Opera review: Puccini’s Madama Butterfly

4 / 5 stars
Puccini’s Madama Butterfly

ALBANIAN soprano Ermonela Jaho once said to me in an interview that singing was about more than beautiful sounds, and that “Music is the language of the heart... the voice is like a bridge reaching to the public.”

Opera reviewPH

This performance was both heart-touching and musically flawless

In Puccini’s great tragedy Madama Butterfly Jaho reached out to the audience last week in a performance that was both heart-touching and musically flawless.

Directors Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier have set their 2003 production, now in its fifth revival, in classical Japan around the time when the opera was written. 

Designer Christian Fenouillat’s clean-cut screens rise to display the harbour of Nagasaki below and banks of pink blossom. Marcelo Puente’s Lieutenant BF Pinkerton is impatiently waiting with the American Consul Sharpless (Scott Hendricks) for the arrival of the 15-year-old Geisha he has commissioned from sleazy marriage broker Goro (Carlo Bosi).

Pinkerton’s sense of entitlement and disdain for the Consul’s scruples is clearly expressed when he knocks back his whisky without offering his guest a drink.

Puccini builds the drama as we hear the voice of Cio-Cio-San singing of her joyful wedding day before she arrives on stage. The long wing-like sleeves of Jaho’s white silk kimono bring a butterfly to mind, to become even more significant in the image subsequently evoked of a butterfly pinned to a collector’s display case. 

The intensity of Butterfly’s passion for her duplicitous “husband” is seen by Jaho as almost manic.

Rejected by her family and her religion, bearing the shame of poverty and the memory of a father who was ordered to commit suicide, the girl has invested her life in a man who already has plans to get a proper American wife when he returns home. At the same time, Jaho brings out Cio-Cio-San’s sharp intelligence and wit.

The final scene is designed to tug at the heart strings as Butterfly holds her little son for the last time before she has to relinquish him to Pinkerton and his new American wife Kate (Emily Edmonds).

This is made all the more telling by the affection there seems between Jaho and young Paul Benkert. Oddly, the moment of death as the fatally wounded Cio-Cio-San falls to the ground and raises herself in fluttering spasms over the length of the stage is less moving, as it is so precisely choreographed. I’m not sure about the sudden rush of falling magnolia petals either.

The Orchestra of the Royal Opera House under Antonio Pappano brings out the superbly crafted tensions of Puccini’s score. As Butterfly’s maid Suzuki, the rich-toned mezzo Elizabeth DeShong deserved the enthusiastic applause for her sympathetic performance.

Argentinian tenor Marcelo Puente gave a fine performance as Pinkerton. It is a pity, though, that some of the audience have got into the pantomime habit of booing the villain. The sound has different and unwelcome connotations for any singer not used to this recent bit of British banter.

Puccini’s Madama Butterfly 

Royal Opera Royal Opera House, London WC2 (Tickets: 020 730 4000/roh.org.uk; £9-£190)

Would you like to receive news notifications from Daily Express?