The first production of Giacomo Puccini’s opera Madama Butterfly, in 1904, was a disaster, not because of the story or the cast, which featured the acclaimed soprano Rosina Storchio as Butterfly, but because of a well coordinated effort by rivals to devalue Puccini’s reputation. The story combined elements of two japonesque tales: Madame Chrysanthème, by Pierre Loti, and Madame Butterfly, a play adapted by David Belasco from a short story by John Luther Long based on recollections of his sister, who had lived in Japan with her husband in the 1870s. The original Belasco play had been a one-act; by the time Puccini saw it, Belasco had expanded the play to three acts and it was filling the Duke of York’s Theatre in London night after night. Japanese art and culture, and stories of Japanese life, had become all the rage during the blossoming of the Arts and Crafts movement in England and the U.S., and Belasco’s melodrama capitalized on that popular appeal.

In barest outline, the story tells the betrayal of a young geisha by a feckless American Naval officer, who leaves her with his child, only to return after two years with an American wife to reclaim the child, driving Butterfly, the Japanese “wife”, to despair and suicide. The plot would have been more than titillating with its mixed-race “marriage” of convenience. But the ultimate suicide provided dramatic fodder as well as moral justification; compound this with the child, a half-Asian/half-Caucasian toddler named “Trouble”, and the public was bound to be swept into virtuous artistic raptures, especially after Puccini re-worked the opera, achieving what is now the “standard” score only on his fifth revision, which debuted in 1907.

The first of many performances of Butterfly that I have seen was sung by Licia Albanese. I didn’t know at the time, being young, that she was a legendary interpreter of the rôle, and had studied it under one of the few Butterflys coached in the part by Puccini himself. That said, one of the others in our group was a Japanese exchange student, who could hardly contain her amusement at the very un-Japanese acting and stage direction. Earlier generations had seen a Japanese soprano, Tamaki Miura, sing Butterfly to very appreciative audiences; comparisons of recordings reveal vastly different vocal approaches to the rôle between her and Albanese. Miura had been coached by Storchio, and their voices are quite similar, a narrow-throated, “white” sound dramatically appropriate to Butterfly’s age, which is 15 in the opera; Albanese had been coached by Giuseppina Baldassare-Tedeschi, also an important interpreter of the part, but whose voice is much closer to the modern open-throated “dark” sound than to Storchio’s.

Alan Chin has taken Butterfly and both re-set it in high-desert Nevada and re-imagined it in two different time lines, to stunning effect. Essentially, he has written a sequel to the opera, an opera in prose form. Such an undertaking requires both nerves of steel and a sure hand, and Chin demonstrates that he has both. Some of the dramatic development is unexpected at the very least, but the character development is both subtle and deeply felt. The axis of both opera and novel is the character of Suzuki, which my Japanese friend told me translated as “Perfume of Pines”. As a name, it gives us a hint that the maid will be the strong survivor of the household, and in Chin’s tale it is indeed the maid/companion Juanita around whom the homestead revolves. Tough and resilient as a high-desert evergreen, scoured to essentials by wind and cold and desert heat, she holds the ranch together while disaster nearly consumes the family created by Butterfly’s child. The child has grown into a young man haunted by loss and grief, and whose preternaturally acute hearing has made him a misfit in the Manhattan environment he inhabits. His grandmother’s death and the necessity of returning to the family ranch to settle her affairs uproot him from life in the musical world, setting him on a course of growth and maturation. Along the way he sees one love wither and another blossom, witnesses deep devotion and fidelity, sees others’ loves grow in both romantic and non-romantic forms, learns what it is to be a man, and re-discovers a joy in music that he thought had faded completely away.

The characters of Butterfly’s Child are sensitively drawn; from the novel’s protagonist Todd, to the small boy Jem, they are believable and engaging. As the story progresses, we are pulled into the extended family. In the broadest sense, this is a romance, but it is far more than that. The tale is compelling – I was so transfixed by it, in fact, that I read the entire novel in one long sitting, stopping only when hunger drove me to the table and returning to the book as soon as I set my fork on the empty plate. Short scenes and longer set pieces are intelligently balanced, and the pace never feels either rushed or inhibited. I did feel a twinge of annoyance a couple of times when a passage of recitativo ran too dry: the hero’s ruminations on Zen Buddhism could have been abbreviated without damage to the score. But that’s a minor point. You don’t have to be a fan of Italian opera to respond to this dramatic tale of high romance, just be ready to fall in love.

Dreamspinner Press, 2010
ISBN: 978­1-­61581-­658-­3 $16.99// eBook ISBN: 978-­1-­61581-­659-­0 $6.99 // 264 pp.

 

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