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.
