Giacomo Puccini's "Madame Butterfly" has become more than just a pretty piece of music. It has turned into something of a popular icon for East-West relations. Poor faithful Cho-Cho-san, left behind by faithless Lt. Pinkerton, doing away with herself while Little Trouble, fruit of their union, all oblivious, waves the American flag.
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The pathos of that innocence traduced has wet many an opera-going eye, and the sweet sorrow of Butterfly's lament, "One Fine Day," has moved many an otherwise stolid heart.
But this passing passion, like the music itself, is comfortable. It demands no redress, no indignation. We do not have to earn our easy emotion, and this makes "Madame Butterfly" popular.
This was not always so and in this fine recapitulation of everything that went into the making of the opera we can understand just how a popular icon gets constructed. Jan van Rij, a former lawyer and a European Union senior diplomat, traces the original real-life models, the evolution of the story, the influences that created its nexus, and the making and further history of Puccini's music drama.
The composer might not have been Puccini at all. An earlier version of the romantic story was offered to Giacomo Meyerbeer and, had the composer of such exotica as "L'Africaine" gotten around to it, we might have had the first European opera on a Japanese theme. As it was, that honor went to Camille Saint-Saens for his pretty and inconclusive 1872 "La Princess Jaune."
This composer said that he could hardly have avoided a Japanese subject at the time, since back then "people talked about nothing but Japan." It was the era of the first Japan boom, and "japonisme" was, for a time, a fashion. Loti cashed in with his meretricious "Madame Chrysantheme" (later set to music by Andre Messager), and Pietro Mascagni wrote the melodramatic "Iris," which was not too good on local color: It had characters named Osaka and Kyoto.
His librettist also wrote Puccini's libretto and was perhaps instructed to avoid what the composer of "Madame Butterfly" thought defects in the Mascagni. These included "action that is uninteresting and pines and fades away for three acts." Retained, however, was the famous vigil (waiting for Pinkerton) and the suicide scene.
All of this, however, occurred only after the story was considerably evolved from the simple romance glanced at by Meyerbeer. A minor American author, John Luther Long, had heard the original anecdote (perhaps an ur-Butterfly actually lived in old Nagasaki) and adapted it in 1898 for Century magazine. Pinkerton, like Loti's equally naval hero, decides to "marry" a local Japanese and, upon his departure, "to return one day." He does, but with a blonde lady-friend.
Poor Butterfly does try to kill herself, but in the end takes Little Trouble (whose name was to be later changed by his confident mother to Joy) and disappears.
The story was picked up by David Belasco, an American entrepreneur with a great sense of drama (he dressed entirely in black with a Roman collar), who instantly realized that a dead Butterfly was more dramatic than one simply on the lam. Hence the celebrated suicide.
The resulting stage spectacle was seen by Puccini, who was much touched by it. (He was somewhat easily touched. Of his career, he later wrote, "Almighty God touched me with His little finger and said: Write for the theater.") He applied himself, and the work premiered at La Scala early in 1904.
The performance remains one of the most famous disasters in musical history. The audience laughed and shouted during the most tender moments and there was general riot at the curtain calls. Part of the reception was directed by the anti-Puccini cabal, and another part may have resented the crude East-West bias of this early version of the work. On the other hand, some of the most beloved operas (Bizet's "Carmen" is a famous example) were originally booed off the stage.
Chastened, Puccini and his librettist took out some of the East-West business, softened criticism in general and cut the second act in two, and a few months later the opera had a triumphant performance at the Teatro Grande in Brescia. It then went on to conquer the opera houses of the world.
Except for those of Japan. The first performance here took place at the Imperial Theater in 1914. The final scene was not, however, shown. Instead there was a melodic melange of Japanese songs. This was necessary, said the Asahi Shimbun, to sweeten the mood of an audience embarrassed by this "contemptuous glance at customs and habits of loose women in Japan."
Certainly Long, Belasco and Puccini had not intended to be contemptuous, but they were complacent and condescending, and perhaps the audience felt this. In the event, the opera went on to be performed in full but it has never been as popular here as abroad.
All this and more is included in this scholarly, fascinating, beautifully produced volume. There is a masterly "dramatic genealogy" that traces all the complicated turnings of the Butterfly saga, and the pictures and drawings reproduced are delightful.
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