Giacomo Puccini's “Madame
Butterfly” is about the passionate love between a Japanese lady and an
American sailor, Pinkerton. However,
the sailor prefers to marry an American, but wants to take advantage of a
Japanese lady. She doesn’t mention this
to her, which leads her to think he loves her with genuine feelings of
passion. The opera ends in tragedy, when
Madame Butterfly realizes that her American husband has remarried without
letting her know when she thought he left on a mission. She kills herself. The album was released in 1996, with a
performance by Ying Huang, which was made for a film by Frederic Mitterrand. Interestingly, Puccini’s life was riddled
with many affairs with women. The most
notable one was with a married woman who eventually left her husband because he
had many affairs himself.
The music
throughout the opera seems it’s written for a particular key, though I’m not
sure. There always seems to be a
bass-continuo while the opera actors sing.
One can easily fall in love with Madame Butterfly’s voice, because of
the music. The tender moments occur when
she ends a musical phrase on a high note, but then tapers off. I like how the composer has the singer end on
a relatively higher note (than the rest of the musical phrase) by steep,
disjunct motion. The music was written
in a late romantic style, which is obviously homophonic, with multiple melodies
at the same time at parts. At parts
Puccini blends between polyphonic and homophonic textures. In the beginning few tracks, I noticed that
the sailor begins to be associated with the U.S.’s national anthem, which
recurs throughout the opera whenever the sailor is about to enter the scene (or
during), which is an interesting way of word painting. Puccini word paints a lot in by fading in
with the sailor’s voice, implying distance.
Madame Butterfly, who’s on a higher register of the keyboard if it were
composed on one, seems to be much louder and forefront because she is the main
character. The music seems to have many
recitative moments intermittent within the arias. The most impassioned music occurs when
Pinkerton and Madame Butterfly share the stage. Otherwise, when she’s with her maid, Suzuki,
she sings as though she’s in a meditative, self-reflecting state of despair (in
Acts 1-2).
At the track,
“Viene la sera,” there seems to be three distinguishable melodies; one in the
orchestra, the sailor, and Madame Butterfly, of whose music is played
simultaneously. The style is briefly
contrapuntal. The sailor and Madame
Butterfly have an impassioned duet, singing together at parts and alternatively
towards the end of the track, “Bimba dagli occhi pieni di malia.” The piece, however, is Puccini’s way of
saying “I’m just getting started,” because the piece is less climatic and
powerful than the music in Act 3 in my opinion. Towards the end of Act 2, the US’s national
anthem returns in Madame Butterfly’s voice, which seems to foretell that he
will return and that she believes he loves her.
In Act 3, there’s
a prelude with mostly instrumentals and brief vocals made by Goro, a matchmaker
for Madame Butterfly. The music moves in
a more agitated manner; there are less impassioned duets of love, rather, the
music foretells a gloomy end to the relationship. The last piece, “Tu? Tu?... piccolo iddio!”
is when Madame Butterfly slits her throat, thus ending the opera abruptly. Towards the end of the piece, there are only
instrumentals played in fortissimo, making the dynamics of the opera having a
big range between quiet and loud. This
piece seems to disappoint, because I thought that there would be more vocals
and duets between the sailor and Madame Butterfly. Puccini also didn’t add the third act until
later, which is why, to me as a listener, the music felt out of place.
Overall, I think
this is an excellent recording and I like the music. The music made me understand what she was
feeling and thinking more so than if it was a play. Also, it was impossible to see the performers,
so I didn’t know exactly what they were doing while listening, which is my main
complaint. Puccini seemed to base this
opera on his own life in an allegoric sense, although it was based on a
book. The album isn’t my favorite
recording of the opera, but, I liked the pieces particularly from Act 1 the
most.
