Lyric Opera 2025-2026 Issue 9 - Madama Butterfly

19 | Lyric Opera of Chicago Madama Butterfly: Between Fantasy and (Virtual) Reality This new production offers a boldly relevant, gorgeous reimagining for the present day By Kunio Hara When the curtain rises on Matthew Ozawa’s new production of Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly , we see the dimly lit interior of a room furnished with sleek, modern furniture in neutral colors. The exception is the red and black gaming chair, center stage, whose colors echo those in the room’s posters of women in kimono. The door opens and Pinkerton, wearing a T-shirt and a pair of slacks, enters. He grabs a can of beer, sits, and puts on a virtual reality headset. The stage is suddenly bathed in cold blue light; Puccini’s prelude begins. As additional characters begin to interact with Pinkerton, it becomes clear that we are now seeing the onstage action through his eyes. This is Madama Butterfly presented as a kind of artificial game world in which Pinkerton acts out an elaborate fantasy. This provocative theatrical conceit can provide a jarring sensation, especially for audience members accustomed to standard renditions. But Ozawa’s overarching gesture immediately engages with a long- standing trope that existed in Europe at the turn of the 20th century, when Puccini composed the opera, which premiered early in 1904. Camille Saint-Saëns’s one-act comic opera, La princesse jaune (1872), for example, features a Dutch student, Kornélis, who falls in love with a portrait of a Japanese woman, Ming. With the aid of a magical potion laced with opium, Kornélis hallucinates and mistakes his cousin Léna for Ming. Puccini and his librettists, Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa, also play with this idea; early in Act I, before Cio- Cio-San sets foot on stage, in his aria “Amore o grillo,” Pinkerton explain to Sharpless that his future Japanese wife “seems like a figure from a screen ( sembra figura da paravento ).” The very voice of Pinkerton encourages the audience to experience Cio-Cio-San as a visual object. (In the exchange that follows, the kinder and more emotionally sensitive Sharpless reminds Pinkerton, and the audience by extension, to listen to her voice.) This phenomenon — and this production of Madama Butterfly — point to the historic fact that European and American exposure to Japanese culture in the late 19th century came primarily through objects — imported prints, furniture, ceramics, and fabrics — rather than through interactions with Japanese people. Ozawa’s ambitious construct not only updates this mediated cultural process for the 21st century, but also foregrounds the work as an artistic creation rather than a documentary reflection of history. To acknowledge that a piece of opera, an inherently stylized genre, is a fictional work may seem self-evident. The significance of Ozawa’s Madama Butterfly , however, becomes more clear as we examine the performance history of the work, where cultural authenticity has often been a central concern, and consider his framing of its narrative. The desire to present a kind of realism in performances of Madama Butterfl y began in the work’s very early stages. For the libretto, Puccini and his collaborators relied on a cluster of related literary sources written by French and American authors: Pierre Loti’s autobiographical novel Madame Chrysanthème (1887), John Luther Long’s short story “Madame Butterfly” (1898), and David Belasco’s one-act play “Madame Butterfly” (1900). Loti was stationed in Nagasaki, the setting of Madama Butterfly , as a naval