The
word “Diva” gets thrown around a lot, and tends to evoke images of spoiled
performers trashing hotel rooms. The term refers back to goddesses, female
singers who arouse a connection to the divine within us as we watch and listen.
Mirella Freni is a diva. So is Christa Ludwig. Freni sings with a palette of
delicate colors, opening out to a full-throated forte when necessary. Her acting
is calibrated to the finest detail and her ability to believe in what she is
doing – coupled with her petite and winsome beauty – create an enthralling
character. Ludwig combines two almost contradictory skills, magnetic attraction
of focus and the ability to refract focus, to make the viewer follow her eyes to whatever she
herself is focusing on. She sings well-nigh perfectly but Suzuki is mainly an
acting assignment and she extracts every ounce of juice from her part. Together the two divas create a world of love and support with cross currents of mistress/servant and
even mother/daughter relationships.
The
male side of the opera offers less loveable figures. Robert Kerns plays a Sharpless
who knows what will happen but stays within his job description and isn’t comfortable interfering.
The dead-end exhaustion of his job surfaces as he pulls out his flask for
fortification: another out-of-place American doing foreign service under a
volcano. Michel Sénéchal’s Goro is a fascinatingly hideous racist caricature, simpering
through his buck teeth. Placido Domingo veers from engaging to hammy, allowing
an older theatrical vocabulary – more suggestive of the Duke of Mantua – to flavor
his American sailor cad.
The
Vienna Philharmonic and Herbert von Karajan play the lushest Puccini
imagineable, mostly at very expansive tempi. The range of dynamics and the
wealth of detail more than balance the occasional moment of inertia.
Jean-Pierre
Ponnelle adds a fair amount of visual freedom to what is still essentially a
stage production. Interior monologue lines are filmed as voice-overs. There are
several effective daydream sequences. But the much-mentioned sea with its wide
horizon never actually appears. There are several directorial missteps: how can
Pinkerton sing of her first sight of his mother-in-law when she was so
prominently featured few pages before? How can Butterfly shy away from
revealing her sacred objects on the grounds that there are too many people
around when she and Pinkerton are alone in an interior room? These problems
vanish if the subtitles are off! Butterfly embraces her husband’s country and
religion by dressing western style and redecorating – but her idea of
Christianity is filtered through a European Catholic lens. The devotional
picture of Jesus she keeps on her sideboard does not suggest mainstream US
culture from the age of Teddy Roosevelt! Ponnelle does not solve the riddle of
how to stage an extremely sexy love duet and not have it look tame and stagey.
The end of Act 1, a beautiful shot of Butterfly looking up at the stars as
Pinkerton drifts sleepwards on her breast does not suggest that Trouble will be
born nine months later.
Madama
Butterfly contains a huge and upsetting cultural conundrum. Two actually. Maybe
even three. One is about cross cultural relationships, another about the
relative roles of men and women, and a third could be a coded gay subtext. Our
heroine loves at sight, gives herself so completely that she loses any sense of
individuality apart from her role as wife, subordinates herself to a man’s
identity, and acts as an avatar for hopeless unreturned love. In the first act
we can adore her and worry about her. In the second we can feel pity and still
root for her. But the final scene poses problems that require solutions far
different from the one that the playwright (Belasco) has imposed on us. I know, I am
using modern cultural awareness to judge the art of another time! But the idea
that Butterfly must die rather than live with dishonor is bad enough – the thought
that she is required to give up her child rather than receive child support
from the child’s father is unthinkable (to me!). Ponnelle makes the final scene
a great deal more cruel than I think it needs to be, with Suzuki dutifully
preparing Butterfly for her suicide (horrifying but still touching) and then
Butterfly waiting to cut her throat until Pinkerton bursts in and she can
imprint her death on him. Her suicide becomes an act of aggression, a
punishment. Not at all the self-sacrifice that seems inherent in the story. I
suddenly hated her. I understood her rage but it seemed inappropriate, pasted
on, utterly unlike anything she had done, said, sung, or been for the previous two
and half hours/three years of the opera and its story. What a pity that so much
utterly gorgeous and moving music is wedded to a plot so limited by its
cultural assumptions. It may record a way of living, but it isn’t a picture I
want to wallow in.
2 comments:
I question why you feel that Butterfly, given her samurai-caste father's history of committing seppuku and the huge amount she had staked on her relationship with Pinkerton, could just casually negotiate child support and continue to live in a highly socially degraded condition. As late as 1970, "westerners" saw the loss of honor ritual work itself out when Yukio Mishima committed seppuku with the assistance of a follower who then immediately followed him in death according to the ancient imperative.
A contemporary example is that of Isao Inokuma, a Jdo champion who committed seppuku in 2001 over financial losses he had caused for the company he headed.
The female form, the one Butterfly would use, is called jigai and is somewhat different. If you see a soprano tying a long red sash around her legs while in a kneeling position so that they cannot flail about as she's killing herself, you know that she and/or the director know what they're doing.
The central issue -- why does she do it -- may well be answered by asking what would the mixed- race son's future be in Japan with a mother who had become totally degraded and a grandfather who had been ordered to kill himself? If her father's suicide had left Butterfly with nothing but the life as a geisha/rental bride as an option, what could his fate possibly be? One dies still wonder a bit what his life would be like in the United States at that time, but Butterfly probably figures it would be a good bit better since we know her image of life in America is filtered through rose colored glasses.
The sash was white but it served its purpose. And I acknowledge the correctness of all you say. It's just that I don't want to think about worlds of such cruelty, however accurate their depiction for their time. My main gripe though was the transformation of Butterfly's suicide from an act of sacrifice for the child to an act of vengeance, done right before Pinkerton's eyes. She became a harpy in her final moments. Not a Puccini little woman at all!
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