The aggressive Westernization devalued both Japanese wisdom and tradition. Around the end of the 19th century, the old, patriarchal order and the force of feudal authority had lost their relevance and power due to increasing Western influence. Unusual for opera at that time, Madama Butterfly was set contemporaneously. The events of the opera are simply too much for the fifteen-year-old to cope with. Since her family and her culture have disowned her, she cannot return and so instead latches onto a future with her fictive husband, but soon is forced to realize the end of her fantasy and that her marriage was only for the amusement of a Yankee.

Butterfly has lost her roots with the East, but yet she has never becomes part of the West as she has always wished to be. My reading of the piece focuses on this particular aspect of the drama: Butterfly belongs neither to the East nor to the West-a particular interpretation that makes the opera relevant to the modern dilemma of many women today. Pamela Recinella is directing a new semi-staged production of Madama Butterfly for Opera Hong Kong 16-17 August. These themes were of enormous significance in Puccini’s day and this production thus places his opera back in this original context to give an intriguing and innovative interpretation for present-day audiences unfamiliar with its background. This approach draws the opera back into the original discourse surrounding the Western discovery of Japan in the late 19th century, a contentious field involving contemporaneous questions of exoticism, race, gender and sexual exploitation. While the work reveals exploitative and opportunistic Western machismo, the opera nevertheless concentrates on Butterfly’s feelings, her psychology and the highly dramatic conflict between her identity and her true love, a unsolvable conflict which leads her to delusion and to death. Puccini’s opera refers to the geisha Cio-Cio-San and similarly retells her fictive marriage. David Belasco, meanwhile, (who wrote the play (1904)-derived via an 1898 short story by American John Luther Long-that was the main reference for Giacomo Puccini’s librettists Illica and Giacosa, describes her as a victim of a fatal and irresistible love. These two sources present the protagonist Madame Chrysanthème is in two completely different characterizations: in Loti, she is a dissolute and licentious woman, while in Regamey she is a needy, extremely sensitive creature. The concept for this new production Madama Butterfly was been influenced the work’s literary background: the western perception of Japan present throughout the autobiographical novel of Pierre Loti ( Madame Chrysanthème, 1887) and the diary treatment of the subject by Félix Régamey ( The Pink Notebook of Madame Chrysanthème, 1894).

Madame butterfly short story