Madame Butterfly

Madame Butterfly – Imperialism, and its inadvertent critics, produced several notable works of art. Madame Butterfly (1904 – Minnesota Opera, 2012), with Kipling’s “Without Benefit of Clergy” and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness are exemplary and unmask the imperialist venture as a species of predatory rape. When Cio-Cio-San learns that Pinkerton’s blonde wife intends to return to America with Madama Butterfly’s baby son, she sings: “They are trying to take everything away from me” and, this, probably summarizes the hard, avaricious core of colonial imperialism. The feckless and opportunistic Pinkerton’s arias generally begin with a two-bar allusion to the “Star Spangled Banner” and it’s a bit peculiar to see an American smeared by this particular brush, although, I suppose, that subsequent history – including adventures in Iraq, Vietnam, and Afghanistan – justifies the portrait. (And, in any event, the story of the native girl seduced and abandoned by a conquering hero is at least as old as Virgil’s Dido and Aeneas.) The Minnesota Opera’s recent version of Madame Butterfly restores the work’s original two-act structure – and this seems to be a mistake: the elongated second act drags a bit since it is really about nothing more than fruitless and prolonged waiting. Probably, the opera works best with two intermissions – but the second and third acts of the work are really too short to stand alone and, in terms of simple logistics, the opera presents an insoluble problem: one intermission is not enough and combining the second and third acts serves to reveal their paucity of dramatic events, but two intermissions makes it seem as if the opera is more lounging about in the lobby than performance, a disconcerting defect. I have seen this work many times and, obviously, the opera’s problematic structure doesn’t impair its popularity. On this viewing, I particularly admired how Puccini scores the work’s signature aria Un bel di (“One fine day”) pivoting the tune on the pedal point of an ominously rumbling tympani that simulates the cannon firing in Nagasaki bay when Pinkerton’s ship, the “Abraham Lincoln,” arrives while also simultaneously sounding a convincing note of doom, foreshadowing the Butterfly’s hara kiri. Like all great works of art, Madame Butterfly has some profoundly strange, even disorienting, moments – Pinkerton’s final aria seems to deconstruct before our wondering eyes the very notion of the “heroic tenor”. Hurling high notes at the audience, Pinkerton sings an aria that, in effect, uses the heroic tenor timbre to convict himself of cowardice and weakness – he sings words to the effect: “The shit has hit the fan and I must vamoose…, an aria that casts a long and incriminating shadow on a whole tradition of Heldentenor. In the final act, particularly the famous “Humming Chorus,” Puccini dares to stage something that was hitherto mostly unacted and unrepresented – the agony of pointless, hopelss waiting, an existential condition that the 20th century would explore but that seems to have been mostly unknown to the art of earlier eras. I always wonder how small children impressed into service as Cio-Cio-San’s hapless infant recall, in later life, their experience on the stage – a woman in glaring white make-up bellowing (in this production Cio-Cio-San mercifully cover’s her little boy’s ears as she delivers her 120 decibel suicide aria) before slitting open her stomach and crawling with outstretched arms toward the bemused infant.

Back in Austin, walking my dog, Julie and I found no fewer than four shattered robin’s eggs lying along the sidewalk on one block. Recall that Cio-Cio-San has been told that Pinkerton will return to Nagasaki when the robins make their nests.