On December 2, 1944, a newspaper from Cody, Wyoming published a small notice about a performance of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly at the Brooklyn Academy of Music the previous week. Oddly, the unsigned article does not contain any description of the performance itself. Instead, it dwells on the decision of the company’s director, Alfredo Salmaggi, to mount the opera, which had not been performed in New York City since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The article reports that Salmaggi had received “several letters of protests from relatives of service men” but also reminds that he too had “five sons in the armed services.” The piece concludes with Salmaggi’s justifying claims that “art is international” and that “this opera was written long before the war.” The newspaper that printed this intriguing article was the Heart Mountain Sentinel, a publication produced by the inmates of the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming—one of ten incarceration camps constructed in the remote interior of the continental United States that collectively housed over 120,000 people of Japanese descent who were forcibly removed from their homes on the West Coast during World War II.
At the heart of controversy was the sudden and powerful surge of anti-Japanese sentiment that emerged at the outbreak of the Pacific War, which spilled over to Japanese Americans and, as it turned out, cultural artifacts like Madama Butterfly. However, considering that the opera was produced by a team of Italian artists (Giacomo Puccini, Luigi Illica, and Giuseppe Giacosa) and based on a play and a short story by American authors (David Belasco and John Luther Long), the so-called “ban” on Madama Butterfly does seem ironic. In fact, when the war between the U.S. and Japan broke out, music critics were quick to reassure the audiences that Madama Butterfly would remain on stage. On December 14, barely a week after the attack on Pearl Harbor, a writer for The New York Times predicted that the opera would likely be performed by the Metropolitan Opera later that season. The author of the column “Mephisto’s Musings” in the December 25 issue of Musical America openly scoffed at the idea that people might have problems with the opera. Despite their optimistic predictions, the managements of the Met and other major opera companies throughout the nation quietly retracted the opera from their repertoires.
This ban on Madama Butterfly did not, of course, prevent people from listening to or performing excerpts from the opera outside of the opera house in private and public settings. Taking an accurate account of such “rogue” performances of Madama Butterfly during the war is a difficult challenge. However, scouring through newspapers such as the Heart Mountain Sentinel reveals that, surprisingly, some of the places Madama Butterfly continued to be heard and performed were the Japanese American incarceration camps. These performances took various forms, including record concerts held at libraries, a marionette play for a Christmas program, and recitals both in and out of the camps. For instance, the March 13, 1943, issue of The Minidoka Irrigator from Hunt, Idaho reports that the Japanese American students from Hunt High School presented “a well-rounded program of semi-classical and popular numbers” to the students at Burly High School outside the camp. The program included instrumental showpieces, a wide variety of songs such as Charles Gounod’s “Ave Maria” (after J.S. Bach), Jerome Kern’s “Old Man River,” and Glenn Miller’s “Juke Box Saturday Night,” baton twirling, and a lively rendition of school cheers by the “yell team.” It also included a rendition of “One Fine Day” (“Un bel dì”) from Madama Butterfly by a student named Susie Takimoto.
To us today, the young Japanese American singer’s selection of “Un bel dì” under these extraordinary circumstances may seem like an unexpected one. But when we consider what the aria represents within the narrative of Madama Butterfly, her choice can be seen as an astute and moving political gesture. In the opera, the aria emerges early in Act II when Cio-Cio-San attempts to convince Suzuki that Pinkerton will return to Nagasaki. Cio-Cio-San encourages Suzuki—and by extension us the audience members—to visualize the approach of a foreign ship from across the sea that carries her American husband. Pinkerton’s return, Cio-Cio-San believes, will not only rescue her from abject poverty and from her extreme social isolation but also reaffirm the legitimacy of her marriage, something others around her do not take seriously. Is it a stretch of imagination to see a parallel, in this instance, between Cio-Cio-San’s longing to be recognized as Pinkerton’s American wife and the incarcerated Japanese American students’ desire to regain their liberty?
Musically speaking, “Un bel dì” stands out within the score of Madama Butterfly in that it has almost no allusion to Japanese music. This becomes obvious when comparing it to Cio-Cio-San’s second Act II aria, “Che tua madre” which stiches together at least three Japanese melodies—“Suiryō-Bushi,” “Jizuki-Uta,” and “Kappore Hōnen”—which Puccini gathered from printed collections of Japanese music. Composed in his signature late-Romantic style, “Un bel dì” has more in common with arias by heroines from Puccini’s earlier works such as Manon’s “In quelle trine morbide” and Mimì’s “Sì, mi chiamano Mimì,” which closely follow the shifting psychological states of characters. Puccini captures Cio-Cio-San’s state of mind at the opening of “Un bel dì” through her gently descending melody supported by the soft sustaining tones of the thinned-out orchestra as she imagines the arrival of Pinkerton’s ship. The mood changes suddenly in the middle portion of the aria as Cio-Cio-San describes in vivid details how she imagines Pinkerton arriving at their house and explains the range of emotions she would experience. To illustrate this, Puccini projects a variety of moods in rapid succession ranging from suspense to nostalgic reflection, from playfulness to painful yearning. Puccini caps off the aria with Cio-Cio-San’s assertion that “all of this will happen” (“tutto questo avverrà”) as the orchestra surges to reiterate the opening melody in full volume. When confronted with this dramatic gesture, it is hard not to be moved by Cio-Cio-San’s conviction and the depth of her feelings. We are so profoundly moved because we see in this aria the fundamental injustice and absurdity of the situation in which Cio-Cio-San finds herself and because we recognize Cio-Cio-San’s humanity in her struggle to overcome her fate.
Indeed, when Madama Butterfly was revived at the Met in early 1946, New York critics reflected on the recent prohibition on the opera and tellingly cited the possibility of humanizing a Japanese protagonist as one reason for it. Puccini’s fictional opera was also used to make sense of the real world in other ways. One notable document is the dispatch from the war front in Allied-occupied Italy published in the November 5, 1944 issue of the New York Times by Harold Taubman who witnessed the performance of Madama Butterfly in Naples. Throughout the article, he reflects on the ridiculousness of the idea that Madama Butterfly contained some nefarious Japanese propaganda and gleefully welcomes the way Pinkerton treats Japanese characters with disdain and contempt. At the same time, he also comments on the courageous acts of Japanese American soldiers of the Fifth Army in Italy, comparing them to Cio-Cio-San’s son Dolore. This was mostly likely the legendary 442nd Infantry Regiment made up of Japanese American soldiers, many of whom enlisted to serve the nation while in camps. Taubman concludes his observation thus: “Let our consul Sharpless but get Sorrow [Dolore] into the United States and away from Japanese indoctrination and he might become a useful human being.”
Almost 120 years after the premiere of Madama Butterfly, and more than 80 years after the outbreak of the Pacific War, we are once again at a historic moment where Asian American representation on the operatic stage is being interrogated and renegotiated to respond to the events unfolding in real life. Madama Butterfly emerged out of a particular historic and cultural context which conceived of Japanese people and their culture in problematic ways that in turn have negatively influenced how Asian people are seen and treated by others. The stream of new productions and works inspired by Madama Butterfly by Asian and Asian American artists that has emerged since the pronounced rise of hate crimes against people of Asian descent aims to tackle this very issue. These productions challenge the overtly racist expressions baked into the texts of the opera as well as problematic theatrical practice (exaggerated and eccentric costumes, makeup, and gestures) that have become conventionalized in performance. One line of argument against these recent efforts posits that we the audience should be able to understand Madama Butterfly as a fantasy and not to confuse it with reality. In other words, we can appreciate Madama Butterfly as it has always existed and still be supportive of Asian American people’s aspirations for safety, justice, and equality. This may be the case for some viewers, but history suggests that many artists, audience members, and critics—like the ones cited above—have repeatedly sought to merge the fantasy of Madama Butterfly with reality. Opera, being a performative art, necessitates repeated iterations of existing works in the present moment that opens the possibility for us to seek new and different meanings. In fact, I believe that the reason why we engage with the arts in general is not necessarily to recede into the world of fantasy but rather to make sense of the world, to understand the time and space we occupy here and now. This was how people treated Puccini’s Madama Butterfly in the United States during World War II. This is certainly one meaningful way we can engage with Madama Butterfly today.
Kunio Hara (University of South Carolina)
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Links to the Digitized Japanese American Newspapers on Chronicling America Website
Heart Mountain Sentinel, December 2, 1944, page 8 [Notice about the Brooklyn Butterfly, see lower right]
The Minidoka Irrigator, March 13, 1943, page 6 [About the High School students’ concert, see upper center]