I can think of few gloomier stories, in any medium, than that of Madame Butterfly’s: the young, innocent girl at the center of Puccini’s world-famous opera, who gets her heart broken and her life destroyed, thanks mainly to a thoughtless and self-serving American lieutenant. It can leave one feeling numb to the core. It’s a dismal story and offers little to offset the wave of disquieting feelings that sweep over your heart — not least during its heartbreaking final scene. Madame Butterfly is, without a doubt, a brutally bleak and somber opera. But it’s also an incredibly popular one — which is an odd sort of thing, in a way, though certainly lots of great art derives beauty from the sadness it evokes. And sadness there’s aplenty in Puccini’s tragic masterpiece.
OperaVision recently had available a 2018 production of Madame Butterfly from the Swedish Royal Opera. It was a powerful performance throughout, sometimes exceptionally so. Asmik Grigorian is superb as Cio-Cio-San, capturing both the highs and lows of the girl’s emotional landscape, as her blithesome wishes for a future with Pinkerton are tragically unfulfilled. Grigorian, not too long ago, powerfully performed another type of sorrowful young woman (Tatyana in Eugene Onegin), but here in her role as Madame Butterfly, she’s perhaps even more on top of her game. Though surely a taxing role to perform, she does it beautifully (and sorrowfully) from beginning to end.
Daniel Johansson is equally good in his role as B.F. Pinkerton, the nonchalant Navy lieutenant who recklessly elevates his own interests above the extremely naive — and extremely young — Cio-Cio-San. We first see him on stage relaxing in a sofa chair, flipping through a magazine, with the look of someone who has few cares in the world. Johansson is thoroughly convincing playing this cool and confident military man. He’s just as convincing when, in the last quarter of the opera, the once carefree Pinkerton is attacked by pangs of worry and agitation, upon being alerted to the tumultuous situation which is all too real and close at hand.
The rest of the cast is very good as well, and there’s little in this production where things feel askew. The costumes are excellent, and the slight change of time period — director Kirsten Harms sets it a few decades later than the opera’s original 1904 — gives the set design a bit of a modern flavor and flourish (though undoubtedly some viewers would have preferred a more traditional setting). On the whole, it’s a well-conceived and powerful production, replete with poignant moments that linger in one’s mind long after it’s over — because that’s the kind of power that Madame Butterfly possesses: sharp, stinging rays of sadness that penetrate your heart.
As I watched it, in fact, the story felt even sadder and more depressing than I remembered it being. Pinkerton, for all his shallowness and disregard for the teenage Cio-Cio-San, is far from the only source of drama in her life. Remove Pinkerton from the picture, and one can still easily imagine the circumstances of her life being quite dismal; would she have married the well-aged suitor Yamadori, only to be brusquely disregarded if his ardent feelings for her subsided? It hardly seems out of the question.
Examining Cio-Cio-San’s circumstances more broadly — her father committing suicide in act of sacrificial honor, the family without money, her needing to marry for the sake of finances — it’s a story that feels depressing not just because of Pinkerton’s actions, but because this young girl has so little human agency. The betrayal, the manipulation, and the dire constraints which enter into Cio-Cio-San’s life are painful to watch, not least because it involves a young person forced into less-than-ideal circumstances. To put it mildly.
The naivety and pliability of Cio-Cio-San comes out especially strong in John Luther Long’s “Madame Butterfly,” the short story which was a main source for Puccini’s opera. It’s nowhere near as powerful as the latter (unsurprisingly), but, unlike the opera, we do get to “hear” Cio-Cio-San’s very broken English throughout the story — an element which further illuminates the complexities of her being pulled between two cultures, two identities, two future lives. She idolizes Pinkerton and his American ways, and even insists that those around her — namely her maid and her very young child — speak in English. It’s something that really alerts the reader to the extent that she’s been enamored and influenced by Pinkerton, and even, in a sense, adopted his mindset. (Indeed, at one point the story, she experiences a kind of glee upon the realization that she’s just used a turn of phrase and tone similar to Pinkerton.)
Moreover, she’s indefatigable in her panoply of rosy beliefs about her future with the American lieutenant, and no one — not the maid or the consul — can challenge the veracity of those beliefs without her excitedly shutting them down. She’s obstinate, indeed. Yet one of the many painful things about watching or reading Madame Butterfly’s story is the thought that, who can blame her? Shoved into a world where her young and vulnerable feelings (and circumstances) are essentially manipulated by adults around her, is it really any surprise to see her life play out in the tragic way that it does?
There’s plenty of sadness in Madame Butterfly. There’s little, if any, moments of consolation. But her story does seem to illustrate a vital principle: human beings aren’t mere means to an end.
Spectatio 