REORIENTING "BUTTERFLY"

At Detroit Opera, a new production subverts Puccini’ depiction of Japan.

-  ALEX ROSS

When Japanese audiences encountered Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly”—a sumptuous Italianate treatment of a geisha’s doomed love for an American naval officer—they found it implausible, insulting, and riotously funny. In 1925, two decades after the opera’s première, the Japan Times reported “screams of hearty laughter” as spectators took in the posturings of a touring foreign troupe. Puccini’s habit of citing popular Japanese songs did not help matters. As Arthur Groos points out in “Madama Butterfly/ Madamu Batafurai,” a new book about the opera’s Japanese sources and reception, the composer ignored advice about how to use his material appropriately. When Suzuki, Butterfly’s maid, prays at an alleged Buddhist shrine, she sings to the tune of “Takai Yama,” a song that extols cucumbers and eggplants. Furthermore, she garbles the names of Shinto gods, who don’t belong in a Buddhist setting to begin with. It’s similar, Groos writes, to “having a Catholic pray to Adam and Eve in front of a menorah.”