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Passions of the Orient
Opera Company's "Madame Butterfly' (1st review)
Puccini's Madame Butterfly is often portrayed as the epitome of the weak and passive woman, pathetically awaiting her man. She's no such thing, as the Opera Company's strong production, directed by Cynthia Stokes and featuring a powerhouse performance by the Albanian soprano Ermonela Jaho, makes clear.
Consider Cio-Cio San, the orphaned daughter of a once-comfortable family. Now she's reduced to making her living as a geisha, a role she performs but despises. She is, or aspires to be, the Japanese New Woman, free from the crippling conventions of her culture and contemptuous of the empty rituals represented by her censorious uncle, the Bonze (Kirk Eichelberger).
Cio-Cio San latches on to Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton, an American naval lieutenant stationed in Nagasaki (Roger Honeywell), who, fascinated by her charms, agrees to an arranged marriage that, by Japanese law, can be terminated at will.
Licensed fornication
Such marriages were widely understood in turn-of-the-20th-Century Japan as licensed fornication; American officers and other foreigners of rank or wealth could enter temporary liaisons for the duration of their stay, while their "brides" received property, goods or other emoluments in exchange. Such women, using their newly acquired wealth, could then make advantageous matches with Japanese suitors.
Cio-Cio San, however, has no intention of letting Pinkerton go. She banks on her charms to keep him in thrall and to use him as her ticket to America. To accomplish this she must not only feign love but also feel it. It's a big risk, and the birth of a child complicates it. As calculation becomes compounded with genuine passion, however, she grows confident that her gamble will pay off, and that the now-absent Pinkerton will return and take her to the land of her dreams.
The only honorable course
Cio-Cio San loses her bet, with tragic consequences all around. When Pinkerton does return, it is with an American bride. He is willing to acknowledge his child, and his new wife is willing to raise it, but Cio-Cio San has, of course, no place in this retinue. She must return to her calling or commit suicide. The latter, she decides, is the only honorable course.
As depicted by Puccini and his librettists, Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa, Cio-Cio San is a complex and ambivalent figure. The prototype she most resembles, it seems to me, is Euripides's Medea. Like Medea, Cio-Cio San makes a marriage not recognized by the law. Also like Medea, her lover leaves for greener (or at least more racially appropriate) pastures— and, to add insult to injury, wants to deprive her of her only consolation: her child. Both Cio-Cio San and Medea are abruptly deprived of status and exposed to the ridicule of an unsympathetic city; both are deeply wounded in their womanly pride.
Medea's alternatives
Medea, of course, chooses survival and flight; her vengeance comes in the destruction of her rival and, more terribly, of the children she has borne by Jason. Cio-Cio San enjoys no such options. She possesses no magical spells or charms to cast, nor any offer of refuge from the king of a neighboring city. She can wound Pinkerton by killing his child— a child he has never known, and to whom he has formed no attachment— but that would also spare him the awkwardness of raising a racially mixed son and the strains it would no doubt put on his marriage and position.
In contrast, Jason's children represent a royal posterity— future princes, if not kings— and their loss deprives him of his last hope.
If Cio-Cio San seeks revenge (a course she never acknowledges, although we see sign enough of her willful temperament), suicide is her best means of it. Pinkerton will not only be saddled with his love child, but with the daily reminder of the woman he drove to her death. Moreover, he must raise a potential viper in his household, for the boy will sooner or later come to realize his circumstances.
Why weep for her?
If this were all there were to Madame Butterfly, of course, audiences would hardly weep for her. She is a fascinating dramatic character because she really does put all her chips on Pinkerton, and because her passion no less than her pride doesn't permit her to withdraw them.
The bride-price she's been given has diminished with the years, but her Japanese suitor, Yamadori (Elliot Madore), is still willing to take her. She'll have none of him, though; Pinkerton must return, for it's the dream on which she has staked her life.
You believe the genuineness of Cio-Cio San's passion because of the music Puccini has given her, and— in this case— because of the power and beauty of Ermonela Jaho's singing and characterization. The chief supporting cast is a strong one, and the splendid team of Jun Kaneko (set and costume design) and Drew Billiau (lighting) produce a stark but richly imaginative stage for the production.
A variety of color
As in the case of the Opera Company's Rape of Lucretia last season, the basic design element is a sloping platform, here curving around the back to end in a frontal area painted white with concentric black semicircles. Moving screens, descending from the flies or pushed out from the wings, complete the stage paraphernalia; but on this arid-seeming, semi-abstract landscape, Billiau deploys a wondrous variety of color and Photoshop effects to create a continually changing commentary on the mood and action of the drama.
The costumes are part of the scene, not a separate element, and the whole ensemble displays a unity of effect that moves the drama onto the archetypal plane where director Stokes clearly wants it. The result is a production that works with the deeper resonances of the drama, while elevating its more conventional elements.
Not vengeance but honor
Madame Butterfly was one of the first works of Western art to deal with the emergence of modern Japan and its response to the Occidental world. The marriage of convenience between Pinkerton and Cio-Cio San is a part of that cultural collision and the premise on which the whole action of the drama— an interracial love affair— is based. This is historically important, but also secondary to the larger purposes of the drama. Madame Butterfly is ultimately about a great passion, and the mixed and conflicting elements of which it is built. This production gets straight to the heart of it.
Stokes's staging ends, however, with a forceful reassertion of heritage and tradition. When Cio-Cio San faces the choice of suicide, she does so not with the thought of vengeance, but of honor. This is very Japanese.
At the last, then, the cultural identity Madame Butterfly has despised and rejected returns to claim her, but also to give her a final assertion of dignity. Cio-Cio San, the geisha and would-be American housewife, dies a daughter of her native country.♦
To read another review by Steve Cohen, click here.
Consider Cio-Cio San, the orphaned daughter of a once-comfortable family. Now she's reduced to making her living as a geisha, a role she performs but despises. She is, or aspires to be, the Japanese New Woman, free from the crippling conventions of her culture and contemptuous of the empty rituals represented by her censorious uncle, the Bonze (Kirk Eichelberger).
Cio-Cio San latches on to Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton, an American naval lieutenant stationed in Nagasaki (Roger Honeywell), who, fascinated by her charms, agrees to an arranged marriage that, by Japanese law, can be terminated at will.
Licensed fornication
Such marriages were widely understood in turn-of-the-20th-Century Japan as licensed fornication; American officers and other foreigners of rank or wealth could enter temporary liaisons for the duration of their stay, while their "brides" received property, goods or other emoluments in exchange. Such women, using their newly acquired wealth, could then make advantageous matches with Japanese suitors.
Cio-Cio San, however, has no intention of letting Pinkerton go. She banks on her charms to keep him in thrall and to use him as her ticket to America. To accomplish this she must not only feign love but also feel it. It's a big risk, and the birth of a child complicates it. As calculation becomes compounded with genuine passion, however, she grows confident that her gamble will pay off, and that the now-absent Pinkerton will return and take her to the land of her dreams.
The only honorable course
Cio-Cio San loses her bet, with tragic consequences all around. When Pinkerton does return, it is with an American bride. He is willing to acknowledge his child, and his new wife is willing to raise it, but Cio-Cio San has, of course, no place in this retinue. She must return to her calling or commit suicide. The latter, she decides, is the only honorable course.
As depicted by Puccini and his librettists, Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa, Cio-Cio San is a complex and ambivalent figure. The prototype she most resembles, it seems to me, is Euripides's Medea. Like Medea, Cio-Cio San makes a marriage not recognized by the law. Also like Medea, her lover leaves for greener (or at least more racially appropriate) pastures— and, to add insult to injury, wants to deprive her of her only consolation: her child. Both Cio-Cio San and Medea are abruptly deprived of status and exposed to the ridicule of an unsympathetic city; both are deeply wounded in their womanly pride.
Medea's alternatives
Medea, of course, chooses survival and flight; her vengeance comes in the destruction of her rival and, more terribly, of the children she has borne by Jason. Cio-Cio San enjoys no such options. She possesses no magical spells or charms to cast, nor any offer of refuge from the king of a neighboring city. She can wound Pinkerton by killing his child— a child he has never known, and to whom he has formed no attachment— but that would also spare him the awkwardness of raising a racially mixed son and the strains it would no doubt put on his marriage and position.
In contrast, Jason's children represent a royal posterity— future princes, if not kings— and their loss deprives him of his last hope.
If Cio-Cio San seeks revenge (a course she never acknowledges, although we see sign enough of her willful temperament), suicide is her best means of it. Pinkerton will not only be saddled with his love child, but with the daily reminder of the woman he drove to her death. Moreover, he must raise a potential viper in his household, for the boy will sooner or later come to realize his circumstances.
Why weep for her?
If this were all there were to Madame Butterfly, of course, audiences would hardly weep for her. She is a fascinating dramatic character because she really does put all her chips on Pinkerton, and because her passion no less than her pride doesn't permit her to withdraw them.
The bride-price she's been given has diminished with the years, but her Japanese suitor, Yamadori (Elliot Madore), is still willing to take her. She'll have none of him, though; Pinkerton must return, for it's the dream on which she has staked her life.
You believe the genuineness of Cio-Cio San's passion because of the music Puccini has given her, and— in this case— because of the power and beauty of Ermonela Jaho's singing and characterization. The chief supporting cast is a strong one, and the splendid team of Jun Kaneko (set and costume design) and Drew Billiau (lighting) produce a stark but richly imaginative stage for the production.
A variety of color
As in the case of the Opera Company's Rape of Lucretia last season, the basic design element is a sloping platform, here curving around the back to end in a frontal area painted white with concentric black semicircles. Moving screens, descending from the flies or pushed out from the wings, complete the stage paraphernalia; but on this arid-seeming, semi-abstract landscape, Billiau deploys a wondrous variety of color and Photoshop effects to create a continually changing commentary on the mood and action of the drama.
The costumes are part of the scene, not a separate element, and the whole ensemble displays a unity of effect that moves the drama onto the archetypal plane where director Stokes clearly wants it. The result is a production that works with the deeper resonances of the drama, while elevating its more conventional elements.
Not vengeance but honor
Madame Butterfly was one of the first works of Western art to deal with the emergence of modern Japan and its response to the Occidental world. The marriage of convenience between Pinkerton and Cio-Cio San is a part of that cultural collision and the premise on which the whole action of the drama— an interracial love affair— is based. This is historically important, but also secondary to the larger purposes of the drama. Madame Butterfly is ultimately about a great passion, and the mixed and conflicting elements of which it is built. This production gets straight to the heart of it.
Stokes's staging ends, however, with a forceful reassertion of heritage and tradition. When Cio-Cio San faces the choice of suicide, she does so not with the thought of vengeance, but of honor. This is very Japanese.
At the last, then, the cultural identity Madame Butterfly has despised and rejected returns to claim her, but also to give her a final assertion of dignity. Cio-Cio San, the geisha and would-be American housewife, dies a daughter of her native country.♦
To read another review by Steve Cohen, click here.
What, When, Where
Madame Butterfly. Opera by Giacomo Puccini; directed by Cynthia Stokes. Opera Company of Philadelphia production through October 18, 2009 at Academy of Music, Broad and Locust St. (215) 732 – 8400 or operaphila.org.
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