Pure Joy in Music & Vision 27 luglio

Pure Joy
GIUSEPPE PENNISI finds
'Madama Butterfly' at the Puccini Festival
a pleasure for the ears and the eyes

After a Fanciulla del West received with very mixed feelings by audience and critics, the 2010 Puccini Festival presented, on 17 July 2010, a revival of its 2005 production of Madama Butterfly. The large lake-front auditorium was full to capacity. The audience was enthusiastic: open stage applauses during each of the two parts (Act II and Act III were presented without intermission); accolades at the curtain calls, even though it was 1am on 18 July and many spectators had long drives to return home. Some two hundred guests had an after performance dinner with the artists. Your reviewer was back in his Viareggio hotel at nearly 3am, but was happy to have seen a performance that had been pure joy for both the ears and the eyes.

The wedding scene from the first part of 'Madama Butterfly' at the Puccini Festival in Torre del Lago. Photo © 2010 Aldo Umicini
This report is based on that fabulous 17-18 July night with a blue sky and the stars and the moon mirrored in the lake -- the background to the stage. I had already seen the production when it was unveiled in July 2005. Since then, it has travelled to the United States, Germany and Japan. It has gradually matured and improved. I believe that successful productions should be proposed over and over again; Otto Schenk's production of Der Rosenkavalier is being performed in Vienna and Munich since the early 1970s: yet, I discover additional special details and enjoy it more each time I see it. About two months ago, I commented on a successful revival in Rome of a Madama Butterfly originally produced in Bologna twenty six years ago and since them seen in several European Opera Houses. I wish a similar fate for this Torre del Lago production also because, even though it has been conceived to be staged on a lake front, it can be easily adapted to normal theatres.

Amarilli Nizza as Cio-Cio San and Massimiliano Pisapia as Pinkerton in the first part of 'Madama Butterfly' at the Puccini Festival. Photo © 2010 Aldo Umicini
The stage set (Kan Yasuda, a well-known Japanese sculptor), the costumes (Regina Schrecker) and the lighting (Fabrizio Garzelli) are, at the same time, extremely simple and elegant: a green hill sliding up from the front stage to the back stage (with the lake in the background), a few white stones in the first part, two stylized arches in the second part, a skillful use of lighting to show both the different hours of the day and the feelings of the protagonists, costumes based on 'turn of the Century' drawings and photographs. Thus, naturalistic attire in an abstract setting. This is how Japan was imagined by Belasco, Giacosa, Illica and, above all, Puccini. Sweet and delicate but at the same time rigorous and even cruel.

Amarilli Nizza as Cio-Cio San in the first part of 'Madama Butterfly' at the Puccini Festival. Photo © 2010 Aldo Umicini
The other important element is that this Madama Butterfly is entrusted to three ladies. The protagonist is Amarilli Nizza -- Music & Vision discussed her skills in the role two months ago when she sang Butterfly in Rome. The stage director is Vivien A Hewitt, born in Belfast but longtime resident of Tuscany and a very well known Puccini, Donizetti and Verdi specialist in Italy, Germany and Latin America. This stage direction sees Bufferfly's drama from the side of the Japanese young girl more strongly than directions by men normally do : we feel the young girl, fifteen years old, growing into a mature woman (even though only eighteen), her increasing sensuality and passion, her sense of motherhood. The third lady is the conductor, the American Eve Queler. She has been for several decades the Queen of New York's Carnegie Hall where she often performed operas, including rare operas, in concert versions. I recall her conducting Wagner's Rienzi in the early 1980s in the Washington Kennedy Center. Now she is seventy nine years old, but as charming as ever and also as demanding a conductor as ever; with perfect technical skills, she digs into the most secret parts of the complex score; the Festival Orchestra follows suit with enthusiasm.

Amarilli Nizza as Cio-Cio San and Renata Lamanda as Suzuki in the first scene of the second part of Puccini's 'Madama Butterfly'. Photo © 2010 Aldo Umicini
Within this context, Pinkerton (Massimiliano Pisapia) acquires the despicable and even racist look he fully deserves; a look he had in the seldom performed 1904 La Scala version of Madama Butterfly but successively toned down in both the Brescia and Paris versions of the opera. As is generally known, the 1906 Paris version is normally performed. Sharpless (Fabio Capitanucci) is an honest and well-meaning Consul attempting to prevent the damage in the first part and to contain it in the second. Goro (Mauro Buffoni) is a slew. Yamadori (Giovanni Guagliardo) is a sex object with plenty of money but little brain. No doubt, the three ladies in charge of the performance have conjured up, with quite a bit of complicity, this male universe in Nagasaki around 1900.

The chorus between the first and second scenes of the second part of 'Madama Butterfly'. Photo © 2010 Aldo Umicini
A final word: the chorus, directed by Stefano Visconti, was really moving in the interlude between the first and the second scene of the second part.

Massimiliano Pisapia as Pinkerton in the second scene of the second part of 'Madama Butterfly'. Photo © 2010 Aldo Umicini
The 2010 Puccini Festival also includes Tosca, Turandot, a Renée Fleming Gala and a Bolshoi Ballet production of Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet.
Copyright © 27 July 2010 Giuseppe Pennisi,
Rome, Italy

GIACOMO PUCCINI
MADAMA BUTTERFLY
ITALY
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