Tomorrow and on Thursday, Opera Siam's 17th season will close with two performances of one of the "top 10" operas, performed over 2,000 times around the world this year alone, Madame Butterfly. It's a tear-jerker, a relentlessly romantic piece full of famous melodies and a can't-lose formulaic plot: boy meets girl, boy dumps girl, girl kills herself.
When you see this opera on the stages of the world, there's one aspect of the story that doesn't get much play: it's about a rich white man who comes to Asia to exploit an innocent, impoverished underaged girl. At the heart of this icon of romanticism lies a sordid transaction with Goro, called a "marriage broker" -- but we would know him as a trafficker.
When Madame Butterfly premiered in 1904, it was a total bomb. Some reasons given: people didn't like an opera "set in modern times", and the hero was just so unlikeable. Well, of course he was. In the original version he had few redeeming features; he was a racist from the beginning, and never really expressed any remorse at having ruined a young girl's life.
Puccini worked hard to make Pinkerton more sympathetic to audiences. In the final version, which is the one that will be performed, he makes fewer overtly racist comments and then adds around 90 seconds of sublimely glorious music in the third act, the aria Addio Fiorito Asil, in an all-out effort to show that this heartless baby-stealer has some humanity. Puccini also removed some of the indications that Butterfly was somewhat more worldly than she is usually portrayed. The rejected version was darker than the one we see today, and was a lot more realistic about the sordid transaction.
The revised edition was a triumph, and Madame Butterfly is currently the sixth-most-frequently performed opera in the world.
In our Bangkok production, we are working with one of the most experienced casts ever -- both our Butterfly, Nancy Yuen, and our American Consul, Phillip Joll, did their roles in the massively sold-out Albert Hall performances three seasons running, and Israel Lozano has sung the role of Pinkerton many, many times. Collectively, this cast has done the opera with all sorts of viewpoints and directorial perspectives and in many traditional and non-traditional permutations.
Producing this opera in Thailand, a country in which this plotline happens for real far too frequently, requires that we not ignore the darkness Puccini originally put into his opera. But so often, the music itself, with its vaulting lyricism, its soaring melodic lines, is telling us no: trafficking or no trafficking, this is a love that is powerful and real.
If you go back to the original short story and the David Belasco play that Puccini saw and adapted, you see a Butterfly much more aware of what is going on, less of a pure innocent. And I think she does know what is going on. Changing her religion is her way of making sure she doesn't get treated like the other short-time wives she's heard of. I think that at first, this relationship is transactional on both sides. But then, Puccini's music tells us in no uncertain terms that the American predator and the Asian victim arrive at genuine love -- that for a short time, that relationship is the real thing. The problem is that, for the man, it doesn't remain real long enough to change him into a different person.
I decided to get at the irony beneath the surface not by disrupting the romantic arc but by finding the ambiguity in the back story. What I'm hoping is that those who come to the production seeking the traditional high-romantic rush will get everything they came for, but those who sense an irony in the storyline will see the ambiguity on the edges of the main story.
Some examples: Goro, the wheeler-dealer, has sold Butterfly and the rent-a-wife deal to Pinkerton for "a mere ¥100", and in the second act he introduces a rich suitor, Yamadori, as everyone assumes Pinkerton is long gone. In our version we introduce a little backstory; at Butterfly's Act I wedding, Yamadori's already negotiating to be Butterfly's next purchaser. Among the foreign guests at the wedding, the future Kate Pinkerton is already present, and though Pinkerton does not notice her, she's already plotting to get her man one day. The guests at the party, even Butterfly's relatives, all know what the real deal is -- this part is explicit in the words they sing, and most of the time we just see a chorus singing prettily in the background.
So many points of view have been taken with this opera that doing something new just for the sake of it seems pointless. Radical solutions, like having Butterfly pull out a gun and shoot Pinkerton in a sort of turn-the-tables triumph, were proposed, but I've settled for something more understated: as Butterfly goes behind the screen doors to commit suicide, we see, in the distance, her child being delivered to Pinkerton and his new wife -- as was the bargain. But Suzuki, Butterfly's maid, appears to tell them something. This prompts Pinkerton to rush to the house, too late to stop the suicide, of course -- but now we see him torn between two worlds; on the one side his romantic love-nest, on the other his new American family, in the distance, with the child that has been purchased at the cost of his mother's life.
Madame Butterfly, with Nancy Yuen, Phillip Joll, Israel Lozano, Damian Whitely and Emanuela Barazia, in a new production by Somtow Sucharitkul, will have two performances only, tomorrow and Thursday, at the Thailand Cultural Center at 8pm. Tickets -- Thailand Cultural Center, Line @operasiam, Eventbrite, or at the door -- 500 to 5,000 baht.
