Butterflies: Not Free, Evidently

mmelinger ♦ May 20, 2025 ♦ Leave a comment

OK, let me get this out of the way right up front–I’m not really an opera guy.

I do appreciate classical music and have been supporting it live for many years, but I guess one of the main attractions for me has been the absence of singing. I just get too distracted when somebody walks onstage and starts belting out an aria. Maybe it reminds me too much of the turbulent household in which I grew up. Minus the Italian, of course.

But when my beloved bride and I recently had the opportunity to to hear our Colorado Springs Philharmonic close out their season with Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, we jumped at the chance. Also, we’re season ticket-holders, so taking a pass would mean skipping out on a show we had already paid for. No way, Guiseppe!

The Phil, being the Phil, took a “theatricalized concert” approach to the production, in collaboration with the Colorado Springs Chorale. This means the musicians are right on stage as per usual, with the singers wending their way through and in front of them to perform. It also does away with the need for all those pesky sets and costuming. The male singers are in tuxes, whether Chinese peasants or US Naval officers. Madame Butterfly herself gets a costume change or two, otherwise–use your imaginations, folks.

The story line is pure soap opera, and our Lt. Pinkerton doesn’t come off in a particularly sympathetic way. It’s not a feminist parable, to say the least. And before you relegate it to a bygone era, remember that Butterfly premiered in 1904. In Italian, by an Italian, for Italians–but by then, Puccini and his countrymen would surely have a gotten a whiff of the warp of our woof.

To summarize:

Lt. Pinkerton of the US Navy is stationed in China, where he meets a 15-yr-old geisha named Butterfly performing in a Nagasaki dive and decides to marry her. He’s already engaged to an American woman, mind you, but he just needs to keeps himself amused for the rest of his tour of duty. So Butterfly and her family climb a steep hill to the wedding ceremony, and the hill is long and steep enough to provide for a fair degree of exposition from her side of the aisle (we don’t need to learn anything more about Pinkerton, he’s already exposed himself as a pig in the opening segment with the ‘marriage broker’).

Along the way, we learn 1) Butterfly considers herself the happiest woman in the land, due to her impending marriage, who 2) comes from a formerly wealthy family that has fallen on hard times, with 3) her father dead, and her remaining family ready to disown her for what they perceive to be a disastrous decision on her part that will bring further shame onto their already beleaguered family. Also, would it have killed them to hold the wedding in a valley somewhere?

Right off, it’s clear that this young lady has put all her eggs in a particularly leaky basket. Nonetheless, the wedding party finally arrives at the top of the hill, pleasantries are exchanged, the couple weds. Then they scamper off to consummate, tastefully, presumably behind a scrim with no backlighting.

Act II: Pinkerton has blown town, leaving a pregnant Butterfly in his loutish wake. He swears his return, with no intention of doing so. So she gets to wait, and wait, and wait–really, Act II is an awful lot of waiting, and this being opera, singing about waiting.

Act III: Butterfly has given birth to a son, who is now three years old. At long last, Pinkerton returns…not to reconcile, of course, but to snatch his son away with him back to America. To really rub it in, he brings his newly acquired American bride along. And being a consummate coward in addition to a philandering colonialist asswipe, he refuses to even meet with Butterfly, sending instead his newlywed and the US Consul at Nagasaki to do his dirty work. Butterfly agrees to give up her child if Pinkerton comes himself to ask–I mean, man up already, fella! But she lets him off the hook by cutting her own throat when he finally does appear, suddenly and unconvincingly distraught. AND…she dies. Curtain.

As Church Lady used to say: “How conVENient.”

At this juncture, I should probably point out that one of my biggest peeves at symphony concerts is people talking to each other during the performance–even if they are whispering. For some reason, these folks always seem to be sitting either a row ahead or a row behind where I land. Behind is best, because then I can swivel my head to them and with a wordless gaze, deliver a silent stink-eye that can stop a charging bull elephant at 90 yards. I spent thirty years in elementary school music classrooms, so don’t challenge me on this one, folks.

If they are a row in front, that’s a whole different ballgame because you are forced to tap a shoulder to get their attention–an intrusion worse than the original offense. So unless they are screwing around with their phones or lighting off Roman candles, it’s best to just let it pass.

Sure enough, in the row directly in front of us, sat a couple in their mid-40s. The wife kept leaning into her husband’s ear with a whispered commentary–mostly addressed to the fact that the stage kid they kept trotting out for dramatic effect “sure was like no Chinese SHE ever saw, with those blonde curls.” Her husband took in all her pithy jingoistic observations as he probably took in the bulk of their marriage–in stoic silence, with a barely perceptible head nod. He’ll die married, like my father did.

Anywhoo…as I said at the top, I’m not really an opera guy. Boorish comments at the symphony deserve a response IMO. But at the opera? It’s already a soap opera to begin with, so you can’t really blame audience members for wanting to chime in occasionally. Art mirrors life, so to speak.

Oh yeah, the music was pretty cool too.