RichardtheTenor: Geisha to Go?.

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Geisha to Go?.

Madama Butterfly is an acclaimed masterpiece. I just revisited it, via the Ponnelle opera movie starring Mirella Freni. I finished it with a mix of delight, awe, and rage. What exquisite performances, what a horrid story!The word ?Diva? gets thrown around a lot, and tends to evoke images of spoiled performers trashing hotel rooms. The term refers back to goddesses, female singers who arouse a connection to the divine within us as we watch and listen. Mirella Freni is a diva. So is Christa Ludwig. Freni sings with a palette of delicate colors, opening out to a full-throated forte when necessary. Her acting is calibrated to the finest detail and her ability to believe in what she is doing ? coupled with her petite and winsome beauty ? create an enthralling character. Ludwig combines two almost contradictory skills, magnetic attraction of focus and the ability to refract focus, to make the viewer follow her eyes to whatever she herself is focusing on. She sings well-nigh perfectly but Suzuki is mainly an acting assignment and she extracts every ounce of juice from her part. Together the two divas create a world of love and support with cross currents of mistress/servant and even mother/daughter relationships. The male side of the opera offers less loveable figures. Robert Kerns plays a Sharpless who knows what will happen but stays within his job description and isn?t comfortable interfering. The dead-end exhaustion of his job surfaces as he pulls out his flask for fortification: another out-of-place American doing foreign service under a volcano. Michel S?n?chal?s Goro is a fascinatingly hideous racist caricature, simpering through his buck teeth. Placido Domingo veers from engaging to hammy, allowing an older theatrical vocabulary ? more suggestive of the Duke of Mantua ? to flavor his American sailor cad. The Vienna Philharmonic and Herbert von Karajan play the lushest Puccini imagineable, mostly at very expansive tempi. The range of dynamics and the wealth of detail more than balance the occasional moment of inertia. Jean-Pierre Ponnelle adds a fair amount of visual freedom to what is still essentially a stage production. Interior monologue lines are filmed as voice-overs. There are several effective daydream sequences. But the much-mentioned sea with its wide horizon never actually appears. There are several directorial missteps: how can Pinkerton sing of her first sight of his mother-in-law when she was so prominently featured few pages before? How can Butterfly shy away from revealing her sacred objects on the grounds that there are too many people around when she and Pinkerton are alone in an interior room? These problems vanish if the subtitles are off! Butterfly embraces her husband?s country and religion by dressing western style and redecorating ? but her idea of Christianity is filtered through a European Catholic lens. The devotional picture of Jesus she keeps on her sideboard does not suggest mainstream US culture from the age of Teddy Roosevelt! Ponnelle does not solve the riddle of how to stage an extremely sexy love duet and not have it look tame and stagey. The end of Act 1, a beautiful shot of Butterfly looking up at the stars as Pinkerton drifts sleepwards on her breast does not suggest that Trouble will be born nine months later. Madama Butterfly contains a huge and upsetting cultural conundrum. Two actually. Maybe even three. One is about cross cultural relationships, another about the relative roles of men and women, and a third could be a coded gay subtext. Our heroine loves at sight, gives herself so completely that she loses any sense of individuality apart from her role as wife, subordinates herself to a man?s identity, and acts as an avatar for hopeless unreturned love. In the first act we can adore her and worry about her. In the second we can feel pity and still root for her. But the final scene poses problems that require solutions far different from the one that the playwright (Belasco) has imposed on us. I know, I am using modern cultural awareness to judge the art of another time! But the idea that Butterfly must die rather than live with dishonor is bad enough ? the thought that she is required to give up her child rather than receive child support from the child?s father is unthinkable (to me!). Ponnelle makes the final scene a great deal more cruel than I think it needs to be, with Suzuki dutifully preparing Butterfly for her suicide (horrifying but still touching) and then Butterfly waiting to cut her throat until Pinkerton bursts in and she can imprint her death on him. Her suicide becomes an act of aggression, a punishment. Not at all the self-sacrifice that seems inherent in the story. I suddenly hated her. I understood her rage but it seemed inappropriate, pasted on, utterly unlike anything she had done, said, sung, or been for the previous two and half hours/three years of the opera and its story. What a pity that so much utterly gorgeous and moving music is wedded to a plot so limited by its cultural assumptions. It may record a way of living, but it isn?t a picture I want to wallow in.

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Source: http://richardthetenor.blogspot.com/2012/09/geisha-to-go.html

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