Contextualizing Butterfly 

Welcome to The Butterfly Process blog! My name is Phil Chan, I am the cofounder of Final Bow for Yellowface and since 2017, we have been working to improve how to represent Asians on the stage (yes, we are the folks who de-yellowfaced The Nutcracker). Though my work has primarily been ballet, I am a self-professed opera queen. So, I was intrigued when BLO invited me to lead a year-long conversation around the issues raised when producing Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, a work I love but have always been slightly uncomfortable with. As my creative practice consists of reimagining works with outdated racial representations that still have intrinsic artistic merit and continued social resonance, tackling Butterfly became an irresistible challenge. How can we save this beautiful opera from the calls of cancel culture, while challenging the problematic racial dynamics embedded within the structure of the opera itself?  

A common misconception in the performing arts is that works like Madama Butterfly are static, and should be treated like sculpture, paintings, or films. While the visual arts capture the zeitgeist of the moment, frozen in time, that isn’t at all what happens in the performing arts. Operas, plays, and ballets require a different sort of care. I use the analogy of treating them like bonsai trees—living art that serves as a stand-in for life in miniature. Bonsai need air, water, fertilization, and repotting. Pruning helps keep its shape, its form, its essence, and sometimes it gets messy as it changes and slowly grows through each season. Ultimately, producing opera requires the same attention and care over many years.  

It is critical for opera companies to collectively shift from a Eurocentric to a multiracial way of producing opera to better serve the diverse communities we live in. To make that shift, we can still program these European masterworks, but it is imperative we provide creative solutions to those works that contain outdated racial representations. This is the opposite of cancel culture. Re-imagining works of the canon to serve a new generation is vital to the survival of not only the individual work, but for the art form itself. It is BLO’s goal to lay the groundwork for this shift through conversations generated from The Butterfly Process.  

The conditions for this conversation feel especially urgent at this moment in time. With in-person performances timidly resuming nationwide, opera companies face a dire need to produce something that is a performance staple that sells itself and is ready to go with minimal rehearsals. Madama Butterfly is a popular solution, with 40 different productions planned worldwide in the 2022/23 season alone. With the heightened violence against Asian people outside of our theaters, it is imperative opera companies collectively examine their productions of Butterfly in light of the current social context we find ourselves in. 

 Where does the process start? For me, the first step in reimagining a work and its possibilities is to begin with the conditions of its birth and subsequent performance life in the context of social progress and changing geopolitics. We must examine how a living work like an opera has warped with the passage of time. This step in the process is crucial; it helps us see clearly what elements have resonated through the generations, and what are the work’s structural weaknesses. Historical context illuminates how we shape the work, for it to retain its essence for audiences today. 

 To provide this context, the BLO team and I turn to Dr. Kunio Hara, Associate Professor of Music History at the University of South Carolina whose research specialties include Puccini’s operas, exoticism and Orientalism in music, nostalgia, and music in postwar Japan.1  Not only is Kunio a celebrated musicologist and Puccini expert, but he is also Japanese — whose experience both living in Japan as a member of the majority and living in America in the minority could directly speak to the lived impact of the opera on a person of Japanese heritage in different societies. Kunio provides nuance and multiple perspectives to the conversation making him the perfect point of view to this Butterfly Process. 

 To that end, I started our 90-minute conversation by asking Kunio why he thought Madama Butterfly was still so popular? He listed three reasons:  

• Familiarity: The high frequency to which Madama Butterfly has been programmed has created a sense of familiarity, which in turn drives it to be programmed frequently.  
• Contrast: “Exotic” stories that take place outside of Europe were popular to European audiences because it allowed for greater spectacle and fantasy without being constrained by reality.  
• Relatability: Who among us can’t relate to falling hopelessly in love with the wrong person? Puccini’s romantic verismo music allows us to viscerally experience emotions in a heightened dramatic setting.  

At the top of our conversation, Kunio and I started with an overview of attitudes towards Asia at the time Puccini began working on Madama Butterfly. During most of the nineteenth century, Japan had limited cultural exchanges with Europe through Dutch traders. That is until mid-century when United States naval officer, Commodore Matthew C. Perry aggressively heralded an era of unequal trade deals between Japan, European powers, and the United States. Japanese leaders responded to this crisis by importing Western science, technology, and ideas, and became a regional militarist power, including becoming colonizers themselves, (a fact my Chinese grandfather would never let us forget). In the arts, a growing awareness of Japanese culture in Europe resulted in Japonisme, the collecting craze of woodblock prints, ceramics, screens, and other objects from Japan, as well as imitating elements of Japanese art and culture. Paintings by Monet, and performance works like Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado and Saint-Saëns’s La princesse jaune began to heavily influence conceptions about Japan in the Western imagination. 

 Puccini’s Madama Butterfly was incubated under these circumstances: informed by French naval officer Pierre Loti’s novel Madame Chrysanthème in 1887; American lawyer John Luther Long’s short story “Madame Butterfly” in 1898; and American playwright David Belasco’s play Madame Butterfly in 1900. In addition to his soaring romantic melodies, Puccini drew from printed Japanese music that was produced by Japanese musicians in Japan and by European musicians who had travelled to Japan. Kunio stressed the sheer amount of actual Japanese music embedded by Puccini within the opera. Was this Puccini’s attempt at authenticity and inclusion, an adoption of cultural appropriation, or a combination of both?  

Even from the opera’s conception, constant change was already baked into the equation. While the premiere of Madama Butterfly in 1904 at La Scala was a flop, Puccini continued to revise the opera multiple times until it reached a stable form by the end of 1906 for a production in Paris soon after the work’s American debut. Some of the most significant revisions include the elimination of some of Pinkerton’s overtly racist dialogue and the addition of a new aria for Pinkerton, “Addio fiorito asil,” in Act III (or Act II, part 2) a remorseful aria that gives his character some redemptive quality. (Puccini might have realized the importance of an audience’s ability to fall in love with the tenor to the success of a work.) As the opera gained popularity in both the western and eastern worlds, a wave of Japanese artists worked to “correct” the opera by incorporating the Japanese language in the work, and bilingual productions began popping up in the 1930s.  

Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, [reproduction number, e.g., LC-B2-1234]

 The turn of the 21st century brought re-imaginings of the opera: some dove deeper into the dynamics of the original story; some removed Japan and Japanese-ness altogether; and others took the story and recentered it around an Asian experience. La Scala did a production in 2016 that attempted a time-capsule approach to restore Puccini’s original 1904 production (racist bits and all). The common denominator of all the productions is that they mostly retained Puccini’s music. But even without Puccini, Butterfly has inspired other more drastic re-imaginings, including Broadway’s Miss Saigon which premiered in London in 1989. And in the summer of 2022, David Henry Hwang and Huang Ruo’s new opera, M. Butterfly 蝴蝶君, will see its world premiere at Santa Fe Opera. It’s nice to see Asian Americans taking ownership of these re-imaginations in recent years.  

 At this point in the conversation, we invited a multicultural group of opera singers—those originally contracted for BLO’s previously scheduled production of Madama Butterfly, to join in discussion with Kunio and me to bring in the thoughts and perspectives of current artists. Some of the questions the artists asked were, “What has been the reception of the opera in Japan?… At what point does a work like Madama Butterfly become a product of the culture that it’s depicting, even though it originally didn’t come from that culture?… Is there anything that is inherently Japanese that Puccini captures in Madama Butterfly?…”  

 After a thoughtful discussion, my takeaway is that a “masterpiece” like Butterfly, is so reinforced in the canon, that it seems untouchable. Operas that we consider part of the frequently performed “core canon” have been made to feel like static works, more closely resembling a painting instead of a living, breathing ritual that is enacted before an audience. However, through Kunio’s historical context, he illuminated for us that, in fact, we have never treated Butterfly this way—not even by Puccini himself.  

 For the sake of keeping the work alive and vibrant, the opera has become flexible enough to change and adapt alongside socio-cultural trends despite deep geopolitical and cultural strain. History proves this. Therefore, Butterfly must continue to be challenged and reimagined if we want to keep it alive and resonate with current and future generations. 

 I hope you will join us for the other Butterfly Process conversations coming up, with topics including the fantasy of orientalism, archetypes within the opera, casting issues, as well as the impact on artists and audiences, centering the Asian experience in opera.  Please join us!