If ever a play was crying out to be made into an opera, it’s David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly. The 1988 Tony award-winning drama explored the west’s infatuation with the idea of the Asian woman as submissive victim, in part inspired by Puccini’s 1904 weepie. Hwang, an Asian American, used it as a lens through which to examine the curious case of a real-life French diplomat who had a 20-year sexual affair with a Beijing opera singer without ever realising “she” was a “he”. It all ended in a salacious trial after the singer was discovered to have been feeding sensitive information to his masters in the Chinese Communist party.
In this opera by Chinese-born composer Huang Ruo, premiered in Santa Fe in 2022, René Gallimard, the ambitious if slightly dim diplomat, allows his sexual fantasies to inform his professional view of international affairs. The east, he predicates, longs to be mastered by the west. By failing to foresee the collapse of regional western ambitions, his downfall is ensured.
