The story of an Asian woman waiting for her American lover to return and carry her off to a new life far away must stir not a few hearts here in Taiwan.
Even today Madame Butterfly, which opens in Taipei's National Theater Sept. 22, encapsulates the emotions that cluster round so many relationships in Asia, which are far more frequently between local women and foreign men than vice-versa.
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE TAIPEI SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
Puccini's 1904 opera is set in Nagasaki when Japan had only recently been opened to foreigners. A US Navy lieutenant, Pinkerton, arrives to take as his "local" bride the 15-year old Butterfly. He regards the arranged marriage as a bit of a joke -- one day he will go home and marry a "real," in other words American, wife. The innocent Butterfly, however, understands nothing of this, as she tells Sharpless, the American Consul, that she finds Pinkerton the best man in the world. Her servant Suzuki, who learns the truth about him before she does, dares not disillusion her.
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE TAIPEI SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
Tragedy is implicit in the initial situation. But it unfolds slowly, through a series of delicately moving scenes, ending with Butterfly's suicide and the departure for America with her child of Pinkerton and his new, "real" wife, Kate.
"The truth is that I'm directing this production myself to economize for our opera program," says Felix Chen (
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE TAIPEI SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
Opera's a complicated thing to mount. Earlier this week Chen was indicating their stage positions to the singers in a mixture of English, Chinese and Italian. The day before he had been conducting his Taipei Symphony Orchestra in separate rehearsals at their Pateh Road headquarters.
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE TAIPEI SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
Matters are not made easier by the necessity of rehearsing each scene twice, once with each of two sets of soloists. Double casting is a common device in opera to save the main singers' voices from strain.
"I love this music," says Taiwan's Mewas Lin (林惠珍), one of the two sopranos playing Butterfly. "I almost cry every time I sing the last aria. The heart of the typical Asian woman is like this -- strong, and patiently waiting for her man to return. But another way of looking at it is that this is an opera about a bad man and what you could call a rather stupid woman."
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE TAIPEI SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
The scene is a rehearsal room high in the National Theater building. As the melody of Un bel di (One fine day, the opera's most famous aria) rises from the piano, tenor Jason Lavender (one of the Pinkertons) is doing The Times crossword puzzle, soprano Huey-ru Tang (the other Butterfly) is trying to fix a flower in her hair, and the children waiting to rehearse the mute role of her five-year old son are doing their homework at a table in the corner. Rehearsals started early in the month and will now continue daily without break until the premiere on Sept. 22.
Lavender, from the UK, said he was an understudy of Pavarotti at New York's Metropolitan Opera, but that the high point of his career so far was probably singing the role of Pierre in the first complete recording of Prokofiev's opera War and Peace on the Chandos label.
"Mozart wrote his operas directly as an orchestral score," says Lavender. "He wrote so much he didn't have time to do it any other way. But Puccini wrote his operas first as piano scores, and I think you can hear this in the eventual orchestration. But Butterfly's a stunning score, don't you think so?"
"And this rehearsal pianist [Cecilia Chen], by the way, is wonderful! It's an enormously difficult job, and she does it magnificently!" The other Pinkerton is Steven Harrison from New York. He was heard as Rodolfo in La Boheme here earlier in the year, and as Cavaradossi in Tosca in Hong Kong, both tenor leads. But this is his first Pinkerton in the original Italian. He did sing it once in Germany, but in German, he says laughing, modestly disregarding the enormous amount of hard work opera singers need to undertake to keep up with the competition.
It would be wrong to compare the two casts for next week's production -- all the artists bring strengths of different kinds to their roles. There is certainly no question of either cast being the better, and real enthusiasts should try to hear them both.
An impromptu discussion ensues over Pinkerton's shoes. Should they be white or black with a naval officer's white tropical uniform? The matter is settled, and someone from the costume team makes a note in a folder.
It's one of the features of opera productions that the constituent parts -- soloists, chorus, orchestra, scenic artists, and the props and costumes department -- all prepare independently for several weeks. Then, over a few days, they coalesce, and suddenly the show is ready. A handful of performances take place, and then everything is dismantled, and the visiting soloists fly off to different roles in different opera houses, maybe halfway around the world.
New Zealand's Barry Mora, one of the two baritones singing Sharpless, will go from here to Lausanne, Switzerland, where he will sing in Shostakovich's satirical opera The Nose. The other Sharpless, Bei Yu-Hsi (
One of the great paradoxes of Western opera in Taiwan is that imported productions are expensive and sometimes of poor quality, whereas the homegrown ones are modestly priced and almost always excellent. The problem is that local patrons don't necessarily see things this way, and the idea that the foreign product is better dies hard.
The recent stagings of Turandot by a Latvian touring troupe and of Rigoletto by an American group fell woefully short of the quality of the original works they were performing. By contrast, the Taipei production of La Boheme earlier this year was outstandingly good, and the local Turandot from this year incomparably superior to the imported version.
The reality is that homegrown Taiwan productions have the advantage of lower costs, resident salaried orchestras, creative people eager to work, and a significant degree of subsidy from the city governments concerned.
With top prices of only NT$1,200, this production is likely to sell out for all performances. Currently there is a range of seats available for Sept. 24 and Sept. 25, but only a few left at the top price for the weekend performances on Sept. 22 and Sept. 23.
As I left the rehearsal room, the sound of Butterfly's lyrical opening words came soaring from behind me. It was Tang Huey-ru (
Madame Butterfly plays from Sept. 22 to Sept. 25 at the National Theater, Taipei. Felix Chen conducts the Taipei Symphony Orchestra and the stage manager is Fang Lu-yun (方淥芸). The leading roles will be sung as follows: Sept. 22 and Sept. 24, Butterfly: Tang Huey-ru, Pinkerton: Steven Harrison, Sharpless: Bei Yu-hsi, Suzuki: Lin Chia-wen (林佳文); Sept. 23 and Sept. 25, Butterfly: Mewas Lin, Pinkerton: Justin Lavender, Sharpless: Barry Mora, Suzuki: Chen Hsin-an (陳興安). Ticket prices range from NT$400 to NT$1,200. Performances begin at 7pm.
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