Madama Butterfly

At a little house on a hill above the port of Nagasaki, preparations are being made for a wedding. For the young Lieutenant Pinkerton of the U.S. Navy, it’s a marriage of convenience—a temporary solution to the problem of being single overseas. But for Cio-Cio-San, his teenaged Japanese bride known as Butterfly, it’s deadly serious: a means of escaping poverty and the scorn of her once-noble family. “Be careful—she believes it,” warns the American consul, Sharpless. Pinkerton, though, is not careful; he has marriage plans of his own back in America. The deserted Butterfly’s unwavering belief in their marriage becomes, in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly (1904), the centre of one of opera’s most compelling and heart-rending studies of love betrayed. It can look enchanting: an exquisite western fantasy of Japan, expressed (at first) in music of glowing colours and playful freshness. But Butterfly’s emotions—revealed in arias such as “Un bel dì, vedremo”—are anything but a fantasy, and as Puccini depicts her long, desperate wait for Pinkerton’s return, the music explores the depth of her suffering with overwhelming sympathy and compassion. The beauty of the setting (and of numbers such as the wordless “Humming Chorus”) only heightens the poignancy and power of an opera which, in a good performance, can reduce even the most jaded audience to tears.