Abstract

Born in Lucca 1858, Giacomo Puccini worked for years to reach the top of his profession. By 1900, Puccini was already the most popular opera composer in the world. At the height of success after other operas, such as Manon Lescaut, La Bohème and Tosca, Puccini settled on a play he had seen in London on 21st June, 1900 – the first British production of Madame Butterfly by American impresario David Belasco, based on the one-act dramatization of John Luther Long’s short story, with the famous actress Blanche Bates in the title role. Although the composer understood almost no English, he instinctively felt the appeal of the story. As Puccini later described it, the effect on him was like “pouring gasoline on an open fire”. Even though he immediately applied to Belasco, it took time to secure the rights to the play, as well as for his librettists, Illica and Giacosa, to fashion a text. In fact, the negotiations with Belasco over rights to the drama dragged on into September 1901, when the anxious composer pressed Illica to begin Madama Butterfly using a translation of Long’s short story. Madama Butterfly is indeed by far the best known opera by Puccini. In fact, multiple versions of the ‘Madame Butterfly’ story exist (both in literary form and in staged and filmed versions), particularly via the following works: the French novel Madame Chrysanthème of 1887 by Pierre Loti, in addition to the tale Madame Butterfly by the American writer John Luther Long, which appeared in the Century Magazine of January 1898. According to Dr. Sandra K. Davis – Butterfly’s faith is based on two wrong assumptions -- unconditional love for a man whom she trusts, and for whom she sacrifices all aspects of her previous life and culture, and her faith in that man’s culture, her ‘American dream’. The opera’s most prominent musical themes, powerfully echoed at dramatic peaks, cluster about these central tragic choices. The ‘cosmic collusion’ of fate, represented most often in authentic Japanese musical themes, challenges her faith throughout the opera. Because Butterfly shares her hamartia with countless women and men throughout history, audiences are drawn deeply into empathy with her situation. But because her voice and melodic contours in Puccini’s orchestral context make her powerful, she becomes an iconic tragic figure of the theater. Since the mid-nineteenth century, the story of ‘Madame Butterfly’ has been an enduring cultural trope. Although it is not the first tale of ‘the soldier and the exotic’, the fundamental issues of race, gender, and imperialism intertwined in Puccini’s popular opera setting have stimulated its continuing representation in popular literature, theater, films, and music, in addition to more formal historical, political, social, and cultural studies, and so on. This paper aims to examine the literary, historical and musical currents that shaped Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, as well as the images of Japanese women in other Western arts forms and literature. This paper also includes transcripts of interviews with an internationally acclaimed Chinese soprano, Ms. Ella Kiang, sharing her thoughts about her interpretations and understanding of the opera Madama Butterfly.