The heartless GIS who inspired Mme Butterfly
A new production of the opera is set in post-war Japan. By Rupert Christiansen
Anight in the West End when Puccini couldn’t understand a word of the play he was watching would change cultural history. In town for the 1900 premiere of Tosca at Covent Garden, the composer wound up at the Duke of York’s Theatre to see the latest hit imported from Broadway – Madame Butterfly by David Belasco, notable for a 15-minute scene in which a humming chorus was accompanied by a spectacular light show, depicting the passage of night into day as the heroine awaits her faithless American husband’s return.
Puccini spoke no English but got the gist and was transfixed, immediately sensing the story’s operatic potential. He then spent a tense year negotiating the rights and tracked down the short story by American writer John Luther Long on which Belasco had loosely based his play.
Together with Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa, his long-suffering librettists, he set to work on what proved to be – as always with the fastidious Puccini – the tortuous process of forging a text. Considerable changes were made to these sources: Belasco’s play had only one act and the opera would introduce a new scene that filled in Butterfly’s back story; while Long’s version doesn’t end with a hara-kiri – a pidgin-speaking Butterfly merely says that she is “disappoint – a liddle” when she discovers Pinkerton’s American marriage, before vanishing from Nagasaki with Trouble, her son, and Suzuki, her maid.
Behind the opera lies the late 19th-century fashion for all things Japanese – the result of the trade that began after the American commander Matthew Perry landed a squadron in Tokyo in 1853, opening an isolated and introverted land up to the world. Exhibitions of Japanese textiles and woodwork and the alien formality and ritualism of Japanese customs transfixed the West, profoundly influencing the arts and crafts movements and leading to hugely popular shows such as Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado.
One Japanese phenomenon that provoked prurient fascination was the peculiar position of women within a sexual culture that appeared to run on different lines to the Christian division between virtuous virgin, respectable wife and disgraced slut. Instead the giggling submissive maiden, the enchanting, obliging geisha and the imperial concubine offered another more ambiguous set of possibilities that gave respectability – or at least glamour – to the idea that rights over a woman could be bought or bartered for a limited period of time without further consequences. This became known as “a Japanese marriage”, something of doubtful legality.
It was all a horrible fiction of course: the facts show that pimps exploited all parties and venereal disease was prevalent as anywhere else, but it made Japan something of a destination for early sex tourists. One semiautobiographical novel published in 1887, Pierre Loti’s Madame Chrysanthème, came near to blowing the lid off the clichés, showing a French naval officer setting up home with a Japanese geisha. Although this novel was adapted into an opera by André Messager and its plot bears some relation to that of Butterfly, it has none of the latter’s highly emotional character: its tone, rather, is lightly ironic, as the geisha proves to be a mercenary fraud, two-timing with a friend of the naval officer, who returns to France disenchanted.
Puccini’s opera is so tightly composed through such a strong and nuanced libretto that it doesn’t allow much scope for directorial interpretation and it’s very rare to see a production set anywhere but Japan – even if that is a landscape glamorised and sentimentalised with cherry blossom and kimonos. But Annilese Miskimmon’s new staging for Glyndebourne interestingly takes the original setting forward half a century, placing it in the seven-year interregnum immediately after the Second World War, when under the wise firm governance of General Macarthur, America was reconstructing and democratising a Japan devastated and impoverished by defeat.
This social context gives urgency to Butterfly’s desperate situation and emphasises a moment at which American commercialism was invading and corroding traditional Japanese values. Butterfly is thus presented here as a sort of war bride: there were thousands of these in actuality, hopeful of escaping to a better life abroad (a possibility that Butterfly never entertains).
Those who made it to the USA – as many as 45,000, mostly to California – faced years of discrimination, prejudice and language barriers before integrating. Those left in Japan, for whatever reason, faced opprobrium on the assumption that they were mere prostitutes or traitors consorting with the enemy.
The Macarthur years were generally good for women in Japan, however, introducing long overdue reforms such as the right to vote and extending employment rights. Although licensed prostitution was abolished, sending thousands of poor girls, known as punpun, on to the street, the sight of wives walking meekly three paces behind their husbands became a thing of the past.
But progress for women like Butterfly has at deeper cultural levels been slow, impeded by the fiercely conservative views of Confucian philosophy. Until 1908, it was legal for a husband to kill his wife if he discovered her infidelity; and it was only in 1999 that the contraceptive pill was permitted. Even today, there are very few women in Japan in top business jobs or government (less than 10per cent of the country’s lower parliament is female, compared to 30per cent in the UK and 40per cent in France).
Puccini’s Butterfly stands at a crossroads. Misunderstanding the temporary and provisional nature of her union with Pinkerton, she naively converts to Christianity and buys wholeheartedly into the idea of enlightened American values and comforts (in the opera’s second act, Miskimmon shows her reading Life magazine and puffing on Lucky Strikes), while maintaining traditional Japanese submission to her husband’s will. But when Pinkerton’s treachery becomes clear, she reverts to the archaic code of her Shinto ancestors and its insistence that one cannot live without honour.
What makes the opera a masterpiece, however, is something timeless: its acute psychological understanding, expressed through both music and text, of a bravely stubborn but irrationally obsessive love, born of delusion and ultimately self-destructive, that makes Butterfly one of the most complex and moving of all modern dramatic heroines.