Puccini was given paper – Newspaper Kommersant No. 145 (7346) dated 08/11/2022

The main event of the summer festival in Bregenz, Austria was the premiere of Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly directed by Andreas Homoka. Tells Alexey Mokrousov.

Five opera premieres, not counting performances and concerts – such an abundance is rare not only at the summer festival in Bregenz. In addition to “Armida”, “Italian in Algeria” and large-scale “Siberia” (for more details, see “Kommersant” dated August 6), this is a two-hour opera by the contemporary German composer Johannes Kalitzke “Captain Nemo’s Library”. But the main event of the festival was the opera on the Lake Stage. This year the role of the hit was performed by “Madama Butterfly” directed by the intendant of the Zurich Opera House Andreas Homoka.

Performances on the Lake Stage are known not only for sunsets – the action begins at the moment when the sun sets in Lake Constance – but also for megalomaniac scenery. But Madama Butterfly artist Michael Levin took a different path. The stage seemed to be covered with a huge white curtain flying over the lake with a giant sheet of paper. On it, as if drawn with ink, the outlines of mountains and forests appear. Not without video effects like a huge grimacing face or a ship in the ocean; in the finale, when the life of Cio-Cio-San ends, everything will light up with fire, as if the whole leaf will burn down.

The minimalism of the design of Madama Butterfly is justified: Puccini wrote a chamber opera, where music and plot replace entertainment. After the success of Tosca, the libretto of which was based on a play by Victorien Sardou, the composer appreciated the merits of a professionally made play. In London, not knowing English, he went to see David Belasco’s popular play Madama Butterfly, and after the performance went backstage to the author to negotiate rights. Belasco recalled that he could not resist the temperamental Italian, in whose eyes there were tears and whose hands closed on his throat.

The neck of the artist of the current production was not squeezed by other people’s hands, but in it the miracles of technology common to the Lake Stage are replaced by poetry and mood. The stage still weighs 300 tons, and the “sheet of paper” is 1340 square meters. m – also not a candy wrapper. But it is precisely this combination of large-scale and human that allows Homoki to play out the history of relationships for every taste.

Costume designer Anthony McDonald came up with color characteristics for the characters: Consul Sharpless (an excellent American baritone Brian Mulligan) is in bright yellow, Lieutenant Pinkerton (a memorable Lithuanian tenor Edgaras Montvydas) is in blue, Goro’s pimp (German tenor Michael Laurenz) is in green . They are easy to distinguish against a white background, except that the spirits that make up an important part of the action turn out to be an exception – they are in white and sometimes seem to dissolve into the landscape.

Heroes are given space to move. But freedom of movement does not mean inner freedom. All characters depend on their own manias, and if Goro persistently offers the Americans a convenient image of Japan that never existed in reality, then the American consul Sharples unsuccessfully tries to open his eyes to Pinkerton’s treachery.

Andreas Homoka has a different main idea – about the connection of the behavior of the American sailor with the phenomenon of white supremacy, the theory of “white supremacy”, which existed in a wide spectrum, from Gobineau to Kipling. The performance does not show that Pinkerton read them, but here he is a typical example of a racist attitude towards a geisha. Although 15-year-old Cio-Cio-San does not want to be a geisha, she wants to be an American. The scene when she wraps herself in a multi-star flag and walks around the house in it is touchingly touching, if you don’t see it as a tragically unsuccessful attempt to abandon her identity and find a new one.

However, it is not necessary to perceive the subtexts and references to the cultural history of racism, you can just watch and listen. The Uzbek soprano Barno Ismatullaeva is especially good. Muscovites can easily imagine her in the role of Butterfly – she was a soloist of the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Musical Theater, and the only main part that she sang there was just the part of Cio-Cio-San. After that, European theaters began to invite Ismatullaeva as Butterfly, it came to Bregenz. Elena Guseva, the current soloist of the Muzteatr, sings in line, she previously performed Cio-Cio-San in Moscow, Hamburg and Vienna.

Performing in Bregenz every summer, the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Taiwanese Yi Chen Ling, who works in Germany (she conducts with Enrique Mazzola), has no difficulty in conveying Puccini’s lyricism. The orchestra routinely plays in the Festival Palace, and the sound is also routinely transmitted through the speakers. When you listen to the Butterfly performed by the Viennese, it becomes incomprehensible how the opera could have failed at the premiere at La Scala in 1904. But it is clear how strongly verismo and Puccini influenced the music of Hollywood. You begin to relate differently to the well-known anecdote in which, speaking of Puccini, Britten remarks: “What terrible music!” “Yes, but what a good opera!” Shostakovich answers.

The public of Bregenz agrees with him. Tickets for the Butterfly are sold out, and the excitement is expected next summer, when the opera will be repeated.