Italy xxi--Madame Butterfly

What I knew about Madame Butterfly I could have written on the back of the ticket. Puccini?--a spicy Italian sandwich maybe. We were going to the opera, in Venice, because who would go to the Black Hills and not see Mt. Rushmore? You've got to see an opera. We're in Italy, where something operatic happens every day right on the street. You want taciturn? Visit Den Haag, Munich, or 10 Downing Street. Want full-blast, two-fisted emotion? Keep your eyes open almost anywhere on the boot. 

I don't have to tell you how much we paid for those tickets. The truth is, I've deliberately forgotten. "Should we go?" we asked ourselves. Well, good night, how often are you going to be in Venice, Italy? We bought in.

And went. 

And, my goodness, was it was magnificent.

Let's be candid. The theater is like nothing we'd ever been in. I took this with my phone.

I'm telling you, places like this actually exist. We were there. Grand opera. 

What did I know about Madame Butterfly? I knew it was opera, and I knew it was Japanese because I remembered a big scrape about a white opera star playing a Japanese woman, and how wrong it would certainly be if a white woman sang "Summertime," or anything from Porgy and Bess. Madame Butterfly is a Japanese story--that's what the purists argued. Made sense, too. The love-struck tragic heroine is a 15-year-old geisha. There's no geishas in Sioux City.

But then, Puccini isn't a sandwich. He's Italian, not Japanese. He first encountered the story in London, in a play created from a story written by an American whose sister read it in a French novel. You could argue the MB is global--and in theme and emotion it is.

Still, the poison conflict at its heart is Western colonialism. Because that's true, it should be a little touchy to determine how it should be performed, ethnically speaking. I wondered.

That's the jackass American sailor, center stage, holding the teenage sweetheart with wings on her shoulders. (You're looking at contraband photos--no cameras allowed.) The whole incredible drama--so overwhelmingly operatic--was set on a bare stage, its cast dressed in modest pastels. Nothing even faintly Japanese, except the play itself. Fascinating.

Yes, it was sung in Italian, and yes I would have understood nothing without there being a line of translated libretto crawling along above the stage, a line I didn't see until fifteen minutes into the story. But with that blessed sub-title, this ugly American loved every minute of grand opera.

Loved? Well, when Puccini opened the opera the audience howled and threw stuff because they hated it that  much. It took a few revisions to make it more presentable; but then there are characters worth hating in Butterfly, including that horny American sailor. When he returns to Nagasaki, there's a white woman on his arm, his real wife. At the turn of the century, when promiscuity was more despised, the audience even hated Madame herself, a girl who was turning Japanese tricks before the Americans sailed in.

Spoiler alert--Madame Butterfly doesn't end well. First, Madame gives up her identity for a man who, in all honesty, wanted nothing more than a all-nighter. She quits family and tribe and faith, becomes a Christian, in fact, only to be horrifically double-crossed by an American who wanted little more than a good time.

What Madame does in taking care of business finally, once her own little boy is gone to America with the man who stole her heart and soul, is culturally significant. In her world, she regains nobility by the finality of her act. It's a grotesque, yet noble end to a love-sick opera that works beautifully on an Italian stage, every last human emotion playing just plain huge. 

It wouldn't play quite the same in Iowa.  

We almost had to mortgage our future to pay for the tickets, but we did. 

But it was--how can I say it?--wonderful. It was grand opera. We loved it.