Madama Butterfly

Madame Butterfly is the drama of a Japanese geisha who, in her love for a man from a foreign culture, exchanges her own country’s age-old traditions for an uncertain future. This radical choice makes her an outcast in her own country. In committing ritual suicide, Butterfly tragically returns to her cultural traditions.

We get to know Cio-Cio-San as a naive child wife enjoying her fragile happiness with Pinkerton, her prince charming for the day. This ‘purchased’ marriage is one of the many evil excrescences of Japan’s troublesome social and economic situation at the end of the 19th century. A country which, after two centuries, is breaking out of its isolation and being introduced abruptly to the unknown West.

Puccini masterfully integrates Butterfly’s psychological drama into the problems of this country. It was not without reason that he called this opera a ‘Japanese tragedy’. The work starts as a musical comedy with an accent on romance and sensuality, but takes on a much darker tone in the second part, before slipping into tragedy. The opera then becomes a penetrating portrait of a woman and of the clash of two cultures.

Muhai Tang, who is best known in Flanders as the inspiring chief conductor of deFilharmonie in the early nineties, conducts this revival of Robert Carsen’s legendary production. This is the first time he is a guest of the Flanders Opera. Cio-Cio-San is played alternately by the young Korean Yunah Lee and Karine Babajanyan, who sang Tosca at the Bregenz Festspiele and starred in the latest James Bond film Quantum of Solace.