Puccini, Madama Butterfly: (Revival Premiere) Soloists, Chorus and Orchestra of Welsh National Opera, Julian Smith, conductor, Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff, 03.02.2007 (GPu)

 

Conductor: Julian Smith

Original Director: Joachim Herz

Revival Director: Caroline Chaney

Set Designer: Reinhart Zimmermann

Costume Designer: Eleonore Kleiber

Original Lighting Director: John Waterhouse

 

Cio-Cio-San: Amanda Roocroft

Lieutenant B. F. Pinkerton: Paul Charles Clarke

Goro: Philip Lloyd Holtam

Suzuki: Claire Bradshaw

Sharpless: Eddie Wade

Cio-Cio San’s Cousin: Megan Llewellyn Dorke

Cio-Cio-San’s Mother: Neda Bizzarri

Yakuside: Julian Boyce

The Imperial Commissioner: James Robinson-May

The Official Registrar: Jack O’Kelly

The Bonze: David Soar

Prince Yamadori: Alastair Moore

Kate Pinkerton: Sian Menhir

 

In William Blake’s Songs of Experience there is an extraordinary little poem called ‘The Clod & the Pebble’:

 

          ‘Love seeketh not Itself to please,

          Nor for itself hath any care;

          But for another gives its ease,

          And builds a Heaven in Hells despair.’

 

                   So sang a little Clod of Clay,

                   Trodden with the cattles feet;

                   But a Pebble of the brook,

                   Warbled out these metres meet:

 

          ‘Love seeketh only Self to please,

          To bind another to its delight;

          Joys in another loss of ease,

          And builds a Hell in Heavens despite.’

 

While it would be forcing the issue to claim that Cio-Cio-San and Pinkerton can simply be identified with, respectively, Blake’s Clod and Pebble, the two starkly antithetical conceptions of love of which Blake’s poem speaks certainly come close to finding theatrical embodiments in the chief characters of the libretto which Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa (working, of course, from David Belasco’s play Madame Butterfly) provided for Puccini.

 

This production by Jochen Herz was first staged by Welsh National Opera as long ago as November 1978, and has been revived a good few times since then. In most respects it has survived the years very well – it was apparently “refurbished” (the term used in the programme) in 1998. The basic set design, the hill-top house of semi-transparent, movable screens, bowered in cherry blossom, continues to be a flexible platform and plays its part in the composition of more than a few striking stage pictures. Like Cio-Cio-San, the house which Pinkerton has ‘bought’ appears fragile but has a strength far beyond his comprehension. It is one of the production’s measures of Pinkerton’s coarseness and insensitivity.

 

In the opening scenes Paul Charles Clarke does something like justice to Pinkerton’s arrogant blindness, to his appalling shallowness, to his Pebble-like self-love; while he seeks only his own temporary pleasure he dresses up his desire (not least to himself) as romantic love. Neither Clarke’s acting nor singing is perhaps of the very subtlest, but they serve the characterisation quite successfully in these early stages of the opera and act as a foil to Pinkerton’s brief, but anguished, expressions of something approaching self-realisation (however cowardly his reactions to it) at the close.

 

Roocoft’s Cio-Cio-San mixes formality and vivacity very successfully in Act One, and in physical terms she sustains a ‘Japanese’ demeanour more than many other interpreters of the role have been able to do. Tonally her voice sometimes seems a little too heavy in these scenes, but it is a rare soprano indeed who can be equally perfect at the two extremes (psychologically and emotionally) of the character’s experience at beginning and end of the opera. Roocroft resists the temptation to feign any specifically girlish mannerisms of voice or gesture and the results are quietly affecting, viewed and heard, as they must inevitably be, with a knowledge of the outcome.

 

The ‘crowd’ scenes of the wedding are handled amusingly – but without any excessive playing for laughs – and the scene succeeds in reinforcing our awareness of Pinkerton’s complete lack of any real interest in or sympathy for the world in which his bride has grown up and his lack of anything more than a superficial interest (however transiently ‘passionate’) in Cio-Cio-San herself.

 

Pinkerton intends to give up nothing; Cio-Cio-San is willing to give up almost everything, except her misplaced faith in Pinkerton. Like Blake’s Clod of Clay she is willing to allow herself to be trodden into a different shape under his feet. But for us the painfulness of her self-abasement, generally well evoked by Roocroft, lies in our realisation that her idea of love is finally as unsatisfactory as his, as unbalanced as his. There is a rich irony in Pinkerton’s Act One assertion that “l'amor non uccide /
ma dà vita”, since both lovers are, in their different ways, committed to notions of love which are self-destructive, finally devoted more to death than to life.

 

The production pointed up this very neatly in places – as in Suzuki’s mutely pained reaction to Cio-Cio-San’s ‘Un bel dì’, the opening bars of which Roocroft floated out with considerable beauty, though there was perhaps an undue harshness at the top end of her voice in some later passages, the aria perhaps taking more poignancy from its place in the narrative than from the detail of Roocroft’s interpretation.

 

Indeed, Amanda Roocroft’s Cio-Cio-San, a qualified success in Act One, was far more compelling in Act Two. Here her interpretation was, dramatically, a persuasively moving study in delusion, and her vocal production seemed utterly certain and purposeful. She was helped by a very fine interpretation of Suzuki by Claire Bradshaw, utterly convincing in both gesture and voice, a thoroughly ‘Japanese’ study in devotion; the long scenes between the two women were very much the beating heart of the production.

 

A number of other roles were given pleasing performances. A virus-stricken Neal Davies had to be replaced on the day of the performance by Eddie Wade (himself apparently a little under the weather too!) and to his great credit Wade gave an altogether assured and sensitive performance as Sharpless, even if his voice was not at its very best; this was a Sharpless painfully embarrassed by the crassness of his fellow countryman and genuinely troubled by his own impotence to ‘save’ Cio-Cio-San; in his brief appearance as the Bonze, David Soar was a commanding presence, in person and in voice.

 

Roocroft’s interpretation of Cio-Cio-San grew more and more substantial as the events drew to their inevitable conclusion; in the reassertion of control over her own life (if only through her death), in the reclaiming of her Japanese moral code and her family tradition (as she used the dagger previously used by her father), Roocroft’s Cio-Cio-San fused pain and dignity in equal measure. This particular ‘Clod of Clay’ finally refused simply to be trodden underfoot, rediscovering a certainty as to her own identity which elevated her above mere malleability.

 

Not for the first time, one was reminded just how much of the emotional substance of Puccini’s operas is nourished and sustained by the orchestral writing, especially when its subtle (and not so subtle!) colours are presented with the sympathetic understanding which Julian Smith and the Orchestra of the W.N.O. brought to this performance.

 

It would be good to see this company tackle a new production of Madama Butterfly – it is surely time for them to do so. But in the meantime, Herz’s treatment remains eminently serviceable (and more than that for the most part), especially when its central figure is interpreted as intelligently as it is here by Amanda Roocroft. She sings with real passion too and isn’t afraid to take the odd risk; most came off on this particular night and, as so often, one left the hall with a continued (and in my case, ever-increasing) respect for Puccini’s understanding of the theatre.

 

Glyn Pursglove