Coming Monday, a New ‘Butterfly’

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The New York Sun

Cast your eyes over the orchestra stalls of the world’s opera houses and you will see row upon row of white-haired, often slumbering patrons and their aged, overdressed spouses. The cheaper seats above are often gap-toothed and half empty. How to attract a younger crowd, an audience for the next 50 years, to a place and a medium that has become both ossified and stultified?

The answer is to innovate or die: find artists and productions that thrill. Which is why on Monday the Metropolitan Opera will present one of the freshest, most exciting, unusual productions ever to open a new season: Giacomo Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly,” in a new staging conceived by the English movie director Anthony Minghella.

Mr. Minghella — who is probably best known for his Oscar-winning film of Michael Ondaatje’s “The English Patient” and more recently directed “Cold Mountain,” the much-hyped (and afterward much-derided) Confederate Civil War romance — was originally commissioned to direct his “Madama Butterfly” for the English National Opera at the Coliseum in London.

It was this choice of opera house that set the stage for an operatic phenomenon and the subsequent collaboration between Mr. Minghella and the Met, which, under its new general manager Peter Gelb, promptly offered to co-commission.

Traditionally the biggest names in opera have worked in Covent Garden, the premier London house where black ties and long dresses adorn the orchestra stalls and whose high prices can command the most expensive voices on opera’s top-flight international circuit. By contrast, the Coliseum has a deliberately democratic philosophy, which ensures that its always-ingenious, if sometimes off-key productions are aimed at ordinary music lovers. The Coliseum has for many years insisted on singing in English on the grounds (which many argue are misguided) that even well-known operas can be better understood if sung in the audience’s native tongue. The house has attracted a reputation for innovation and lively, unusual revivals of lost operas — with a single production of “Xerxes” in the ’80s, the Coliseum was almost single-handedly responsible for a worldwide Handel revival.

But even by the Coliseum’s standards, Mr. Minghella’s “Madama Butterfly” has been a revelation since it opened in November 2005.

Using a lacquered black wood hill and floating sets, it introduces the audience to an alien Japanese world where the American cad Pinkerton is searching for his latter-day mail-order Asian bride. The increasingly sad action and stark staging are accompanied by the silent reprimand of Butterfly’s child, here a traditional Bunkaru Japanese puppet operated by a black-clothed figure that melts into the background. The costumes are by New York designer Han Feng.

In some ways, Mr. Minghella is doing nothing new. The ebullient Franco Zeffirelli abandoned film for the opera 40 years ago, and his extravagant and wonderfully cinematic productions are still in the Met’s repertoire. And others are being coaxed into opera, too, including the unlikely contributor William Friedkin, director of “The Exorcist” and “The French Connection,” currently at work at Washington National Opera on Bela Bartok’s “Duke Bluebeard’s Castle” and Puccini’s “Gianni Schicchi.”

But while this trend to employ the tricks of the cinema and the sensibility of filmmakers to the opera stage may offend the purists, it is entirely true to the spirit of Italian opera, which has always been a truly popular, democratic art for the common people.

The form, however, is currently in the grip of a new and urgent drama every bit as histrionic as anything that appears on an opera stage. This is not to do with opera as an art but more to do with an economic truth that all purveyors of live classical music have come to understand.

Although there has never been more music and opera heard in the world, through the explosion in recorded music, radio, iPods, and online streaming audio, the audience for live, serious music has never been more elusive. Ask those who run Carnegie Hall or New York City Opera. The figures are dire. While audiences for the top acts are invariably sold out, there are empty seats for the mainstream fare that, even five years ago, attracted enough of a crowd to ensure the books balanced.

Mr. Gelb’s main goal has been to remedy this decline in interest, which he has attempted through assertive advertising campaigns and enthusiasm for the multi-platform distribution of opera. Now “Madama Butterfly” — which has provoked audiences in London to reconsider Puccini’s soaring music, which has become muffled over the years through over-familiarity — will be the first real test of the opera house’s new era. Not since Peter Brook’s “Carmen” has so familiar a piece been re-presented to a jaded audience to such great effect. As the London Independent said, “Our visual senses were ravished by one of the most exquisite spectacles to grace the Coliseum stage.”

London’s buzz quickly set off the word of mouth in New York, and today’s open house dress rehearsal at the Met will surely attract long lines. Whatever the critics’ opinions of Monday’s opening night show, the enthusiasm of audiences — including young, new opera-goers — will set the Gelb years off to a flying start.

“Madama Butterfly” has become London’s hottest ticket, and now it is New York’s.


The New York Sun

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