Puccini, Madama Butterfly: Soloists, chorus & Orchestra of Metropolitan Opera, Ascher Fisch (cond), New York, 05.10.2006 (HS)

Editorial Board

North American Editor:
(USA and Canada)
Marc Bridle

London Editor:
(London UK)

Melanie Eskenazi

Regional Editor:
(UK regions and Europe)
Bill Kenny

Seen and Heard International Opera Review

Puccini, Madama Butterfly: Soloists, chorus & Orchestra of Metropolitan Opera, Ascher Fisch (cond), New York, 05.10.2006 (HS)

Cristina Gallardo-Domás: Cio-Cio-San

Marcello Giordani: Pinkerton

Maria Zifchak: Suzuki

Dwayne Croft: Sharpless

Greg Fedderly: Goro

James Courtney: Bonze

David Won: Yamadori

Edyta Kulczak: Kate Pinkerton

Blind Summit Theatre.

Anthony Minghella (director)

Carolyn Choa (choreographer)

Set designer: Michael Levine

Costume Designer: Han Feng

Lighting: Peter Mummford

When Cio-Cio-San plunges a knife into her neck to die at the end of director Anthony Minghella's production of Puccini's Madama Butterfly, black-clad figures unfurl two long blood-red silk scarves big enough to fill the Metropolitan Opera stage. The image is striking, theatrical, haunting and ravishingly beautiful, as is much of this production, which opened the Met's 2006-2007 season last month.

Such exquisite visual effects make for a stunning evening of theatre. If it weren't for the formidable musical strengths of the cast, the orchestra and conductor, heard October 5, it might have overwhelmed poor Puccini. Fortunately, every role got its due from at least solid singing and dedicated acting, and conductor Ascher Fisch led a red-blooded musical performance of considerably more substance than that red scarf.

And then there were the bunraku puppets and the legion of black-clad figures operating them. More about those anon.

Chief among the live human pleasures was soprano Cristina Gallardo-Domás. The Chilean soprano created a Butterfly whose naïveté and timidness are evident right from the start. This Butterfly has been abused psychologically so much in her life that she can't do the rational thing, accept an arranged marriage with a wealthy Japanese husband. She stubbornly believes her American naval officer husband will really come back to her. Finally alone after she learns the truth, that B.F. Pinkerton has married an American woman and has only returned to take his son, she shakes like a leaf as she begins the ultimate scene. That's acting.

As for her singing, it was most touching in the quiet moments. Occasionally, loud phrases could go wobbly, and "Un bel di" was so matter-of-fact and conversational it never really bloomed into the riveting moment in can be. But she sang gloriously in the big love duet and effectively in the final scene.

Musically, the final scene might have been more effective if she had been downstage when she actually committed the act, as she was at the start of the scene. Instead, to accommodate the unfurling of the scarf diagonally across the expanse of the Met stage, Minghella had to place her halfway upstage, diminishing the vocal intensity that could cross the footlights.

And that's where the beauty of the production can run at cross purposes to the music. In its favor, the set is built like an enormous squared-off megaphone, narrow at the back, the raked stage and a slanted mirrored ceiling directing the sound outward. The wide-screen aperture at the back, with its changing color backgrounds, frames Butterfly's entrance in the middle of a line of her wedding party in colorful kimonos. The mirror lets us see the patterns created on the stage, a nice touch. But Minghella also has Butterfly and Pinkerton moving around separately in this enormous space during the love duet. I hate it when directors do that. Lovers are not cooing to each other from 20 feet away. That only diminishes the music and intimacy of the moment.

As Pinkerton, Marcello Giordani got the right bemused attitude and put his sweet tenor to good use, especially in the love duet and his Act III arietta, "Addio, fiorito asil." The dashing Italian tenor created a character that was not so much a bad guy as a careless one who sincerely regrets his actions in the end.

The strongest singer in the cast was Dwayne Croft, the Met's house baritone, whose Sharpless was a study in grateful phrasing and commanding presence. The Act I duet with Pinkerton, usually tossed off as a preparatory scene, blossomed into a moment of real musical stature, thanks to two musically deft and intelligent singers.

But for acting, the most fully developed character may well have been Butterfly's two-year-old boy, the creation of England's Blind Summit Theatre. Three black-hooded men operated the life-size puppet and infused it with so much realism I forgot at times it wasn't alive. Clad in the traditional sailor suit, the bald baby with a fixed smile could turn to follow voices, leap into his mother's arms and, blindfolded before her suicide, find his little American flag and hoist it aloft, just as a true child might.

There were several other puppets, two in the first act representing the cook and a servant, and one in an interpolated scene at the beginning of the third act depicting Butterfly on her wedding night. All those extra bunraku puppeteers and apparently some additional dancers clad identically, operate a flock of origami cranes at the end of long sticks as the birds chirp in the musical introduction.

The black-clad figures also slide Japanese screens across the stage to represent the house. They carry off a room full of Western furniture at the beginning of Act II, representing Butterfly's selling off her belongings as she awaits Pinkerton's return, leaving a single chair. Pinkerton is seen seated in the chair at the beginning of Act III. As Cio-Cio-San brings him some flowers, a screen slides across the scene and he disappears, another fine theatrical stroke.

Some critics have tried to read too much into the use of bunraku and these other Japanese elements. I don't see the black-clad puppeteers as something sinister, or the puppets as commentary on a manipulated child. On the one hand, introducing a Japanese art form into an opera that shows us how western culture disrupted Japanese culture makes perfect sense. On the other hand, the mere presence of all those black-clad figures is only part of the overwhelming theatricality of the experience. Visually, what happens on stage is so riveting and beautiful that it can divert attention from the music and the drama.

In the end, all that Japonaiserie sets up a sort of dissonance with the red-blooded Italian spirit of the music and the story it tells. Puccini uses elements of Japanese music and Japanese-sounding musical gestures in specific places where he wants to underline Butterfly's Japanese-ness. But most of the score is amped-up, adrenalin-pumping, highly emotional stuff. The formality of the bunraku and much of the staging competes with that.

It's great theater, but is it great opera?

Harvey Steiman

Back to the Top Back to the Index Page

Error processing SSI file