“M. Butterfly” turns Puccini on his head.
As beautiful as it is, “Madama Butterfly” presents problems of race, gender and cultural differences. Based on the Tony Award-winning Broadway play, “M. Butterfly” offers a corrective, composer Huang Ruo says.
“There are issues with Puccini’s opera,” Ruo said in a telephone interview from Santa Fe. “Of course, it was written 100 years ago by a composer who had never been to the country.”
In Puccini’s version of this unrequited love story, the naval officer Pinkerton seduces and marries Cio Cio San, a young Japanese geisha with whom he has a child. He subsequently abandons her, marrying an American wife who returns to take the child.
In “M. Butterfly,” a French diplomat falls for a Chinese opera singer who presents him with a son. But it is the diplomat who falls into tragedy.