You can try to resist the melancholy notes of Puccini. You can resolve to get through the opera without it consuming you but Act one is slow to develop and deceptively lighter. It unfurls little by little giving time for the music to seep into your bloodstream, a steady drip, drip of delicate arias and love duets with just some hints of the darkness that is waiting, forever waiting in the distance.
Against a backdrop of Japanese trees and blossoms and sliding doors, Butterfly or Cio-Cio San is ready to marry her American Pinkerton. The stage set is traditional but effective, the sliding doors transforming the space simply but swiftly, shutting away areas and focusing the attention on different quarters.
The lighting is also minimal yet, at key moments, bathing the screens in red or sad blue, accompanied by the darker orchestral notes signifying treachery and tragedy to come. Puccini delicately ghosts in oriental touches to his music, just a gentle suggestion in the floating notes in “Madama Butterfly”, not the heavier oriental leitmotifs of “Turandot”.
The moment of pain and sadness hits with such force in Act two with the opera’s most famous aria, “Un bel di”, and closing with “‘Coro a bocca chiusa”’ (the Humming Chorus) as Cio-Cio San waits in vain. She still has hope as her child and the ever-loyal Suzuki sleep while she stays awake all night as the colours change from darkness into dawn.
This is the turning point where the composer has you in his grip. Gabriella Létay Kiss is perfectly cast as the delicate-as-crystal Butterfly, from her shy beginnings as a bride, growing more powerful with her sensational voice and emotions until the final overpowering finale in Act three.
Her pain is tangible and her maid, Suzuki, played by Andrea Ulbrich, forever sweet and forever trying to prevent Butterfly suffering as she waits every day for Pinkerton’s ship to return to Nagasaki.
Puccini’s opera comes under fire for being a simplistic story; part of the trouble is in the libretto itself which had limitations, but being Japan, this is Zen living. Butterfly has everything she needs in a wooden box at the opening of the opera; her new life with Pinkerton in the house on the hill needs nothing else.
Further on her life is reduced to waiting, waiting every day for him to return from overseas. Hoping, weeping and waiting for three years. There are people everywhere who might wait longer, praying that their lost love will return. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.
To live life without hope is not to live at all. Suzuki, her family and everyone try to crush her hope but Cio-Cio San will not hear of it. She knows he will come back to her.
I saw Cio-Cio San’s death as tragic on the first viewing of this opera, but over time I saw in her suicide a nobility and a strong vengeance, a desire to punish her lost love for eternity. With one slash of the blade of her father’s hara-kiri knife she says without words, “I will haunt you forever and I will die with nobility as my ancestors would”.
Cio-Cio San is stronger than the fragile girl she appears. Hope dashed and smashed into a million pieces, she has no choice but to die. Her uncle has already damned her for renouncing her ancestral religion and embracing Christianity and Americanism. Everyone around her is critical and cruel, except for Suzuki.
Pinkerton is for me the most despicable character in opera. He is worse than any murderous villain. He wears his American colours with pride yet he is a coward and a scheming, greedy man who has no thought for the tender 15-year-old Butterfly.
He fully intends to leave her when he returns to America and take a new bride. Despite the beautiful and tender love duet in Act One, he is already planning his exit, making full use of the flexible Japanese divorce law.
When he learns of the child he had with Cio-Cio San, he returns to Nagasaki not to rejoice in his reunion with Butterfly but to take her son away from her back to America with his new bride.
He broke her heart and now he breaks her life. István Kovácsházi as Pinkerton shows shreds of remorse when he realises Butterfly has set out the house just as he left it with delicate blossoms adorning the rooms, but not enough remorse, not nearly enough. As she bleeds out in his arms, I hope he suffers eternally.
Climbing the Calvari Steps in Mallorca, 365 of them in the burning heat to mark the days of the year thinking to myself that maybe he will come back. But he never did and he never will. Kneeling before crucifix after crucifix in Spanish cathedrals praying for “Un bel di” as Butterfly did. But no one was listening, least of all God. Yes, I understand Butterfly clinging to the last splinters of hope until the end. I understand her well.
“Con onor muore.”
“Madama Butterfly”
Hungarian State Opera
Opera House, Andrássy út 22, District VI
Until Saturday December 5
Tickets and information:
www.jegymester.hu/eng
