Lyric Opera 2025-2026 Issue 9 - Madama Butterfly

Lyric Opera of Chicago | 20 officer. Long had no direct connection to Japan, but had a sister, Jennie Corell, who lived in Nagasaki with her husband, head of a Methodist mission there. Belasco, a native of San Francisco, had experience encountering immigrants from East Asia in that city. To musically evoke the Japanese setting, Puccini made at least some efforts to understand its culture. He interviewed the wife of the Japanese ambassador to Italy, Hisako Oyama, possibly witnessed a performance of Sadayakko, a Japanese actress then touring Europe, and studied printed Japanese music that was available to him. The numerous costume illustrations for the first production at La Scala, by Leopold Metlicovitz and others (accessible at digitalarchivioricordi.com) , amply demonstrate how the European artists had studied Japanese prints and art works. Toward the end of his life (he passed late in 1924), long after Madama Butterfly had entered the repertory around the world, the composer attended a 1920 performance of the work in Rome with the Japanese soprano Tamaki Miura (1884-1946), a well-known figure in Japan, Europe, and the United States, in the title role. Puccini invited her to his villa in Torre del Lago, where they discussed Japanese music; he was at the time seeking additional inspiration for his current project, Turandot . A remarkable encounter, to be sure — though the composer reaching out to a Japanese musician while composing an opera set in ancient China indicates a somewhat casual approach to cultural accuracy. This production of Madama Butterfly by Ozawa, who is Japanese American, comes not as a disruption but a bold continuation of a long line of productions in the United States informed by artists of Japanese ancestry. In 1952, 1953, and 1956, Japan’s oldest opera company, the Fujiwara Opera, engaged in three North American tours, bringing together Japanese singers and local musicians for performances of Madama Butterfly . The Metropolitan Opera invited director Yoshio Aoyama, connected to the Fujiwara Opera Company, and the scenic designer Motohiro Nagasaka, for its new Butterfly in 1958. Following this success, in 1969 Lyric Opera of Chicago invited Aoyama to direct a new production, and participation of Japanese directors at major operatic houses continued in The perils of cultural imperialism have been present in the opera from its inception. _ Philip Groshong / Cincinnati Opera