Opera - Madame Butterfly

Madame Butterfly

1904

Giacomo Puccini

Madame Butterfly is an Opera that was premiered in 1904 composed by Giacomo Puccini. I explain this opera as a hopeless romantic love story of a Japanese girl Cio-Cio-San, or Madame, and a white American man, Pinkerton. Madame is a geisha wife, which is basically a girl that entertains men with conversation, dancing, and singing. When Pinkerton shows up they end up “falling in love” and they get married. Before he leaves for sea they make love and she ends up getting pregnant. As the opera is going on she’s just waiting for him return back home with their child. I like to describe this opera as a hopeless romantic love story because Madame believed that he was in love with her just as much that she was in love with him. She didn’t want to listen to anyone else and what they had to say about their relationship. Even when she was offered to still be a geisha she turned it down, because she’s married now and she has to wait for her husband to return. Once he came back from sea he broke her heart because he returned with a new wife and decided to take Madame’s and his child, and leave her with nothing. The end of the opera she ends up killing herself because she didn’t want to suffer for the rest of her life alone.

We did learn a little bit about the term, “Mise en scene”, by watching bits of clips of operas in class. We were able to see how they had everything placed for the show. When I researched the term I found out that the French meaning for it is, “placing on the stage”.  Some examples of this are, how the stage is set up, the lighting, costumes, makeup,props, etc. While watching Madame Butterfly that’s what I tried to observe. The live opera that I watched of this version of Madame Butterfly, the main stage did not change at all. Something that I did notice in the beginning was the makeup and costumes of the Opera. In the beginning Madame has the full face of makeup and a very pretty dress on, and that’s how she looks when she meets Pinkerton. Once Pinkerton leaves for sea and she “officially has a husband”  she ends up having no makeup on at all and her outfit is very plain now. I think that could be symbolism of how her life has changed because she doesn’t have to try hard to impress anybody anymore because she finally has someone. Since the stage, setting, and props were very simple for the show something they did to make it more interesting for the scenes was to change the lighting. Depending on the mood of the scene or what the characters were feeling depended on how bright or dark they would make the background.

Before watching this opera we as a class  were required to watch the short animation on Madame Butterfly. After watching that animaton I honestly was not very excited to watch a whole opera on that. I discovered when I watched the opera it  was not as dark as the animation and it was a very simple plot. There wasn’t that much detail or specific things happening in it but it still turned out good. Madame Butterfly was first performed at Teatro alla Scala, Metropolitan City of Milan, Italy on February 17,1904. The reviews of this opera today is being one of the most known operas around the world. I thought because of how popular it is today it would be very popular back then too. I wanted to do a little research to see how people reacted to it when it was first premiered and I figured out that I was completely wrong. I found that after the first performance Puccini had to remove it because of how bad the responses were from the audience. He took about 4 months to redo everything with it and put it back on stage at the Teatro Grande in Brescia. He got a completely different reaction than last time and it went on to be a huge success.

Madame Butterfly is important in the chronology of opera because I think it’s one of those shows that other opera’s looked up to while being created. Because of how big the success of it was, especially with a women as the lead, it was very inspirational for people. Technology was used in this opera by the use of the stage and how things were being used. Like I said earlier in the paper they used different lighting settings to make different colors to go with how the actors felt. Especially with one scene at the end there was no singing at all and it was between a guy and a girl and the scenery went dark. Also the sound effects that were used in the background of the performance with the live music was also technology used in this opera. Just because of how simple the show was there still wasn’t that much technology used in Madame Butterfly.

If I were to turn this opera into a video game, I would be basing it off of the last scene in Madame Butterfly. The main player would be Madame and you would be trying to beat Pinkerton. She  would have to go through different levels and challenges within those levels to find her child. If she gets beat or if she was too slow Pinkerton would end up with the child and she would die. This correlates with the end of the movie because once the child was taken away from Madame she ended up killing herself. This game would only be available to be a single player game because there’s only one player, which is Madame. Pinkerton would just be the computer going against her in these challenges. As video games usually work as you move up a level the challenges and game would get harder. So the last level would decide the rest of her life. Either she finally wins and gets to keep her child and her life. Or it can be like the actual ending of the opera and she’ll end up dead with nothing once again.