Madama Butterfly: Visual Buzz
Most of us know the bare bones of the tale of Madama Butterfly: American Naval Lieutenant B.F. Pinkerton takes a Nagasaki bride, one Miss-soon-to-be-Madama Butterfly (also known as Cio-Cio-San). Their Japanese marriage becomes the centre of the fifteen-year-old ex-geisha's existence, while to Pinkerton it is merely an exotic interlude, a kind of delirious mock-up of the real thing, which can only exist in the West – someday in the future-West, when he has finished sewing his wild oats. Pinkerton eventually abandons Butterfly, returning to Nagasaki three years later with a “real” American wife, Kate, to take custody of Madama Butterfly's three-year-old son, known as Sorrow. Butterfly relinquishes her child and then kills herself with her father's knife, a treasured relic and a symbol of both her cultural ties to Japan and her tragic fate.
The Vancouver Opera's production of Madama Butterfly, conducted by Jonathan Darlington and directed by Leslie Swackhammer, was a lavish spectacle. The strikingly original set and costumes, designed by ceramic artist and painter Jun Kaneko, brought a postmodern twist to the well-known story, filtering it through a bright, Op-Art-inflected imagination. Kaneko's bold colours and geometric patterns heightened the fantastical elements of the story, emphasizing the extent to which Puccini's opera is not an historical narrative but an artistic rendering of ideas loosely based in history. The stage itself was a minimalist sculpture – a slow spiralling incline wrapped around a raised disc, all painted with thin black lines that created a hallucinatory visual buzz. Instead of dressing the performers in traditional period garb, Kaneko had them in loud patterned kimonos made from swatches of red, green, yellow, blue, and lavender fabric, with black and white polka-dots and stripes. Pinkerton's navy jacket was patterned on Mondrian's Composition with Yellow, Blue, and Red, while his wedding-night garb consisted of a loose white shirt with blue polka-dots. The obvious boldness and humour in these costume choices had the effect of liberating the opera, at least visually, from is orientalist overtones: rather than mimicking an idealized or nostalgic notion of Japanese culture, these designs were a merry mash-up of Eastern and Western artistic sensibilities from different periods.
One of the central threads in Butterfly's story is her fascination with Western culture and her attempt to abandon her Japanese heritage for the sake of her husband. In light of this, the image of Japanese women in loud Modernist kimonos is all the more compelling. Kaneko's designs seemed to imply that a fascination with the exoticism of the Other moves both in both directions – even as the West might have historically looked to Japan for artistic inspiration, so might Japan (isolated from Europe and America until the nineteenth century) have been looking inquisitively at the West. In this fantastical version, Madama Butterfly becomes a meditation on possible worlds and on the artistic imagination itself, with its magpie tendencies towards cultural borrowing, appropriation, and reinvention.
The musical aspects of the opera were presented in a less strident but equally powerful manner. It would take a critic more versed in operatic conventions to comment on the details of musicianship and singing, but to my ear the performances were well-balanced and versatile. In contrast to the brashness of the set and costumes, Puccini's music was sweet and heady. It would rise to great crescendos and dive into a melancholic abyss, before rising again to offer a few brief bars of a military marching tune, the American national anthem, or a stately string of notes from a minor pentatonic scale meant to suggest Japanese-style music. The strength of the orchestra's performance seemed to lie in its subtlety – the ease with which musicians handled the many shifts of tone and style inherent in the score.
Likewise, the principal singers handled their performances with deceptive ease – although to my mind, Act I seemed a bit off-kilter in its emotional tone. The performers playing Butterfly and Pinkerton were vocally charged – Soprano Mihoko Kinoshita's resonant voice comes ghosting on stage even before we ever see her – but they seemed to lack romantic chemistry, with Pinkerton appearing earnest where he should have been arrogant, and Butterfly acting restrained where she should have been bubbling over with infatuation. Mezzo-soprano Zheng Cao, as Butterfly's maid Suzuki, was perhaps the most consistently expressive actor as well as singer, and her moments on the stage were touching in their sincerity.
Mihoko Kinoshita seemed to come fully into her own in Act II, as the more tortured Madama Butterfly (rather than as the purely naive “Miss”). This is the point in the story when Butterfly has been left in Nagasaki to descend into poverty along with her maid and child. It explores the fullness of Butterfly's yearning for reunion with her husband, and Kinoshita filled the stage with strongly-felt, bittersweet presence. Tenor James Valenti had an arguably less emotionally strenuous role to play as the callow Pinkerton (the man who says “it is hard to tell love from whim”), but his performance was surely no less technically demanding. His final aria in Act III, in which Pinkerton expresses remorse at how he has destroyed the life of a young woman, was an affecting and genuine-seeming moment of illumination. And all of the performers clearly relished the tempestuousness of the last cathartic act.
As a viewing/listening experience, the opera was about as structured as they come: Act I was full of colour and excitement, Act II full of longing, and Act III was the dramatic pinnacle. As the story progressed towards its inevitable tragic end, the stage lighting became more subdued. The brilliant reds and yellows of the opening flowed into blues and pinks reminiscent of daybreak and evening – the endless days and nights of Madama's Butterfly's purgatory – and finally the ashen grays of the death scene. This last was a visually arresting moment: Madama Butterfly, dressed again in her white wedding gown, a red flower in her hair, stands before a white screen. As she prepares to plunge the knife into her body, a spot of red appears on the screen. As she dies it drips red lines of blood. The moment was lurid and wholly satisfying – all the pathos made visible and nothing held back. Yet there was an artistry and a neat symbolism to it, to see the bleakness of the visual field finally relieved by the torrent of red emanating as if from the Japanese flag itself.
The original libretto calls for Pinkerton to enter the stage just as Butterfly dies. In this version, the curtain simply falls on the collapsed figure of Madama Butterfly with abrupt finality. This was all to the good: the performance ended with such strength and dark emotion, that it seemed right to withhold any potential redemption or further dramatic irony. The austerity of the last scene, uninterrupted by another character's temperament, seemed to restore a degree of dignity to the ill-used Madama Butterfly. Her actions spoke for themselves and needed no coda, however brief.
This was a strong production of a classic opera, and a memorable artistic experience.