Opera North's touring production of Puccini's celebrated opera comes to Dublin this week. Here, cast and production members talk to MICHAEL DERVANabout staging Butterfly
ANNE SOPHIE DUPRELS, SOPRANO
Cio-Cio-San (Madama Butterfly)
Singing Cio-Cio-San
It’s beautiful to sing, and it’s an amazing journey I have to do as an actress, growing from a child to a woman, with so many different kinds of emotions, so many feminine feelings to convey.
Butterfly, the opera
It’s an amazing piece of theatre, and an amazing score. Puccini translates the emotion into the music so well, I feel sometimes you don’t even need the words, just the music. You have fantastic, emotional music, and intense dramatic theatre.
Biggest challenge in Butterfly
I’m on stage practically all the time. I’m not on for the first 10 minutes, and then I’m on for the whole evening. That’s quite a challenge as an actress and as a singer. You have to get ready for that.
Greatest Butterflymoment
The best Butterflymoment is when I'm on stage. And my favourite moment in the opera is Act II, when she listens to the letter that the American consul is trying to read to her. I really, really enjoy that. It's so clever. There are so many things you have to share and play: happy to sad, to happy, to despair, hope, no hope. It's great.
Anything you’d change?
No. We’re not doing the latest version; we’ve put back some music that he removed after the opening night, and also there is no aria for the tenor in Act III. It’s in a way harder, because we put back all the very harsh, non-romantic moments, and it makes it even more real, more heartbreaking. It’s real. It’s life. It’s hard. I wouldn’t change anything.
ANN TAYLOR, MEZZO SOPRANO
Cio-Cio-San’s maid, Suzuki
Singing Suzuki
There’s a physical challenge as well as an emotional and musical challenge, controlling the way she moves, places a cup, takes people’s shoes off. We had a movement director who taught me all of that. And, of course, it’s fantastic music, with a beautiful duet in the middle.
Butterfly, the opera
It tells such a compelling story and seems to reach out to everybody. We did it four years ago to packed houses; we’re touring it again, to packed houses. It tells the story so beautifully and simply. I’ve brought my children to it, aged 9 and 11, and they loved it. It’s such a poignant tale.
Biggest challenge in Butterfly
The physical challenge. I’m on stage most of the evening, even when I’m not singing. Even though you’re not singing, a little eye movement, a hand gesture, becomes hugely important. Suzuki spends most of the opera with her hands in front of her. It’s also a big challenge to have the energy behind the sound when the physical movement is so constricted.
Greatest Butterflymoment
I think it's the flower duet for me. It's the one moment in which Butterflyhas hope and you think everything might be okay. And then the humming chorus comes straight after.
Anything you’d change?
Maybe he should have let Suzuki have an aria. Maybe she should have a little moment to herself while she’s making the tea.
MARTIN PICKARD
Conductor, head of music at Opera North
Conducting Butterfly
It’s so dramatic. When the show really gets going, even though as a conductor you don’t see the audience, you feel them getting into the drama and being moved by it in a very direct way. And it’s very beautiful music.
Butterfly, the opera
I think in a funny way it feels quite modern, in that it talks about issues that we still deal with, cultural clashes. It’s about the disastrous effects of people not understanding each other’s cultures. You see that happening every day on a world scale. It’s that told in miniature, in terms of Japanese and American culture, so that you end up with a disastrous personal situation.
Biggest challenge in Butterfly
It’s very flexible music. It kind of bends and swerves with the story and in terms of tempo and the different colours you’re getting. It’s permanently changing music. It’s like this great river that you are trying to channel as a conductor. It can’t feel rigid. And you’re doing not just a big technical job, but an artistic and expressive job as well.
Greatest Butterflymoment
My greatest moment was probably the first time we did this particular production; there is a moment where a child is revealed to the audience. I still remember the first time I saw that. I wasn’t conducting, but in the audience with friends who had never seen the opera before. I knew what was coming, but they didn’t. And I could feel their excitement. So my greatest moment is to do with the audience’s part in the opera, going along with the story.
Anything you’d change?
The standard version has an aria in the last act for the tenor, which Puccini added so that the tenor had something nice to sing. But I think putting in that aria was a mistake, and we leave it out. It’s a very beautiful piece of music, but it gives very confusing messages about the character.
RICHARD MANTLE,
General director, Opera North
Presenting Butterfly
It’s one of the great classics of Puccini. It was written over 100 years ago, about an imperialist time before that. It has an amazing resonance with current times, in terms of international relationships and imperial behaviour. Those issues haven’t gone away. People in the services who go abroad can strike relationships they shouldn’t do. It’s completely rich with music and lyricism, and it’s a very poignant piece. She might have been a silly girl, but you do really feel heartbroken for her at the end of the opera.
Butterfly, the opera
I love the way the main character lives through the whole experience, from being a fragile young girl, out of her depth, who falls completely in love, but grows up over three years into this incredibly mature woman.
Biggest challenge in Butterfly
When you decide to do a Butterfly, you make choices. You hire a creative team that can speak to the audience. There's the risk of finding directors who give you their view rather than communicating the work itself. You need singers who can people the opera in a way that all of the characters mean something. You need to create an environment where Butterflyis a realistic piece, not set in the backwaters of Dublin or in a brothel. It's got plenty to say.
Greatest Butterflymoment
The duet in Act II when she realises that the ship has been sighted – the flower duet where they decorate the house for his arrival. That duet between Cio-Cio-San and Suzuki is the most gorgeous feel-good moment.
Anything you’d change?
I wouldn’t change anything that he didn’t. The great thing about the version we’ve developed is that it’s dramatically very taut and concentrated.
Opera North’s
Madama Butterfly
is at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, and the company’s production of Handel’s Giulio Cesare is on Friday.
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An opera is born
John Luther Long's short story Madame Butterfly, first published in 1898 (and partly modelled on Pierre Loti's novel Madame Chrysanthème), was based on a true incident of an American naval officer and a young geisha, who bore a child after being deserted by her lover and died by suicide. David Belasco turned it into a successful play, which was produced in New York and London (where Puccini saw it) in 1900.
The Milan premiere of Puccini’s opera in February 1904 was one of the greatest fiascos in operatic history. “Puccini hissed”; “Fiasco at La Scala”; “Butterfly, Diabetic Opera, Result of an Accident”, ran some newspaper headlines. Puccini’s publisher, Giulio Ricordi, later wrote: “Growls, roars, laughter, animal noises, giggling – such was the reception that the audience of La Scala gave to the new work of Maestro Puccini.”
Puccini withdrew the piece after one night, but didn’t lose faith. He told the banker Camillo Bondi it was “the most heartfelt and most expressive opera that I have conceived! I shall win in the end, you’ll see – if it is given in a smaller theatre, less permeated by hatred and passion.”
He revised the work, trimming parts, breaking the long second act in two, and adding an aria for the villain of the piece, Pinkerton. When the revised version was first performed in Brescia the following May, five numbers were encored, and the composer took 10 curtain calls.
Before the decade was out it had been produced in dozens of cities across four continents. The Moody-Manners Opera Company gave the Dublin premiere at the Theatre Royal in January 1909.
