Madama Butterfly, a nasty story about an American naval officer’s seduction and subsequent abandonment of a 15-year-old Japanese geisha, is a problem for opera houses today, despite its immense and enduring popularity. Puccini, in his work that was premiered in 1904, did what the best opera composers do: craft the most potent of dramatic situations and collisions to wring the maximum emotion from an audience, while writing music of unbearable emotion and dramatic effect.
But in 2022, opera houses are nervous about programming the work and some are even cancelling productions. There seems to be concern that representing bad behaviour could be seen as endorsing it (a fallacy that especially affects opera today). More importantly Butterfly’s racial dimension feels just too hot to handle. Yet plenty of other operas contain content that is troubling for modern sensibilities, for example Così Fan Tutte and its overt misogyny, the Ring Cycle’s incest, and Tosca’s troubling depiction of sexual assault. Notwithstanding their subject matter, these operas are masterpieces. Instead of cancelling them we should find creative ways to live with them – their indestructible openness to interpretation being the key to their future.
Until recent decades, opera’s historic centre of gravity has always been western Europe, and its most popular works were written exclusively by white men. Most were also written in a period of European imperialism, and feature attitudes to women (inferior) and the white race (superior) that we find objectionable today. It was a rare artist who didn’t hold views we would find abhorrent: Wagner’s antisemitism being only one of the more notorious examples; Verdi’s casual racism (he called his opera of Othello “the chocolate project”) or Handel’s investments in the slave trade are perhaps less well known. Predictably, non-white characters or societies were invariably stereotyped, demonised or ridiculed in opera. Meanwhile, male composers fetishised the suffering of women, whose powerlessness is signalled by their inevitable deaths by murder, suicide or agonising illness.
From a modern perspective, and despite its prescient denunciation of American colonialism, Madama Butterfly appears to embody these concerns. An Italian writing about a country he never saw, while incorporating Japanese (and even Chinese) musical motifs into his score is seen as cultural appropriation – nothing less than a supporting effort in the west’s attempts to dominate Asia politically.
The west’s physical theft and destruction of cultural artefacts by force is a fact of 19th- and early 20th-century history. So, too, is the concurrent assumed racial superiority and its corollary: at best inexact and at worst distastefully caricatured representations of non-white characters. These attitudes persisted in popular culture well into the 20th century: see for example Mickey Rooney’s grotesque yellow-face impersonation in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. And in opera, blacking or “yellowing” up also persisted until very recently in productions of Otello, Madama Butterfly or the Peking-set Turandot. With its offensive echoes of The Black and White Minstrel Show and the Fu Manchu “super-villain”, opera has had to move on. At least in the UK or US, no responsible opera house – including Covent Garden – would now dream of attempting to change ethnicity with makeup.
Just as importantly, the case for greater representation in the arts has never been stronger. Art thrives when creativity is democratised – witness the working-class-driven renaissance of British pop music and film in the 1960s. And while artists of colour have been strongly represented at Covent Garden since the 1950s, few can dispute the legacy of structural exclusion from the so-called high arts.
Also uncontroversial should be our revisiting of works in the canon that have traditionally paid scant attention to the voices of those they seek to represent. For our current revival of Madama Butterfly, a production originally created in 2003, we spent a year interrogating the production in detail, consulting with Asian colleagues and practitioners, and inviting Japanese experts in movement, costume and makeup to review the staging and make discreet changes in the name of greater authenticity. This has resulted in a production that feels and looks more real and more respectful – and more emotionally weighty as a result.
Casting is more complicated, not least because opera has a more limited talent pool than, for example, that available to film or theatre. Should one approach casting literally? Butterfly cast only with Japanese or Asian singers, Turandot with Chinese singers, Otello cast only with a Black singer in the lead role? And if we do, how about operas or oratorios that feature all-Jewish casts (Jephtha, Fiddler on the Roof, Samson et Dalila …)? The risks of pigeonholing are obvious, but better than a blanket approach is one that assesses each case with sensitivity and an open mind: being colour-conscious, not colour blind. For example, after the rapid change in attitudes in the last two or three years, to perform Otello with a white singer would feel bizarre to say the least – especially in London. Which is why the historic first performances of Otello at Covent Garden by a Black singer this summer feel like a significant moment in our history.
But performing Madama Butterfly with an all-Japanese or all-Asian cast and chorus – even a majority cast and chorus – is a wholly unrealistic aim. And would it even be desirable? Asian singers speak frankly about their disinclination to be typecast in Asian roles. Far more preferable to increase representation across every opera we perform. For example, the Royal Opera’s recent production of Samson et Dalila was the first in which white principal singers were in a minority on stage, with South Korean tenor SeokJong Baek playing – triumphantly – one of the heroes of Judaism. Vigorously diversifying across the board, rather than ghettoising particular singers in particular totemic operas, feels like by far the best way forward for the art form.
And finally, a point that is not heard enough in the context of febrile social media culture wars (often concocted for clicks). Theatre has always been a home for progressive attitudes but should also be a space for fantasy and make-believe. To insist on “lived experience” for all roles can only lead to artistic impoverishment. Theatre is an imaginative contract between the audience and the performers: that someone on stage is not who they say they are. And that contract must also be based on talent. It’s the uncompromising recognition and protection of talent – whether of historic composition or contemporary singers of whatever skin colour – combined with a modern and sensitive approach to interpretation that will enable the art form to navigate its future with confidence – and without cancelling.
• Madama Butterfly is in rep at the Royal Opera House from 14 June to 6 July and from 12 September to 1 October. Oliver Mears is the Royal Opera’s director of opera.
