A visit to Glyndebourne is for many a chance to admire the gardens and settle into a serious picnic in the evening sunshine, regrettably interrupted by a couple of naps during the opera.
On Wednesday evening we were reminiscing about the napping in the old auditorium which was unbearably hot. Wednesday evening, as it happens, was not at all warm and rain threatened. The weather was an appropriate prelude to the best production of Butterfly I’ve seen. Set in Japan just after WW II it threw out most of the kimonos and all of the parasols and paper lanterns. What was left was a visceral playing out of Puccini’s deeply unpleasant tale of love, betrayal, rejection and ultimate tragedy. What made it so disturbing is that this horror story is accompanied by Puccini’s most beautiful music.
In Act II, Butterfly, rejected in her own society, lives with her faithful maid as an American. She has a TV, western furniture, smokes and wears western clothes. In an homage to Jonathan Miller’s ENO production of Rigoletto, Butterfly plays the Humming Chorus on her radiogram. (These pictures are true to the spirit of the production but are from the Glyndebourne Touring Opera production in 2016.)
There is a blizzard of cherry blossom in Act III to welcome Pinkerton but don’t get your hopes up. The end is as bleak as possible. The young boy is not scooped up by his step-mother and a new life in America, He plays alone on the floor with a model battleship before unpacking the present Pinkerton has brought – a much larger model battleship. It said more about Pinkerton than Puccini intended, as earlier he had shown remorse, but reminded me of the large Scalextric set my father gave me after he left my mother.
Ravishing singing accompanying such an uncompromisingly unromantic production made for a bitter sweet evening in which I was emotionally involved to a much greater extent than I expected.
https://youtu.be/mN9Dipgqdtw