Puccini: Madama Butterfly (Metropolitan Opera Production, 2024) (Metropolitan Opera Guild, Neubauer Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, filmed May 11, 2024, repeated May 15, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday (Wednesday, May 15) at noon my husband Charles and I left for the AMC 20 theatres in Mission Valley to see the “encore presentation” of Giacomo Puccini’s opera Madama Butterfly from the Metropolitan Opera’s “Live in HD” series. The performance originally took place on Saturday, May 11 but to see it then Charles and I would have had to get up really early in the morning – and he’d have had to get off work for the day (he’d already arranged to have yesterday off). Before the opera began I said sotto voce to Charles, “Say a prayer for my mother. Madama Butterfly was her all-time favorite opera.” Madama Butterfly began life as “Madame Butterfly,” a short story by American author John Luther Long, which was published in 1898 and was based on stories Long had heard from his sister, Jennie Correll. It was also inspired by Pierre Loti’s Madame Chrysanthéme, which became the basis for Leo Delibes’ opera Lakmé. David Belasco read the story and wrote a play based on it in 1900, starring Blanche Bates as the heroine, and he created a famous 18-minute pantomime scene in which Butterfly and her maid Suzuki wait up all night – literally – for her errant husband, U.S. Navy Lieutenant Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton, to return after a three-year absence. Though Puccini didn’t understand any but the simplest English – he caught the play in London when he was there to supervise a production of his immediately previous opera, Tosca – he was knocked out by the play and especially by the long pantomime scene. He created the opera with a libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa, his collaborators on his two previous mega-hits La Bohème and Tosca, and structured it as a 55-minute first act and an 80-minute second act. Puccini’s friend and frequent collaborator Arturo Toscanini, who’d already led the premiere of La Bohème and would conduct two more Puccini premieres, La Fanciulla del West and Turandot, tried to talk him into breaking up the long second act into two shorter ones. Puccini asked him if an 80-minute act was too long, and Toscanini said, “For Wagner, no. For Puccini, yes!”

The premiere was conducted by Cleofonte Campanini after Toscanini had had one of his periodic breaks with La Scala, Milan, where the first performance of Butterfly took place. The event was one of the most famous fiascos in operatic history; audience members shouted down the singers, made animal noises (La Scala had planted people in the audience to blow bird whistles during the long intermezzo for Butterfly’s vigil, and this inspired hostile audience members to start making their own animal noises), threw in a few scatological comments (when the kimono of Rosina Storchio, the first Butterfly, blew over her head, someone called out, “Butterfly is pregnant! Ah, the little Toscanini!” – a reference to the fact that Storchio was actually pregnant with Toscanini’s child, though she had a miscarriage later) and turned the performance into such a mega-flop nobody dared try to take a curtain call at the end. I’ve long suspected the fiasco was engineered by a hostile claque led by fans of Puccini’s rival, Ruggiero Leoncavallo, out to get back at Puccini because they had both written operas of La Bohème, only Puccini’s had been a smash hit while Leoncavallo’s was a flop. (To his credit, Leoncavallo himself denounced the people at the Butterfly premiere who had disrupted it.) La Scala canceled any further performances and Puccini and his publisher, Tito Ricordi, decided he would revise the opera and it would be re-premiered in Brescia, a smaller city near Milan that was also the starting point for the Mille Miglia auto race. It was an appropriate place for a Puccini premiere because he had taken up driving motor vehicles as one of his hobbies, though he crashed one of his cars during the composition of Butterfly and a headline on one of the reviews of the Scala premiere referenced that: “Butterfly Diabetic Opera, Result of an Automobile Accident.”

Among the revisions for the Brescia version was Puccini’s acceding to the recommendation that he split the long second act into two shorter ones, though he was still put out enough about the change that he tagged the two parts “Act II, part 1” and “Act II, part 2.” (Ironically, the Met, with its current policy of minimizing the number of intermissions, jammed them back together in this production with only a curtain-down scene change between them.) In 1995 Vox Records released a recording of the original La Scala version of Madama Butterfly as well as excerpts from Puccini’s various revisions, and I remember grabbing this CD as soon as it was available and listening to it with the libretto. The two things that most stunned me about that recording was how much more openly racist Pinkerton was – in one scene he tells Butterfly’s servants that he’s just going to give them numbers because he couldn’t remember their names – and how relatively weak Butterfly’s big scenes were. Though Puccini had said Butterfly had inspired him more than any of his other heroines to date, the major aria “Un bel dì” (“One fine day”) was the only one of her big moments he got right the first time. All of her other big moments – her Act I aria “Ieri son salita,” in which she tells Pinkerton that in honor of him and their marriage she sneaked down to the mission and converted to Christianity; her Act II aria “Che tua madre,” in which she announces to the stunned Suzuki and the American consul Sharpless that she and Pinkerton had a son; and her death scene – were extensively rewritten, and in every case the rewrites were far stronger dramatically. The plot of Butterfly is probably mind-numbingly familiar even to non-opera fans, but just in case, here goes: Lt. Pinkerton (Jonathan Tetelman, the great new tenor Charles and I had previously heard in Puccini’s relative rarity La Rondine) is a U.S. naval officer stationed in Nagasaki, Japan. (There was a bit of confusion as to what his name was – “Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton” or “Francis Blummy Pinkerton” – and both “B.F.” and “F.B.” ended up in the printed libretto, but in this production the Met used “B.F.” throughout.)

Pinkerton has arranged with local marriage broker Goro to marry Cio-Cio-San, a.k.a. Madame Butterfly (Asmik Grigorian) and to lease a house for them in Nagasaki, but both the house and the marriage are on a 999-year basis but with the man having the opportunity to cancel at any month. Butterfly comes to the marriage obviously taking it a lot more seriously than Pinkerton, even though she’s only 15 years old and therefore is little more than a child bride (something that probably seems even creepier now than it did in 1904). She has a huge bit of baggage in her past; her father had been a favored courtier of the Emperor until he displeased him in some way, and he was forced to commit seppuku, or ritual suicide. Butterfly has kept the dagger with which her dad offed himself, and since then she’s made her living as a geisha (a much misunderstood part of Japanese culture; the word literally means “art person” and it denotes a young woman who sings, plays an instrument and dances for the private entertainment of male clients; a geisha is not a prostitute!). Butterfly’s uncle, the Bonze (a priest of Shinto, the national religion of Japan), throws a tantrum when he learns Butterfly has adopted Christianity and orders her relatives and servants to leave immediately, which all but Suzuki (Elizabeth DeShong) do. Left alone, Butterfly and Pinkerton sing a marvelously characterized love duet during which she wants to savor the atmosphere and revel in the moonlight and other aspects of nature, while he just wants to get laid. Then Pinkerton gets called back to his ship, the Abraham Lincoln (a name the U.S. Navy has since used for real-life vessels), and Butterfly is left behind to wait for him to return “when the robins nest again.” Three years later Butterfly is still waiting, and the money Pinkerton left behind to take care of her is now just about gone. Butterfly doggedly insists that Pinkerton will return to her, even though everyone else around her – Suzuki, Goro and American consul Sharpless (Lucas Meachem) – tries to convince her that he won’t. Goro has even lined up a replacement husband for her, well-to-do Prince Yamadori, but she righteously turns him down.

Sharpless has received a letter from Pinkerton saying that the Abraham Lincoln will soon be returning to Nagasaki and he should do what he can to prepare Butterfly for “the blow” – that he has got married to an American woman named Kate and that is the relationship he takes seriously. (He’d already told Sharpless and us this in Act I, where before Butterfly’s entrance he’d boasted that someday he would take a “real American wife” – which led critic Vincent Alfano to note in the May-June 1986 Fanfare, “[H]ow does one react to perhaps the meanest tenor in opera? There he stands, announcing his planned seduction and abandonment of a 15-year-old child, while some of the most beautiful music ever composed for tenor pours out of his mouth.”) But Butterfly refuses to listen, and when she uses a hand telescope to read the name of the American ship that has just come into Nagasaki harbor and it’s the Abraham Lincoln, she triumphantly proclaims that despite all the doubters, Pinkerton has returned and the two will be a happy couple again. When Pinkerton turns up with a strange woman in tow (somehow he was able to get his “real American wife” Kate aboard his Navy ship; real Navy wives have told me that the Navy so rigorously cold-shoulders the wives of sailors that the joke is, “If the Navy wanted you to have a wife, they’d have issued you one”), Butterfly realizes that she’s lost Pinkerton. She tells Kate Pinkerton that the couple can have her and Pinkerton’s child to raise, but only if Pinkerton comes to get him himself. In an aria that Puccini added in the later revisions, “Addio, fiorito asil,” Pinkerton expresses regret and remorse over what he’s done to Butterfly – an aria I think weakens the drama much the way Verdi’s aria for Macbeth, “Pietà, rispetto, amore,” does in his 1847 opera of Shakespeare’s play. Feeling dishonored, Butterfly uses her father’s old dagger to kill herself after reading its inscription, “To die with honor, when one can no longer live with honor.” (The plot of Delibes’ Lakmé is almost identical to that of Madama Butterfly; the only differences are that instead of an American sailor, it’s a British soldier; and instead of Japan, it’s India. Also Lakmé was the Hindu equivalent of a vestal virgin, so she broke her vows by taking up with that British soldier; and she kills herself not with a dagger, but by inhaling the fumes of a poisonous plant.)

The Met’s current production of Butterfly was created by screenwriter and film director Anthony Minghella in 2006, two years before his death in 2008, and it opened the Met’s season that year. It’s an all too typical (for modern opera productions) blend of the stunning and the silly; Minghella and the person in charge of directing it this year, Carolyn Choa, turned the stage into a riot of color (good) but chose to make the members of Butterfly’s household, including her son, Bunraku Japanese puppets (not so good). This meant there had to be a core of black-clad stagehands out at all times to manipulate the puppets on stage and also to move the screens around, since one of the conceits of this production is that Japanese houses at the turn of the last century were made out of infinitely variable screens and shutters which could be used either to form rooms or create outdoor patios. The conductor was Xian Zhang, and though she was called to begin the performance with the usual cry, “Maestro, to the pit!,” she was really a Maestra. It wasn’t easy to tell at first since she was dressed in one of those black uniform things the Chinese Communists once made the near-universal Chinese dress, and she had her hair cut short and close-cropped in a male “do,” but it’s a welcome sign of progress in the classical music world that for the second time in a row we were watching a telecast Met production with a woman conductor. (Once again, it’s about time!)

The singing was stunning throughout, especially from Lithuanian soprano Akmin Grigorian in the title role. Though born in Lithuania, she’s of Armenian ancestry on her father’s side, and her parents – tenor Gegham Grigoryan (that’s how it’s spelled on her Wikipedia page) and soprano Irena Milkeviciuté – were also opera singers. Grigorian commanded the stage from the get-go and sang with total power and authority, and for the most part she was matched by Tetelman, who had impressed me in La Rondine and impressed me again here. Elizabeth DeShong’s Suzuki and Lucas Meachem’s Sharpless were also good as sympathetic voices of reason for the principals. One thing that rubbed me a bit the wrong way about this production was that the singer playing Kate Pinkerton was Black; somehow I was better able to accept a star like Angel Blue in La Rondine than a walk-on player who’s just got five lines, but the racial politics of this opera (as well as its so-called “Orientalism,” its damning the Asian lifestyle and culture with “picturesque” condescension) are already problematic enough that the appearance of a Black singer threw off the racial balance of the show and annoyed me more than it probably should have. Charles and I were both crying big-time during the production – whatever you may want to say about him, one thing Puccini was good at was assaulting the tear ducts, and if anything Madama Butterfly is the sort of story that becomes more tragic, not less, if you know the ending in advance. Despite those silly puppets and the apparently self-propelling walls, Minghella’s staging as realized by Choa was basically strong and did justice to the story (though I’d have liked more physical contact between Butterfly and Pinkerton in the love duet), and overall this Butterfly was a quite charming and entertaining afternoon at the opera!