The Call of LOVE

Puccini’s Madame Butterfly at Houston Grand Opera
by Patrick Summers

Fifteen years ago, conducting Madame Butterfly in Sydney, Australia, I received a passionate letter from a patron who had attended our opening night performance. “It’s just too loud,” the letter said, “I mean, the end of Madame Butterfly. You should play something really quiet at the end. It would be more tender.” I gently wrote back saying I had no real choice in the matter, that I was bound to Giacomo Puccini’s scoring of the final moments of the opera, which are loud indeed: the entire orchestra playing the theme of Cio-Cio-San’s private shame, music she has sung in the work’s second act, in unison octaves, ending in what we are led to believe will be a dramatic B minor, but with a bizarre shift to G major in the final measure, a sonic surprise that is still unsettling. I wrote back to him, explaining the scoring, and that Puccini had made the choice to end the opera with a violent outburst, that there are a lot of choices to be made in the performance of an opera, but we don’t actually have the choice to change notes, orchestrations, or dynamics; those choices have been made for us by the composer. I invited him to attend again, and he was kind, but I think he would have preferred his own ending.

His letter has always stayed with me, not because I agreed with him in any way, but because it exemplifies the exuberantly passionate reactions Puccini’s perennial Madame Butterfly has always induced in opera fans.

“Povera Butterfly!” (“Poor Butterfly!”), sings Suzuki in the opera’s final act, though we might well say “Povero Puccini!” The composer of three of the world’s most popular operas, Madame Butterfly, Tosca and La bohème, Giacomo Puccini (1858–1922) has always been treated contemptuously by all but the very upper echelon of critics, particularly when one considers the effusive approbations showered onto other composers of his era: Mahler, Stravinsky, Richard Strauss and Jean Sibelius, among others, who are invariably classified within the pantheon of the earlier masters. Puccini was maligned for everything: for the attention-grabbing (i.e. non-Italian) settings of many of his operas; for effeminacy, as in the particular appeal of his operas to women, proof of their lack of profundity within the misogyny of the period. He was accused of recycling his own music, even after he proved to be the most original and clever of his age. Puccini was expected to assume the operatic mantle of Verdi, whose death in 1901 left newly united Italy without its unifying figurehead. Puccini was in every way a lighter hearted man, a true child of the golden age that ended the 19th Century and before the horrors of the First World War. He aspired only to entertain and transport; he exerted no desire or ambition to write the darkly psychological and dense works penned by Wagner, and one could scarcely imagine Puccini reading and adoring Italian translations of Shakespeare, as Verdi had regularly, inspiring the great older composer to a late-in-life renaissance of two deeply great operas, Otello and Falstaff. In an art form where aesthetics so freely float, it seems pedantic in the extreme to accuse Puccini of failing to achieve a philosophical profundity to which he didn’t aspire.

Puccini’s comely Madame Butterfly is utterly beloved by the operatic public, and it is one of the few operas with its own additional audience, fans who wouldn’t dream of sitting down to Don Giovanni. It has handily survived the vast number of interpretational eccentricities foisted upon it, but it almost didn’t survive its world premiere at Teatro alla Scala in 1904—a night so filled with poison and partisan jealousy that it threatened to bury the work forever. Initially, it appeared that the vicious cabal that launched the audience on the attack had succeeded; Puccini withdrew his opera before the second performance. Historians have tried to piece together the reason for the failure, but it’s fairly clear, given human nature: too many other Italian composers and, more likely, music publishers had a vested interest in the failure of any Puccini world premiere. Puccini refunded his commission money to La Scala, and in place of the scheduled second performance, the company performed Gounod’s Faust. Puccini revised the work for the Italian city of Brescia, where it was a success. London heard the work a little over a year later, and by the time Puccini’s “piccolo Giapponese” made it to New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 1907, starring the famed Geraldine Ferrar and Enrico Caruso, conducted by Toscanini, the work was fully resuscitated from its rocky initiation.

The genesis of Puccini’s opera is well documented, if often somewhat embellished for dramatic effect: he was in London for the British premiere of his Tosca when he saw a one act play by David Belasco, Madam Butterfly, based on a short story by John Luther Long, Madame Butterfly (the “Madam”, “Madame”, and “Madama” distinctions are rarely made today; the opera is called by all three). John Luther Long’s popular short story was itself based partly on Pierre Loti’s Madame Crysanthème and on stories by his sister Jeanne, who had lived in Nagasaki in the late nineteenth century, about a poor geisha girl abandoned by a foreign husband and driven to despair. Much has been made of the fact that Puccini spoke barely a word of English when he attended Belasco’s play, but it’s probably a good thing; one reads this play now and cringes at the syrupy writing and ethnically clichéd Asian English-isms. Let’s just say, you’re quite unlikely to see a revival of it. Not surprisingly, since he couldn’t understand a word of the play, the scenes that made a lasting impression on him, and which are given the most memorably dramatic music in the opera, are the scenes of the all-night vigil, for which Puccini wrote the atmospheric “humming” chorus, and the final tragic scene, both inventions of Belasco not found in the source materials. John Luther Long’s story is a delightful period piece, appearing as it does only a few years after Japan was opened to the trading west in 1860, the same temporal distance between right now and the Reagan administration. The exoticism of Asia so intoxicating to the European and American world was made even more so by the burgeoning art form of photography. Japanese art swept the world as well, as painting and ceramic techniques from the land of rising sun were taken up by Manet, Monet, Degas, and a host of others.

Many types of sopranos have enjoyed success in the huge title role. Rosina Storchio, the first Cio-Cio-San, was a lighter voice, a Susanna in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, and Gretel (Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel). Verdian sopranos of a heavier variety have also sung the part. One of Puccini’s favorite interpreters of the role was Italian soprano Toti dal Monte, a famous Gilda in Rigoletto, among many other lighter roles. Puccini talked about dal Monte’s sfumato quality, a word not usually associated with music, but with Italian painting, as it was one of the four qualities of Renaissance brush work, perfected by Leonardo da Vinci: an ability to shade, to draw a veil over a scene. Our heroine here at HGO, Ana María Martínez, whose youthful voice and truthful artistry I have always associated with precisely that same sfumato, now assumes this beautiful role for the first time.

Madame Butterfly is a marvel of orchestral transparency and color, with hundreds of details adding up to a work of incredible fragility and sweetness, so easy on the ear and so familiar that one can overlook its incredible skill. There are few passages in opera as entrancing as the Act One–entrance of Cio-Cio-San. Firstly, the words are utterly honest, childlike and sadly prescient, “I have answered love’s call…I came to love’s threshold where the good is gathered of those who live and those who die.” A delicate solo violin, viola, and cello, with lush answering chords on the harp and glockenspiel, accompany her to the stage. The scene of her denunciation by the Bonze is fantastically orchestrated; it builds up an enormous amount of exciting energy, a sonic world of dense tension that contrasts with everything we’ve heard previously in the opera, with all of Cio-Cio-San’s lighter musings. Pinkerton, so often dismissed as just a bad guy, is more complicated than facile opinion would have him be. He is a naïve youngster, lost in what he considers to be a play land, traveling where he’s sure he’ll never be again, and his music is that of a swaggering and overly confident frat boy, not a monster. His heartfelt and touchingly remorseful third-act aria inevitably feels false to today’s audiences who are so accustomed to far more scripted displays of remorse. Interestingly, after several revisions, he became B.F. Pinkerton, short for Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton, but in early versions he was, improbably, Sir Francis Blummy Pinkerton, and the resulting initials, F.B. strangely survived in many extant live recordings of the early century, despite the Imperial Commissioner calling him by his full and correct name moments before.

Puccini’s musical quote of “The Star Spangled Banner” is interesting. The tune is very old, written in the 1760s for the Anacreontic Society, a London men’s club named after the bawdy Greek poems of Anacreon. Fifty years later, Francis Scott Key wrote his poem to commemorate a battle of the War of 1812. Key has an interesting Texan connection; he was only an amateur poet — by profession he was an attorney, and he was the defense for Sam Houston himself, in his trial for assaulting a fellow congressman, which forced his immigration to what was then Mexican Texas. Only in the Hoover Presidency, in 1931, did the song become the official anthem of the United States. In 1904, it would have had specific associations only with the U.S. Navy, who in the late 1880s had begun to play the song upon arrival in foreign ports. Puccini uses the music several times later in the opera, most movingly sung by Cio-Cio-San triumphantly declaring the triumph of her faith that her long-lost husband will return on the USS Abraham Lincoln.

We hear the opera’s only authentically Japanese melody at the end of Cio-Cio-San’s entrance music. A short time later in Act One, Puccini transforms this music into one of Madame Butterfly’s most affecting passages, a brief and childlike aria accompanied by a quietly fluttering harp. One of opera’s most beloved heroines confesses that she will happily forego the religion of her youth to accept the foreign faith of her new husband. In a subtle microcosm of cultural destiny, masked by exotic beauty and momentary expectation, the inexorable tragedy is set quietly into motion.

Io seguo il mio destino e piena d’umilta,
Al Dio del signor Pinkerton m’inchino.
È mio destino.
Nella stessa chiesetta in ginocchio con voi
pregherò lo stesso Dio.

I follow my destiny and, full of humility,
I bow to Mr. Pinkerton’s God. It is my destiny.
In the same little church, kneeling with you,
I’ll pray to the same God.

Patrick Summers
Music Director
Houston, Texas
September 7, 2010