Puccini's Ravishing Butterfly

Watch the video now    $4.99 for 72 hours

Calling the late film director Antony Minghella’s production of Madama Butterfly “cinematic,” as many have done, misses the point.  Sure, the production, which opened the Metropolitan Opera’s 2006-07 season and has been part of the Met’s highly successful series of high-definition cinema theater presentations, is gripping the way a movie is gripping.  And sure, Minghella won an Oscar for The English Patient and directed plenty of other hit movies, including Cold Mountain and The Talented Mr. Ripley.

But this Madama Butterfly is theatrical in the best sense of the word: ravishing to watch, as it unfolds, scene by scene; surprising in its inventiveness with sets, costumes, and staging; and completely in service to underlying emotional truths of the story and Puccini’s ravishing score. Soprano Patricia Racette is touching in the role of Puccini’s butterfly, Cio-cio-San, while Marcello Giordani stars as Pinkerton. Patrick Summers conducts. 

(Watch for: Minghella's brilliant touch of using a bunraku-style puppet to portray Cio-Cio-San and Pinkerton's child.)

Alex Ross wrote in The New Yorker that this production “offers several of the most piercingly beautiful images I’ve seen in an opera house.” Edward Seckerson, in the Independent, said, “This Butterfly is at once the simplest and most sumptuous thing we've ever seen…. the meeting of Japanese kabuki and Western opera but shot through with the expensive air and finely tuned manner of a Broadway show.”

The story that Puccini and his lyricists Illica and Giacosa found so compelling was based on two sources: an adaption for the stage by David Belasco of a short story of the same name by John Luther Long, and the novel Madame Chrysanthème by Pierre Loti.  The opera, in the 1890s, tells of a lovely Japanese geisha who falls in love with an American naval lieutenant in Nagasaki, Japan.  She’s innocent and sensitive; he’s handsome, uniformed, and, despite his ardent first-act words, heartless.  The lieutenant sails away, only to returns to Nagasaki, three years later, married to an American girl.  The story ends tragically, but - well - beautifully.

Another amazing bit of theatrical magic: all the opera’s action takes place in and around a single house.  You could watch Madama Butterfly a hundred times and never fully realize this fact, because Puccini’s ravishing score, painted in a subtle variety of colors, seems to stretch the imagination in infinite directions, with suggestions of each character’s emotion and motivation—not to mention gobs of local color and a whiff of American imperialism.

Listen to this opera carefully and you’ll enjoy a much fuller experience than a standard Hollywood movie could ever give.

In 2006, this Madama Butterfly was the first new production to premiere at the Met on opening night in twenty years.  As such, the choice was seen—and meant!—as an example of the direction in which then-incoming Metropolitan Opera General Manager Peter Gelb wanted to go: imaginative, unstuffy, true to the emotionally potent nature of most opera.  And Gelb’s vision has been successful.  By combining the caretaking of great operatic masterpieces with smart arts marketing and presentation, via HD transmissions into cinemas and schools, and on the radio, the Met is both demonstrating the vitality of so-called “high culture” in today’s world, and bolstering its own ticket sales.

Patricia Racette as Cio-Cio-San. Pictures courtesy of the Metropolitan Opera.

Poster for the 1904 premiere of Madama Butterfly.