defense requires you to ignore not only the libretto stage directions I mentioned earlier, but also how Sharpless, despite not being a selfish jerk, kind of describes Cio Cio San with the same Asian Doll language.  He says things like:

The mystery of her voice

touched my soul.

...

It would be a great sin

to tear those delicate wings

and perhaps break a trusting heart.

Gallimaufry

• I should have mentioned this earlier but the Orlando Philharmonic provided the accompaniment and, as usual, sounded incredible.  Hat tip to conductor Kalena Bovell.

• This was Opera Orlando's first Saturday performance in Steinmetz Hall.  This season they went from two performances of each show to three, which is a good indicator for how much the organization has grown.  From where I was sitting it looked like it sold well, too.

• One thing in the Opera Orlando production that I found kind of heartrending was how just before Cio Cio San killed herself, she sent her son away with a gentle "Go play."  And as an extra gut punch, he won’t even remember her when he gets older.

• In "Puccini’s ‘Butterfly’ and ‘Turandot’: More Than Appropriation," Zachary Woolfe says regarding Madame Butterfly and Turandot:

There’s far more authentic material in these operas than in, for example, Bizet’s “Les Pêcheurs de Perles” or Delibes’s “Lakmé,” both set in South Asia.

• In Western pop culture consciousness "geisha" tends to be conflated with "prostitute" but that really wasn't the case.  Sex workers in Japan were known as yūjo, jorō, and oiran. The Opera Orlando program touches on this as an example of how the opera misrepresents Japanese culture:

A primary example of this in the opera and truly in all Western media is the treatment of the geisha profession, as evidenced by Cio-Cio San expressing that as a geisha, she danced in the streets for money. In reality, geishas are highly respected, refined entertainers who go through years of training.

• Musical theater fans have probably noticed (or already knew) that Madame Butterfly is the source material for the 1989 musical Miss Saigon.  I've never seen that show but looking through some synopses it looks like Chris, the Pinkerton equivalent, is much less of a jerk than Pinkerton, as he is involuntarily separated from Kim, the Cio Cio San analog, during the chaotic American embassy evacuation of Vietnam in 1975.

Miss Saigon's music was written by Claude-Michel Schönberg who also wrote Les Mis.  So it's probably not a coincidence that a melody from Madame Butterfly's "Humming Chorus" shows up in Les Mis's "Bring Him Home."

• There was a French opera based on Pierre Loti's novel Madame Chrysanthème that predates Puccini's Madame Butterfly, premiering in 1894.  It has a very light online footprint so it's hard to say how popular it was at the time but it seems like Puccini's opera pretty much wiped it out of historical consciousness.

• Madame Butterfly is historically plausible.  Japan had been forcibly re-opened to the outside world due to US gunboat diplomacy in the 1850s and after the unequal treaties subsequently forced on Japan by outside powers, Nagasaki became a Treaty Port.  Thus there were a lot of American sailors hanging around.

I've seen some articles say that temporary marriages like the one portrayed in the opera were indeed a thing, but I've seen others that cast doubt on this, so perhaps that bit is apocryphal.  If it is apocryphal, the persistence of this idea is probably this opera's fault.

• I think it's funny that Pinkerton's full name is Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton.  That's so cartoonishly American that I would have bet you money that Puccini and company came up with it as a joke but it is indeed from John Luther Long's short story.  "Pinkerton" is a good surname for this character.  At the time of Long's story the reputation of the Pinkerton Detective Agency was kind of in the toilet, and justifiably.  The US Congress even passed the Anti-Pinkerton Act in 1893.

• Cio Cio San's son Sorrow isn't really a character but the kid who played him in the Opera Orlando production was super cute.  He looked about the right age for Sorrow and there were several times when the audience kind of "awwww'd" when he was on stage.  His profile in the program was adorable:

previous engagements

singing along with The Magic Flute

naming all the planets

aspirational engagements

Astronaut

Zoologist

Composer

• It seems that there can be no discussion of Orientalism or re-evaluation of the opera repertoire without people screaming "WOKE"  "LOST ME AT WOKE GARBAGE" "AHHH CANCEL CULTURE WILL RUIN EVERYTHING AHHH" even when the discussion is not even advocating for removing a thing from the repertoire.  It's completely exhausting.  This is a complicated discourse that different opera companies have handled differently.  Please just...relax.

• There's a part in the libretto where Cio Cio San gets Pinkerton's name a little tangled, saying "Mr. F.B. Pinkerton, forgive me…"  I missed this part during the show because I was looking at the actors when the line came up, but there were some chuckles from the audience.

• When Cio Cio San very incorrectly and aspirationally described the divorce laws in the United States I heard a woman near me turn to her partner and say in not-quite-a-whisper "Why does she think divorce laws are like that here?"  First off, shut up I can hear you and second...is this your first time experiencing a story?  Have you tried engaging with it and maybe, I dunno, considering what in Cio Cio San's life experience might have led her to choose to believe that American marriages were unbreakable and that the sanctity is enforced by law?

I don't want to be unkind but I was honestly just baffled at the illiteracy of that question.

• Sharpless introduces Kate to Cio Cio San by saying "She is Innocent cause of your despair." ...  Um, no she isn’t.  That would be her stupid husband.  Damn baritones.

• Unfortunately I didn't make it to the shop tour for this show, where they take you to the rehearsal space and show the costumes and the set building process etc.  Opera Orlando does a great job of explaining tech stuff for the interested.

Conclusion

I'm glad I saw this and I understand both why it's one of the top ten most performed operas and why there's discourse around it.   Definitely worth seeing and thinking about.

A hearty "well done" to everyone involved in this production.

And if you see Pinkerton somewhere punch him in the face.  (Not Isaac Hurtado, though, he's cool.)

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