If you compiled a list of
the most popular operas
seen throughout the
world in any given year,
Madama Butterfly
would
be at or near the top.
Giacomo Puccini’s 1904 East-meets-
West tragedy fires up the same emotions
as it did more than a century ago.
Madama Butterfly began as a short story,
written in 1898 by American lawyer and
author John Luther Long. The famously
flamboyant Broadway playwright/director/
producer David Belasco dramatized it.
Puccini saw Belasco’s tear-jerker in London
and was deeply touched, even though his
understanding of English was limited. “The
more I think of Butterfly,” he wrote to his
publisher Ricordi, “the more irresistibly am
I attracted.” His librettists for La bohème,
Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa, did the
honors for Butterfly as well, and the opera
premiered at Milan’s La Scala in 1904.
Here’s how Puccini biographer
Mosco Carner views Butterfly:
Though couched in terms of a melodrama,
it contains an element of true tragedy.
The catastrophe is the inevitable corollary
of the geisha’s character; because she is
what she is, she cannot act otherwise than
she does. Faced by three alternatives –
marriage to Prince Yamadori or resumption
of her former profession or death – she
makes the most courageous choice.
Caught in a moral conflict, she solves it
by self-annihilation and thus grows to a
heroine in the true sense of the word.
Butterfly will once again come to Lyric
in 2013-14, the fifteenth season in company
history that has included this Puccini
opera. It made its first appearance here in
1955;
in the only staged performances of
the role that she ever sang, Maria Callas
portrayed Cio-Cio-San (Butterfly). This
season Lyric audiences will be treated to
a new-to-Chicago production by debuting
director Michael Grandage, with sets
and costumes by Christopher Oram
and lighting by Neil Austin. This is the
creative team responsible for Red, John
Logan’s play about artist Mark Rothko,
which swept the 2010 Tony Awards.
This Madama Butterfly production
was first seen at Houston Grand Opera
in 2010, when Lyric’s current general
director, Anthony Freud, held that position
with the company. “Michael Grandage
is a director whose work I’ve known for
years,” says Freud. “I’ve seen many of
his shows and got to know him when
he was artistic director of an important
regional theater in the north of England.”
Freud discovered that Grandage had
an interest in opera, and soon the two
were thinking about a new Butterfly for
HGO. “The most challenging operas for
new productions are the operas that
are most popular and familiar,” says
Freud. “What’s necessary in offering a
new production is finding a way of both
satisfying our audience’s expectations and
at the same time, recapturing something
of the energy, intensity, and theatrical
impact that these great pieces had when
they were brand new. In Michael I felt we
had a director who would be absolutely
true to the text, the music, the narrative,
and the characters. And he would breathe
life into Butterfly’s relationships with
Suzuki, Sharpless, and Pinkerton. The
idea was for us to see the piece with
fresh eyes and hear it with fresh ears.”
The results were thrilling, as Lyric
audiences will discover when Butterfly
opens October 15 and runs for five
performances with South African soprano
Amanda Echalaz as Cio-Cio-San and
American tenor James Valenti as Pinkerton
(
both Lyric debuts). The six January
performances have American soprano –
and Lyric favorite – Patricia Racette as the
ill-fated heroine, opposite the Pinkerton
of Italian tenor Stefano Secco (debut –
see “Entrances & Encores,” p. 20). The
remaining cast members, who sing all
ANewButterflyAlights aT LYric
By Jack Zimmerman
MadamaBut
“
Visually the production is stunning, but going
beyond that, it focuses on the relationships
and the characters in a nuancedway.”
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