The Boston Lyric Opera’s Madama Butterfly emerged this month in colorful flair, premiering a new staging of Puccini’s beloved drama. The singers and orchestra of the BLO delivered a passionate performance of Puccini’s opera, while incorporating several changes in text and setting to reckon with Butterfly’s complicated history.
For the past couple years, the Boston Lyric Opera has presented the Butterfly Process, a series of discussions about the issues surrounding Madama Butterfly featuring Asian creatives and scholars. These topics have particular salience given the wave of anti-Asian violence in the wake of the pandemic. Now, this article is not the place to debate these matters in fine detail —recordings of the Butterfly Process events are publicly available along with many other educational resources. But it is important to recognize the complicated legacy that opera makers and audiences are engaging with, even if briefly.
Puccini’s imagined Japan is informed and populated by fantasy over genuine essence; instead of existing on its own terms, it can only exist as an other in relation to a familiar society assumed as “normal.” Madama Butterfly plays into long-standing stereotypes such as the submissive, seductive Asian woman; the score signifies a vague Asianness through devices such as pentatonic scales and parallel intervals. Butterfly is not alone; complex musical traditions are reduced to simple signs in our popular sound-lexicon all too regularly (for example, Hollywood’s “Oriental riff”).
One could frame these attempts to represent Japan and “the East” as positive comments. Japonisme was, in some way, a result of real fascination and admiration of a foreign culture. But characterizing persons or cultures as “exotic” without recognizing or representing their underlying depth constitutes a gilded offering. Under the fawning smile lurks a patronizing gaze….
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