Taiwanese conductor Felix Chen (陳秋盛) once told me he thought Madame Butterfly was Puccini’s most beautiful creation. Now Camphor Press has acquired Starcrossed, about the background to the opera, from Eastbridge Books, and absorbing reading it indeed makes.
The opera is set in Nagasaki, and Burke-Gaffney treats us to a history of that city as, at times, the only Japanese port open to foreigners. This is followed by the story of its licensed prostitution and temporary “Japanese marriages,” then by the sequence of publications that led up to the stage play by US director and playwright David Belasco that Puccini, by pure chance, saw in London in 1900.
He then considers all the many claims to have discovered the original of Cho-Cho-San, or Butterfly, but dismisses them all. He also rejects the claims that Glover House in Nagasaki, the 19th century home of the Scottish industrialist and entrepreneur Thomas Glover, was the site at which the story was originally played out.
The opera tells of how a 15-year-old girl is introduced to a US Navy lieutenant, Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton, and becomes his wife. Pinkerton considers this only a temporary arrangement on the Nagasaki pattern, but for Butterfly it is a romantic attachment that will last forever. When Pinkerton leaves for the US she awaits his return with heart-breaking loyalty, singing her famous aria Un bel di vedremo (One fine day he will come) in answer to the advice of her servant, Suzuki, that she should find a Japanese husband before it’s too late.
When Pinkerton does return, it’s with an American wife, and what they want is custody of his and Butterfly’s son, Trouble. When Butterfly discovers this she tells her son to go to them and then kills herself with her father’s samurai sword.
There isn’t much analysis of the opera itself in the book apart from information about changes that were made after the disastrous opening night, after which it closed to await alterations. When it re-opened in May 1904 it quickly became a world-wide sensation. The then UK queen attended three performances in succession in London in 1905.
Puccini, who didn’t speak a word of English, had gone to London to attend the UK premiere of his previous opera, Tosca, at Covent Garden. While there he went to a performance of the play Madame Butterfly and was so overcome he implored Belasco backstage to let him make an opera out of it. He may not have understood English, but he would certainly have been taken aback by the 14 minutes of silence in which nothing was said, with only the coming on of night and the sound of birds accompanying Butterfly’s vigil, with her young son, as they wait for Pinkerton’s return the next morning. You can’t have 14 minutes of silence in an opera, so Puccini wrote his now celebrated Humming Chorus to fill the gap.
Anyone interested in getting to know Madama Butterfly should try to get hold of the DVD directed by Frederic Mitterand which has the incomparable advantage of an Asian singer, the Chinese soprano Huang Ying (黃英), in the title role. It was filmed in Tunisia, with appropriate adjustments to indicate a Japanese setting, but may be hard to find these days.
The opera’s early success was in a way paradoxical because it coincided with an era of intense, albeit not universal, anti-Japanese sentiment in the US. Tokyo had declared war on Russia in 1904, in 1906 the San Francisco Board of Education passed a resolution to exclude Japanese children from public schools and only the intervention of US president Theodore Roosevelt, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for mediating between Japan and Russia, helped calm things down.
Japan, in other words, was the rising power, industrially and militarily, in East Asia. It had, of course, acquired Taiwan after winning the First Sino-Japanese War in 1895. But Puccini’s opera depicted it as an exotic, even quaint, society at the mercy of marauding Americans like Pinkerton. The first literary text Burke-Gaffney discusses is Pierre Loti’s Madame Chrysantheme of 1887. Loti, unlike many of the writers who followed him, had actually been to Nagasaki (in 1885, when he stayed a month), and the world he depicted was certainly more exotic that the one that was even then being born.
The opera also suffered initially from the absurdity of large sopranos of advancing years endeavoring to portray a 15-year-old Japanese girl. A solution was eventually found when Tamaki Miura, a Japanese soprano — a new phenomenon for most Americans — began to take the role in productions across the country.
Other factors — the bad behavior of an American naval officer, the under-age status of the female lead — would have been problematical had not the extraordinary beauty of the music won all hearts. The sober wisdom of the US consul, Sharpless, also qualified the potentially anti-US implications of the story. But Japan was a country that at the time few Americans or Europeans believed could ever be a threat to them. Pearl Harbor, and the subsequent atomic bombing of Nagasaki, were still decades away.
Other interesting topics covered in the book are the activities of the Mitsubishi Corporation in building what was to be the world’s largest battleship in Nagasaki, and the intense interest of Vincent van Gogh in all things Japanese, including the influence of Japanese art on his painting style. Much of the interest in Japan, and Nagasaki in particular, at the end of the 19th century was covertly erotic, and Van Gogh’s interest was probably colored by this as well. The country represented many things that were uncharacteristic of Europe at the time, and brightly-colored, non-representative art and a different attitude to sex were certainly two of them.
Starcrossed is a handy and trustworthy guide to all this, even though it displays no trace of the author’s having spent nine years in a Zen monastery in the 1970s. An interview with Burke-Gaffney can be found at http://bookish.asia/author-interview-brian-burke-gaffney
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