Gary Halvorson and Anthony Minghella | Madama Butterfly / 2016 [the Metropolitan Opera HD-live production]

a kind of turandot

by Douglas Messerli

 

Giacomo Puccini (composer), Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa (libretto, based on the play by David Belasco and the story by John Luther Long), Anthony Minghella (stage director), Gary Halvorson (film director) Madama Butterfly / 2016 [Metropolitan Opera HD-live broadcast]

 

The new HD production of New York’s Metropolitan Opera’s Madama Butterfly was Howard’s and my third visit to the popular work in the last 8 years, the other productions being described in My Year 2012; so I need not say much about what has almost become a war-horse for opera companies around the nation. Coincidentally, the LA Opera production we saw in 2012 was also revived this year.

      What I did notice, however, was that when I last wrote about this production in 2009, I seemed to put as much blame on Cio-Cio-San’s refusal to perceive the truth of her situation as upon the behavior of the heartless American Lieutenant Pinkerton. But this time, struck with the handsome Roberto Alagna’s posturing, I grew even more disgusted by the ugly American character, feeling that even the morally-grounded Sharpless (performed again by Dwayne Croft) did not do enough to stop his countryman’s cruel behavior.

    Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton—named perhaps for Franklin’s reportedly licentious behavior in his Paris days—has arranged his marriage with Cio-Cio-San with the same bemusement that he has arranged for the 999-year rental of their Nagasaki home. From the very beginning this barbarian, it is clear, has utterly no intention of keeping his marriage contract with the 15-year-old girl. At least Humbert Humbert stayed with his Lolita as long as he was permitted to. Pinkerton openly jokes about having a woman in every port and “dropping his anchor” around the world, using the words obviously as a metaphor for sexual dalliance.

      Pinkerton not only makes it clear that someday he will break the marriage contract with Cio-Cio-San by marrying an American woman, but he does not even attempt to hide the fact his interest in the young innocent (played this time round by a rather robust adult beauty, Kristine Opolais) is a product of simple lust. Perhaps I missed it in the early Met production, but this time I was struck by how clearly that lust was expressed as he sneaks a view through the Japanese screens of his young bride getting undressed. Even though he already possesses her, it is clear that his interest in the underage beauty is the product merely of, as my companion Howard honestly expressed it, a hard-on.

      During an intermission, Alagna described his character in less negative terms, arguing that he perceives him as simply a young sailor who has made a terrible mistake, and commends his later admission to his American wife and decision to adopt the child. “Think of him as a young soldier in Afghanistan,” he suggested, a lonely boy who finds pleasure in the beautiful local.

      The problem with such a forgiving view, however, is that, although Pinkerton may have regrets, he is not honest enough to openly express them to his former lover; upon his return to Nagasaki with his new wife, Pinkerton has no intent upon even seeing Cio-Cio-San, and only when Sharpless reports to him that she has had the lieutenant’s baby does he bother to make a visit—with the express purpose of taking away the only thing she has to give her solace. And even then, the small band of greedy Americans plans their visit early in the morning so that they might not have to face Cio-Cio-San but merely convince her faithful Suzuki (Maria Zifchak) to tell her of their plans.

     Opolais described her character as representing the highest attainment of womanhood: a woman who is beautiful, loving, passionate, loyal, forgiving. Cio-Cio-San does not even put blame on Pinkerton’s wife, but suggests that she should be the happiest of all beings, since she will now have everything, while Cio-Cio-San will have nothing.

     Yet Cio-Cio-San, justifiably perhaps, is also vengeful, demanding that she will give up her son only if Pinkerton comes to see her, already plotting, surely, that he will arrive only to discover her dead body. It may be that she perceives that the only way to deal with these soulless barbarian Americans is to force them to realize the consequences of their lies and deceptions. Part of the reason that her suicide is so powerful is because we know that Pinkerton and his wife will be forced to live the rest of their lives with the image of Cio-Cio-San’s disemboweled body, just as she has lived with the knowledge of her father’s death ordered by the Mikado. The happiness she has wished for Pinkerton’s wife will be nearly impossible given the circumstances of Cio-Cio-San’s death. Moreover, as I pointed out earlier in that earlier essay, it will certainly have a lasting effect also on her own son; even her names for the boy, “Sorrow/Joy,” suggest that he may live a life of a manic-depressive.

     In the end, it appeared to me, seeing the opera again, that if Cio-Cio-San remains an innocent, by opera’s end she has also become a kind of Turandot.

 

Los Angeles, April 4, 2016

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (April 2016).