The Dallas Opera 2021-2022 - Madame Butterfly/Flight

7 MADAME BUTTERFLY ACT THREE The next morning, when Suzuki persuades Cio-Cio-San to get some rest, she carries her son with her into another room, singing him a lullaby. Suzuki is suddenly startled by the arrival of Sharpless, who has brought Pinkerton with him. Seeing a lady in the garden, Suzuki demands to know who she is. Sharpless reveals that this is Pinkerton’s wife, leaving Suzuki devastated. Agonized by his guilt, Pinkerton rushes away. Suzuki agrees to speak with Butterfly, and Kate assures the maid that she will care for the child as if he were her own. Pinkerton hasn’t been gone a moment when Cio-Cio-San’s voice is heard. She appears, wondering why Pinkerton isn’t there. Seeing the woman in the garden, she begins to guess the truth. When Sharpless gently asks her to give up her child, Cio-Cio-San quietly agrees, provided that Pinkerton will come for him in half an hour. After Sharpless and Kate leave, Cio-Cio-San breaks down in despair. Regaining her composure, she sends Suzuki out of the room before taking out her father’s dagger and reading the inscription: “To die with honor when one cannot live with honor.” When Suzuki suddenly pushes Cio-Cio-San’s child into the room, she bids him farewell, begging him never to forget her face. Handing him an American flag, she blindfolds his eyes. She then goes behind a screen and stabs herself, dying as Pinkerton’s voice is heard outside, calling her name. • Like much European art that uses Asian cultures, Madame Butterfly involves both cultural appropriation—where the creators helped themselves to elements of a foreign culture— and projection—where the characters may be from distant lands, but the creators are really writing about their own culture. Puccini was curious about Japan, but didn’t have much access to Japanese people or Japanese culture. Instead, he projected; using a character who was superficially Japanese, he wrote music exploring his own feelings about men and women and sex and motherhood and marriage. The sexual politics of Puccini’s Catholic Italy, with its images of the Cross and two Marys, shine through his Japan. Orientalism—indulging in romantic notions about faraway places—was hugely popular in Puccini’s time, since it allowed European artists to deal with issues (particularly despotism, sexuality, and their intersection) otherwise taboo in European society. However, an artist who helps himself to images originating from a different culture (i.e., appropriating that culture) is likely to misrepresent that culture, or perpetuate stereotypes, or even encourage racism. Some examples from Butterfly : Cio-Cio-San seems to think that being a geisha is dancing in the streets for money and living a vagabond lifestyle, when really the role in Japan is a highly refined entertainer. Her intolerant uncle, the Bonze, is a plot point borrowed from other western operas, not an authentic representation of Japanese religious attitudes. And Puccini’s concept of honor suicide draws more from ancient Rome than it does from contemporary Japan. Since Puccini’s day, Western artists have created dozens of variations on Butterflys’ stereotypical east-west romance, including the hit musical Miss Saigon by Boublil and Schönberg. Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I swaps the genders (it concerns a European woman and an Asian man), but the story’s chauvinistic sex-role stereotypes are still in place. It took Asian American playwright David Henry Hwang’s thought- provoking M. Butterfly to turn this old myth on its head. In Hwang’s version, based on a true story, a French diplomat with a Chinese mistress incorrectly assumes his lover is a woman (when he’s really a man, and a spy). • Written by Jonathan Dean, edited by Gabrielle Nomura Gainor; printed with permission from Seattle Opera PHOTO: KAREN ALMOND PERSPECTIVE