Seattle Opera’s “Madama Butterfly” is a thing of delicate grace and beauty layered over heart-rending passion, much like the geisha for whom the opera is named.
Puccini’s story of unrequited love has a tendency toward the melodramatic. But director Peter Kazaras applies a constraint that allows the title character’s downfall to play out in a very real and moving way. Which is all the more apt given the actual history behind Puccini’s fictional tale of the geisha, Cio-Cio-San, who sacrifices her connections to her family to marry an American Naval officer, Lt. B.F. Pinkerton, only to be abandoned by him in favor of an American wife.
There were similar marriages in the 19th-century that the Japanese wives considered permanent while their Western husbands did not. The account of one such marriage, whose truth is debatable, tells of a Japanese singer who was left by her Western husband, and their child raised by her husband’s brother and his wife. That tale inspired the short story on which “Madama Butterfly” is based, as well as a novel that spawned an opera by André Messager.
It was abundantly apparent on opening night last Saturday why Patricia Racette is considered the soprano to sing the title role in “Madama Butterfly” at such renowned companies as the Metropolitan Opera. Racette moved with the elegant gracefulness of a geisha, from hand gestures to walking, learned in her early 20s on a cultural exchange to Japan to study “Madama Butterfly.”
Thoroughly invested in the character of Cio-Cio-San, Racette was heartbreaking as she moved from an ingenuous, girlish 15-year-old happily falling in love to her heartbreaking disillusionment with Pinkerton just a few years later. Vocally agile, Racette was one moment spinning a sound as fine as a thread that could be heard at the back of McCaw Hall and the next raising the roof with potent fierceness.
Not quite as strong as Racette was Stefano Secco’s Lt. Pinkerton. Secco has a mellifluous tenor, but his Pinkerton seemed a bit more deliberate than youthfully careless in his deceit, which made it harder to buy his later remorse. That said, the line a singer has to walk to get Pinkerton just right is a fine and touchy one.
Mezzo-soprano Sarah Larsen, a 2011-2012 Seattle Opera Young Artist, is a strong performer who can express volumes without a single note. As Butterfly’s maid, Suzuki, Larsen’s body language spoke her empathy for and fierce protectiveness of her mistress even when she sang not a word.
Doug Jones was appropriately sleazy as Goro, the marriage broker, and baritone Brett Polegato a sympathetic presence as the powerless American consul Sharpless.
Aiding Kazaras’ understated vision, conductor Julian Kovatchev led the orchestra with a gorgeous subtlety echoed by the Seattle Opera Chorus under the direction of Beth Kirchhoff. In the same vein, Susan Benson’s spare set and costumes, designed for the Canadian Opera Company, rely on a few well-chosen elements.
As the opera progressed, Duane Schuler’s lighting gradually changed to reflect less the externals of Cio-Cio-San’s life, such as time of day, and more her state of mind. In the final act, Butterfly is dressed in white and spotlit with sharp white light against an intense blue background at one point and deep red at another--breathtakingly beautiful and yet another deftly employed technique to sweep us into Cio-Cio-San’s tragic story.
Seattle Opera’s “Madama Butterfly” plays at Marion Oliver McCaw Hall, 321 Mercer St., through Sunday, May 20. Prices $25-$241. Tickets/information: 389-7676, www.seattleopera.org.
Freelance writer Maggie Larrick lives in the Seattle area.
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