Madama Butterfly is indestructible. The revisions – it took five versions to arrive at the standard one usually heard today – tightened the structure to focus unpityingly on the tragedy of the 15-year old Cio-Cio-San. Its setting rarely benefits from updating or attempts to point up some obvious ‘modernity’. You want imperial bullying, the patronising of ‘quaint’ native local customs, pressure to abandon Eastern religion for a Western one, paedophilia, sex tourism, ruthless exploitation of female vulnerability by male dominated cultures? It’s all there in the libretto and score. If it was premiered today, in the #Metoo era, there would be an outcry. But in the high culture setting of an opera festival, we can be invited to witness the destruction of an innocent young person, and to the most glorious music. (Only Billy Budd has approached it since in this respect). The task of any production is to show us clearly what the text both says and implies, and Puccini’s music will do the rest. This is exactly what happens in Savonlinna’s very fine production.
The setting is traditional, Japan at the turn of the last century. So at the beginning we get a small home with sliding thin walls, encouraging Pinkerton’s sly observation that the “monthly renewable 999-year” marriages here are flexible just like the houses. No need to show a distant prospect of Nagasaki harbour, as real seagulls can be heard occasionally just beyond the high walls of the covered courtyard performance space of the water-girt Olavinlinna Castle. How do you make this large space, ideal for Tristan’s neglected Kareol or Bluebeard’s sepulchral home, into an arcadian Asiatic hilltop? The lighting is subtly evocative, and the very wide stage has its middle third or so filled with Butterfly’s new home, leased with Pinkerton’s US dollars for the purpose of “pleasure” ahead of the day he marries a “real American wife”.
The levels and entrances the castle wall offers are used very effectively, not least by about 20 black-clad masked figures who assist the setting at various points, bringing in red lanterns for the love duet, and white ones for the Humming Chorus, which can rarely have ever been more evocatively set. These sinister extras also act as a silent ‘Greek chorus’ reacting to the action at certain points, eventually prostrating themselves at Butterfly’s suicide. Perhaps they are harbingers of death as well – it is difficult not to think of Isis when they first appear. Otherwise costumes are the conventions of the place and time, though it is a nice touch that Cio-Cio-San – or “Mrs B.F. Pinkerton” as she heartbreakingly insists – becomes a little more American in her dress once married and in possession of an “American home”.