If you want to sing at the Met go to opening night.  The evening always begins with the National Anthem and everyone sings his (or her) heart out – the lady behind me was doing a Birgit Nilsson into my right ear.  Anthony Minghella’s “new” production of Madama Butterfly competed with the haute couture and tuxedos for glitter.  How a production can be new after it’s already been mounted in another city is mysterious.  Minghella’s Butterfly was said to have been very successful at the English National Opera last year.  Of course, it had to be revised to fit the Met’s vast stage.  The Met’s men’s room is bigger than the ENO’s Coliseum.  I’m exaggerating, the men’s rooms at the Met are not as big as they should be.

 NEIL A. KURTZMAN, MD

A Butterfly in the Net at the Met Opening September 25, 2006

he opera was the first part of The Met’s new General Manger’s plan to reinvigorate the venerable institution.  There were big video screens in the plaza in front of the Met and in Times Square which broadcast the performance live.   But no amount of glitz or technology will save the Met from obsolescence – only great artists performing the old repertoire and great composers writing new operas that the public really wants to hear will suffice.  The latter seems to be a lost skill.  The Met is likely to endure as a museum, ie a graveyard for art.
            The program’s cover read “Anthony Minghella Returns to the Stage.”  I guess London didn’t count.  Minghella seems to have brought everyone and everything he has ever come across back to the theater with him.  There was a Texas sized mirror over the stage that allowed front and back views of the performers.  There were Japanese costumes that displayed colors especially invented for this show.  In the first act Minghella seemed to be trying to get the effect Kurosawa achieved in the “Peach Orchid” sequence in his late movie Dreams.  Minghella didn’t make it.  Day turned to night after the wedding with an option.  Day was not very successful.  Night was beautiful.  Paper fell from the sky.  I think they were supposed to be butterflies.  But alas the law of the theater requires that what falls in the first act falls for the rest of the performance, so paper was still dropping at the final curtain.
            There was Bunraku-style puppetry.  This is a technique in which the manipulators, clad in black, are fully visible to the audience.  These manipulators moved panels back and forth; three of them controlled a puppet that was Butterfly’s son.  They marched him all over stage.  He even took a bow after the opera’s end.  Also, he was bald despite the libretto’s stipulation that he had “curls of pure gold” – ricciolini d’oro schietto.  A little later Sharpless looks at the kid and remarks that he has “lovely fair hair.”  The Met titles omitted any mention of the missing hair.  They also misspelled “Cio Cio San” as “Cho Cho San”.  Marcello Giordani (Pinkerton) struck the right note at opera’s final, and only, curtain call by dumping his naval officer’s cap on the dummy’s head.  There was also another puppet representing Butterfly.  It sailed away before her death scene presaging her tragic end.  All this is not as goofy as you may think – it’s worse. 
            Puccini doesn’t require a lot of help from a stage director.  He was such a master of the theater that almost everything needed for success is built in.  You don’t need the operatic equivalent of Cirque du Soleil to focus the audience’s attention.  Just do what Puccini wrote and you can’t miss.  Minghella gave us a theatrical tour de force that had everything in it except Madama Butterfly.   It wasn’t as bad as Robert Wilson’s ad for chiropractic care that the Bastille Opera presented in the early nineties.  The cast in that production walked as though every joint was frozen and stared at the audience convinced that there had to be something more interesting going on out there than what was happening onstage.  They were right.  Wilson solved the problem of what to do about Butterfly’s child by omitting him.
            Only a big shot director, and a pedestrian protagonist, can ruin the big second act climax.  Butterfly’s moment of false triumph when she thinks Pinkerton has returned to her always, well almost always, causes the audience to applaud over the music.  “Ei torna e m’ama!” – orchestral fortissimo, applause.  But not in this performance, there was no response from the audience.  The great moment passed almost without notice.

Photo: Marko Georgiev / The New York Times

            Despite the scenic and directorial overkill, a good Butterfly could have rescued the performance.  Unfortunately, Chilean soprano Cristina Gallardo-Domâs is vocally underpowered for the title role, though she sings it regularly.  Her entrance was unsteady, her high notes weak (she lost control of the high note at the end of Un bel di vedremo), and her sound too little for the Met’s big auditorium.  Her acting was effective, but it wasn’t enough.  In another bit of directorial conceit, Butterfly killed herself with a knife to the back of the neck, which anatomically is a feat.  Goro, however, described her father’s suicide with the conventional knife to the gut gesture.
            Marcello Giordani’s tenor was in the best shape I’ve ever heard it – live or on recordings.  His sound was big and bright, his high notes ringing.  So ringing and powerful, however, that he seemed to be singing Radames rather than Pinkerton.  Dwayne Croft joined the puppet in going bald as Sharpless.  He did as much as can be done with this incidental role.  The same was true of Maria Zifchak as Suzuki (not the bald part). 
            The biggest disappointment in a night that had several was the conducting of James Levine.  Maestro Levine is now shockingly frail.  Though only 63 years old, he looks and moves like 83 or more.  His conducting was even frailer.  Sidelined by an injured rotator cuff until this performance, his beat was so slow that he didn’t need a rotator cuff.  He seemed to be conducting with a calendar instead of a baton.   His tempi made the first act of Parsifal seem like a scherzo.  All the moments of emotional turmoil were missed and lifeless.  The performance, with two intermissions, lasted almost three and three quarter hours.  His conducting was so dreary that I longed for the days of Fausto Cleva. 
            In summary, this was a flashy production of a poignant masterpiece that would have benefited from a simpler staging and a better soprano and conductor.  The 1958 production of Butterfly at the Met – one of the old house’s greatest triumphs – mounted by a Japanese team, starring Antonietta Stella at the peak of her too brief career, and under Dimitri Mitropoulos’ leadership remains the standard by which all other productions of this opera are measured.

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The Metropolitan Opera, New York
Madama Butterfly

September: 30
October, 2006: 5, 17, 21, 24, 27 & 31
November, 2006: 4, 8, 11, 15 & 18