Baltimore Opera Company

Study Guide

Madama Butterfly

Perspectives on the Opera

Those familiar with the story of Madama Butterfly would probably call it a love story with an unhappy ending. Boy meets girl, boy marries girl, boy leaves girl. In this scenario, the histrionics aren’t usually followed by Hara-kiri - suicide - but then it wouldn’t be Grand Opera. Yet just under the surface of the “libretto” or “little book” on which the opera moves forward, there is so much more.

Like every other human being who considers a story based in “olden” times - which is to say any time before our birth - we dismiss things happening they way they did because “times were different back then” as if we had nothing at all in common with these people who lived and acted so long ago.

But are we really so different?

To answer that question, we look at the attitude of the “civilised” (Europeans) towards the “savages” (in this case, the Japanese). As a closed society and largely unknown to the Western world, Japan was considered an upstart, nearly ridiculous, and populated by “monkeys”. How to understand a landlord who’d offer a lease for “999 years” – yet cancelable at any moment. Or a girl who’d consent to be your wife in a marriage equally easily dissolved? Neither the country nor its people were taken seriously in any forum – economic, military or, above all, social. Understanding this backdrop is essential for grasping Butterfly’s tragedy – for as a human being, she saw herself and the events of her life NOT in socio-economic or military terms, but only through the eyes of love. And love is blind – to imperfections, to self-deceptions that ultimately prove irresistible to our ability to sustain them.

Sharpless, the American consul, has been characterized as our “eyes” – our window into the story of Butterfly and her Pinkerton. Sharpless is the counselor – the one who goes between two cultures to make molehills out of mountains by carrying small offerings from one to the other, tirelessly, in an effort to avoid the cataclysms that can result from tiny misunderstandings. His perspective - from the outside looking in – is like that of the audience: not too distant to care, but too far removed to change the inevitable. He looks on helplessly as events tumble to their conclusion.

From the comfortable distance of time, Madama Butterfly can be seen as a bit of the romantic past – an apt subject for some of Puccini’s most glorious music. But in reality, 100 years ago at the time of its premiere, it was every bit as topical, shocking, timely - and uncertain – as the premiere of Dead Man Walking some years ago. An opera about the death penalty?

How about an opera about a far Eastern call-girl who thinks her license-bureau wedding to a sailor is the real thing – and kills herself, leaving her 3-year old behind, when she realizes it isn’t?

Butterfly sings out from the mountaintop – he will return! – and her words roll down like mist from her hillside to the port where his ship will come and fulfill her hopes, one fine day…….

John Packard

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