The Dallas Opera 2021-2022 - Madame Butterfly/Flight

8 LOSING YOUR HEART TO CIO-CIO-SAN A great performance of Giacomo Puccini’s Madame Butterfly can change your life—it’s that simple. When the soprano singing the title role totally immerses herself in the music, while acting the character with complete sincerity, she takes her audience on an extraordinary emotional journey. That makes Butterfly ideal for first-timers at the opera. They’ll be stunned not only by Puccini’s breathtaking music, but also by the dramatic impact that is possible in the art form of opera itself. In 1904, when Butterfly was introduced, 45-year-old Puccini had already entered his creative prime, with five operas behind him: one fair success ( Le villi ), one disaster ( Edgar ), and three absolute triumphs ( Manon Lescaut , La bohème , Tosca ). No longer was he proclaimed the successor to Verdi—he stood on his own. He’d shown the world that he had everything for opera, including a gift for soaring melodies, phenomenal facility and imagination as an orchestrator, and an innate sense of what made for great theater onstage. Butterfly , surprisingly, was a fiasco at its Milan premiere, but three months later, after significant revisions, it was remounted in Brescia and hailed as a masterpiece. Puccini tended to fall in love with his heroines. A dashingly handsome figure with a haughty, imperious wife, he had numerous affairs, but perhaps his greatest refuge emotionally was found in the women who graced his operas—especially Bohème’s Mimì and Butterfly’s Cio-Cio-San. Bringing these beautiful, sensitive, intensely loving characters to life through his music gave him enormous joy, even if composing their tragic final scenes broke his heart. The opera unfolds in turn-of-the- century Nagasaki, Japan, where Cio- Cio-San has abandoned both her life as a geisha and her religion to marry an American naval lieutenant, B F. Pinkerton. After he leaves Nagasaki (promising to come back “when the robins are nesting”), she bears his child, of whom he knows nothing. Returning three years later accompanied by his American wife, Pinkerton is informed by the American consul, Sharpless, that he has a son. Sharpless then fulfills Pinkerton’s wish by persuading Cio-Cio-San to give the boy up so that he can be raised in America. Heartbroken, she agrees, provided that Pinkerton will come for him in half an hour. Cio-Cio-San then commits ritual suicide, dying as Pinkerton’s voice is heard calling her name. Puccini first lost his heart to Cio- Cio-San in 1900 in London, where he saw David Belasco’s play Madame Butterfly . The American playwright/ director/producer had adapted a short story by American lawyer and writer John Luther Long. Onstage, however, there was a huge change from Long’s story: Belasco had the heroine die at the end. He also created something unique for theater of that time, and truly mesmerizing: when Cio-Cio-San and her maid Suzuki are preparing for Pinkerton’s return, 14 minutes passed Puccini’s unforgettably poignant heroine returns to The Dallas Opera By Roger Pines THE DALLAS OPERA | 2021/2022 SEASON