'Madame Butterfly' opera speaks of wasted love

By Arif Suryobuwono

JAKARTA (JP): Your people shall be my people, and your God my God; where you die I will die, and there will I be buried.

This is one of the strongest expressions of love and faith fulness in the Bible. But in Madame Butterfly, a three-act opera by Italian composer Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924), this earnest message goes into one ear and out the other.

For a Japanese geisha called Butterfly, Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton is not just a U.S. Navy lieutenant. He is her life. She even goes as far as abandoning her religion, adopting his and regarding herself as American. But for him, she is just like one of the many harbors which provide anchorage for his ship.

On Saturday night, a group from the Opera and Concert Productions Ltd. of Cheshire, England, staged almost the entire opera in English at the Grand Hyatt Hotel Jakarta. The props succeeded in evoking a Japanese atmosphere although the table and chairs were clearly not Japanese.

Musically speaking, it was a good performance even though it was accompanied only by a solo piano, not an orchestra. Because of this, the rather sudden end in Butterfly's voice at the end of aria Un bel di vedremo, which describes how her lover's ship will arrive in Nagasaki harbor, was quite apparent.

Butterfly, played by Canadian soprano Constance Novis, did not end the very last part of the aria as smoothly as Maria Callas did in her recording with the orchestra of Milan's La Scala opera house in August 1955.

Moreover, Novis, despite her bright kimono and overly powdered face, is obviously neither a girl nor Japanese as Cio-cio San or Madame Butterfly should be. Hence, the audience burst out laughing when she told Pinkerton that she was fifteen.

The audience also laughed at learning that the name of Butterfly's maidservant is Suzuki (convincingly played by mezzo- soprano Debra Stuart), Suzuki being a Japanese car.

For such a complex and demanding role like Butterfly, however, finding a mature soprano of 15 is impossible. So Novis' overall performance does deserve praise. She expertly acted out Butterfly's excessive emotional dependency on Pinkerton, and her anger at marriage broker Goro for spreading rumors about her illegitimate child, and gave the audience a real sense of her anguish.

However, Novis' affecting performance, (A for freedom of expression), runs counter to Japanese culture where feelings, even good ones, are not normally conveyed with the spontaneity and transparency that Butterfly displays.

This is perhaps the greatest flaw in Puccini's work and clearly also an irony given that Puccini was a leading proponent of realism in the verismo style.

The verismo movement in the last decades of the 18th century preferred plots based on contemporary life. This explains why he decided that a love story between a U.S. Navy lieutenant and a Japanese girl by American playwright David Belasco was suitable for an operatic treatment. But this does not explain why a Japanese girl should vent her emotions in such a decidedly Western manner.

If Puccini were confronted with this "why," he might answer, "I never studied Japanology," echoing the "I never studied ornithology" retort by Sharpless, the U.S. consul at Nagasaki, in answer to Butterfly's inquiry as to how often robins nest in America.

Sharpless comes to Butterfly three years after Pinkerton left her and promised to return. Pinkerton's ship will be arriving soon, Sharpless says, but he does not want to see her. He already has a "real American wife" (acted by an Indonesian girl who kept quiet and did not sing).

Feeling unable to tell the news to Butterfly, Sharpless (played by baritone Meurig Davies) asked her what she would do if her husband never returned. She could become a geisha again, she says -- or better still, die.

Sharpless advises her to marry Yamadori, a rich Japanese man whom Goro has proposed to her. Butterfly becomes angry at this piece of advice and introduces her child, Dolore (played by an Indonesian boy) whom Pinkerton has fathered.

At this point the audience burst into laughter again, the joke being that a marriage between a U.S. lieutenant and a Japanese geisha could result in a little Indonesian. They might also have been tickled at seeing the chubby little boy trying not to smile at the audience.

But the gross error here was this: the boy was obviously much too old, much older than three, probably closer to six. Meurig Davies explained to The Jakarta Post after the performance that the boy had arrived in the afternoon when the group was rehearsing and there was no way of getting a younger one. Sadly, the hilarity continued when Butterfly lugubriously imagines having to go begging with her child should Pinkerton abandon her (Che tua madre dovra).

Pinkerton finally does arrive -- with his "real" American wife. But he does not meet Butterfly, who is sleeping after spending all night long waiting for him in her bridal gown. Pinkerton asks Sharpless to do whatever is necessary for Butterfly, then leaves, bidding farewell to this house full of reminders. Butterfly awakes to discover the ugly truth. Feeling betrayed and dishonored, Butterfly runs herself through with the sword her father used to perform hara-kiri, after embracing her child in an passionate farewell (Tu, piccolo, Addio!), handing him a miniature American flag and bandaging his eyes.

Madame Butterfly is the fourth performance of the Opera and Concert Production company at the Grand Hyatt Hotel Jakarta. Last year the company performed here twice, Georges Bizet's Carmen and Giovanni Paisiello's The Barber of Seville. Giuseppe Verdi's Aida had its first showing here in 1994. "Our next outing here, hopefully this year," the company's director, Barbara Segal, told The Post, "will be another Verdi opera, Rigoletto."