Madama Butterfly

I went to see Madama Butterfly (y'know, the opera) with a friend from work on May 18th.

As a complete aside, the fun thing about going to a matinee is

1. I drop the average age there to about 72.
2. It's the same crowd, everytime. I actually said hello to the lady in the elevator, because, darn it, I'd been in the same elevator with her twice before.

The opera itself was visually stunning, like the other 3 productions I've seen at the SD Opera. Marvelous singing, marvelous body language, and a tale full of allegory about the united states' tendency to assume our way is best. Destiny, as in manifest, friends and neighbors.

The story: Pinkerton rents a house, it comes with Butterfly, a geisha wife. She converts to Christianity, he leaves her high and dry after a while and goes back to America. Gets married 'for real'. Comes back a few years later, takes his previously-unknown son away from Butterfly. She has held steadfastly to the belief that he'll return and they'll be a family again. Doesn't work out that way, she kills herself.

Beautiful opera. I'm a japanophile, so it's a perfect opera for me.

The evident theme I found to be strongest in the performance is not the one that those who know I'm feminist (*) might expect, that this woman kills herself over a man. Firstly, Butterfly is Japanese and it is and was much more acceptable to suicide. If you cannot live with honor, you can at least die with it. Secondly, and I just realized this, by turning her back on her birth religion, Butterfly hooked her wagon to Pinkerton's star irrevocably. His abandoning her is truly devastating. She can't go back to her family. Lastly, the theme -- maybe it's just the current political scene -- of Pinkerton, the Yankee, not taking seriously what he was doing, thinking if it 'didn't matter' to him, since it's off in a foreign land, it must not matter to Butterfly. There is some repentance on his part, at the end, as if he suddenly realizes, as nations so rarely do, that he was playing around with people's lives. And people's lives do matter, especially to them.


[*] What woman isn't? Seriously.
Do you want a good life? For yourself? For your children? Want them happy? Or do you want yourself and your offspring trapped in a rigid world where they are only allowed to be one thing: A man, or a wife. No other options.