Sharon Cumberland

Christmas in Rome

Pacific MusicWorks

Christmas in Rome

Epiphany Parish of Seattle

December 7, 2018

Review by Sharon Cumberland

The Christian celebration of the birth of Jesus has generated a huge catalog of wonderful music, much of it from the Baroque period (1600-1750). And who better to present some of these familiar and rediscovered classics than Pacific MusicWorks, in what better location than the beautiful Epiphany Parish of Seattle in Madrona? The audience for this sold-out performance filled every pew in the long nave, spilling upward into the choir loft—the ideal place to watch PMW’s 12-person orchestra and five singers as they built the elaborate structures of baroque cantatas and concerti grossi.

The “Christmas in Rome” program turned to the eternal city for its sources, showcasing music composed for elaborate musical celebrations in the headquarters of Christianity. The first half of the evening consisted of two concerti for the twelve-person orchestra—Archangelo Corelli’s famous Concerto Grosso “Fatto per la Notte di Natale” and George Fredrick Handel’s charming Concerto Grosso Op. 6 #5—as well Marco Marazzolli’s short cantata, ”Con Fausto augurio” for two sopranos and a tenor (two angels and a shepherd). The second half of the evening was devoted to Alessandro Stradella’s cantata “Ah, troppo é ver,” in which Lucifer and a chorus of Furies bemoan the coming of Christ into the world, while angels, shepherds, and St. Joseph rejoice.

Baroque musicians are often scholars and researchers, since quantities of music of this period still sit untranscribed in libraries all over the world. Both the Corelli and the Handel concerti are well-known favorites—baroque popular hits always welcome in concerts—but the Marazzolli cantata is a work brought to light by the Director/musicologist Stephen Stubbs, who discovered “”Con Fausto augurio” (“With propitious augurs” or less literally, “”With good-luck signs”) in a collection of unedited cantatas from the 17^th century. The work was first discovered and transcribed by hand in the 1990s by fellow lutenist and musicologist Paul O’Dette, who provided the score that Stubbs then rendered into a modern edition using the transcription program Sibelius. Seattle audiences are, most likely, the first to hear this beautiful mini-drama of two soprano angels announcing the birth of Christ to one startled and very articulate shepherd. Together they awaken the other shepherds who then rush to the manger to see the child come into the world. But, in the final lyrics of the cantata, the angels and shepherd sing that “If the feet are too late/Ah, with the wings of faith/Let the heart fly to him.” In the devout 17^th century as in the present time, we can only know the miracle of Christmas through faith—and, I will add, through recovered treasures like this one.

The second half of the program was Stradella’s cantata “Ah, troppo é ver” (Lucifer’s complaint that “Ah, it’s too true” that God is sending his son into the world to thwart satanic plans), a thirty-minute drama that opens with the devil and ends with St. Joseph and a heavenly choir. Director Stubbs, in his program notes, points out that Stradella was the first to combine the virtues of the concerto grosso with the cantata, creating a form that ultimately led to opera as we know it. Hearing and seeing this short proto-opera connects the dots between choral church music, secular singing for entertainment, and religious and secular orchestral music.

Certainly the opening is pure operatic drama, in which Lucifer (the awe-inspiring bass Douglas Williams) delivers an impassioned condemnation of God’s tyranny, and calls upon the Furies to wreak war and vengeance on Heaven. It brings to mind the Satanic monologues in operas such as Boito’s Mefistofele and Belioz’ La Damnation de Faust (one wonders if those composers knew Stradella’s cantata). The Furies—singers who later perform angels and saints—step forward and agree, in crackling “fury” voices, to “launch their thunderbolts” on the “horrible orders/Of the king of the underworld.” The dark forces leave the story at this stage, which is continued with an Angel aria in which the shepherds are awakened with the good news of a heavenly child. These shepherds are even more articulate than Marazzolli’s, agreeing to hasten to “where fate has transubstantiated Heaven into a humble manger.” It seems appropriate that these “pastori” are the voice of the librettist, Cardinal Giulio Riospigliosi, a poet-priest who places theology in the mouths of shepherds, and simplicity and acceptance into the mouths of the Virgin Mary and St. Joseph.

I was impressed that St. Joseph’s aria—the noble acceptance of his son’s “prodigious destiny”—was written for a castrato whose soprano range, in Stradella’s time, was considered the heroic voice while the deep basso was reserved for evil or comic characters. It seems the opposite to us today, probably because there are (happily) no more castrati, and the development of male falsettists capable of singing castrato roles has been fairly recent in music history. Nathan Medley sang this role with translucent dignity.

I was sitting in the balcony so that I could watch the players, and saw that this performance was being videoed—and I hope it will be available to the public someday. Yet no recording can convey the powerful effect of watching a group of gifted musicians create this exciting, multi-textured music—especially Corelli’s concerto grosso “made for Christmas night.” On a recording, the melodies that are developed through repetitions and variations sound solid, as though a leading voice is accompanied by an array of harmonizing supporters. But if you are fortunate to see the work being played, you realize that what sounds like an unspooling line of music is more like a series of ping-pong balls being batted back and forth among players in a manner that is both visually and aurally exciting. PMW’s violin and viola players always stand while performing orchestral pieces, so that you see how music involves the whole body—the string section moving like branches in a breeze, alternately gentle and intense. It’s a pleasure to see music created as the original pre-recording audiences saw it—watching players conduct each other with glances, turnings, and nods. You see the intimate relationship among individuals that creates an inclusive musical environment for the audience. It’s a thrilling dimension of live performance that can’t be duplicated on any electronic medium.

No tribute to this extraordinary orchestra is enough to convey their expertise and devotion to music. It’s always a joy and a privilege to see Pacific MusicWorks in action. And you can see them for free in their lunchtime program called Sanctuary in the City on the first Wednesdays of the month at the Josephinum downtown (2^nd Ave at Stewart St.) from 12:10-12:50. On January 2^nd it will be Music for Church and Cello. The PMW Underground program that moves from brewery to brewery also brings great music to where the people are. The next program, Corelli Goes Global, as well as the schedule for PNW’s next full presentation, Leading Ladies (women composers in a male-dominated world) can be found at PacificMusicWorks.org.

The [R]evolution of Steve Jobs

By Sharon Cumberland

Seattle Opera

The [R]evolution of Steve Jobs

Music by Mason Bates

Libretto by Mark Campbell

Marion Oliver Mccaw Hall

February 23, 2019

Review by Sharon Cumberland

See review in Seattle Gay News

I have good news for Seattle opera lovers and the tech-curious who may have wondered if a contemporary opera about digital wizard and bad-boy Steve Jobs was an idea whose time had come: The [R]evolution of Steve Jobs by composer Mason Bates is a terrific night out – well worth seeing in this super-dramatic new opera.

The set design by Vita Tzykun is spectacular, the performances are uniformly perfect – John Moore in the long, intense role of Steve Jobs brought a powerful baritone to the role and an uncanny sense of the man – and Bates’ music is a multi-textured wonder. The opera is performed by a gigantic orchestra with an electronic core and the largest collection of percussion instruments in SO history. Not only that, Parisian conductor Nicole Paiement is that rarest of birds – a woman on the podium – and an expert in the development and performance of contemporary opera. The [R]evolution of Steve Jobs is a co-commission by Seattle Opera, Santa Fe Opera, Indiana University, and San Francisco Opera, where Maestro Paiement nurtures new works through Opera Parallèle. It was a thrill to see this internationally famous woman at the Seattle Opera podium. You could actually see her conduct because the podium was so high – her arms were like an air dance to the wildly dramatic music.

Librettist Mark Campbell co-wrote (with Kimberly Reed) SO’s 2017 community opera As One – the extremely moving chamber opera about a trans person finding their true identity. Similar to that project, Campbell used small sharply focused scenes to negotiate the complex story of Steve Jobs’ public and private lives, bringing a chamber-type intimacy to what is a very big, loud, dramatic main-stage production. Beginning with the child Steve (a silent role played with admirable intensity by Thomas Gomes) and his father Paul Jobs (the kindly Morgan Smith) we see the start of an interest in -taking things apart and putting them together again- when young Steve is given a work bench and tool kit for his birthday. In the eighteen scenes that follow, we see Steve build a digital empire, love and leave one family, create another, interact with his guru Kobun Chino Otogawa (Adam Lau, in excellent voice), who Steve finally joins on the other side of death, returning to the mystery of creation as a boy in his father’s garage.

If this sounds like myth-making, it is – especially in Bates’ marvelously percussive, multi-textured orchestral and electronic hybrid composition. He managed to bring the very new together with age-old orchestral power to convey the wonderment of the digital age. Yet in opera the composer generally needs an excellent narrative libretto before composition in order to do the best work, and I can only wonder what this opera would have been if Campbell’s libretto had been more ambitious and less conventional. Music expresses the emotional content of a text – but the story is in the hands of the librettist. Instead of going after the big story, Campbell stuck to the predictable tale of an obnoxious man being made better by a faithful woman (after he dumped another faithful woman). For those of us who are old enough to have lived through the high drama of the early computer age – the simple machines that seemed like miracles, the battle between the Microsoft PC and the Apple Mac, the firing of Jobs and near-collapse of Apple, the rise of Pixar, the return of Jobs to Apple, the subsequent world-shattering iPhone, and the weirdly improbable death of Jobs before his time – the storyline of the opera seems at once too brief, too cryptic, and too small.

My opera buddy, who is a generation younger than I am, agreed that you had to know the story of the transition from the literate to the digital age to understand the opera story. An early scene, in which the adult Jobs holds up the iPhone and sings about digital convergence onto -one device,- is a bit ho-hum in the sense that we all have that one device in our pockets, so what’s the big deal? The opera does nothing to convey what the world was like in the olden days, when there was no internet, when you had to spend hours in the library to find things out, and when all the metaphors of the digital age – files, pages, headers, footers, cutting, pasting – were real-world phenomena. My students were always fascinated to hear me describe my own college years, when writing a research paper involved literal cutting and pasting of revisions into long, scroll-like pages for re-typing on an actual typewriter. These are the kids who look at the dial of an old-fashioned telephone and wonder where the buttons are. To have a single scene in which Jobs holds up an ordinary iPhone misses the big story of what Wozniak and Jobs actually set in motion at Steve’s workbench in his dad’s garage.

Without that sense of wizardry, we don’t really know why Steve Jobs deserves an opera anymore than Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, or Tim Berners-Lee – or Alan Turing for that matter, or any of the brilliant women of the Blenchley Circle whose collective genius is coming to light only now. Because – take it from me, you younger folk – it was magical, the steady evolution of machines that became more and more powerful, useful, and quasi-human. It was also a time of steady mourning over the things that went away – the hands-on connection with your own work, the card catalogue with its genealogies of handwriting on every card, the active searching for knowledge – not in you boring old office or living rooms but in reading rooms that were like palaces of learning. I wish Campbell had brought a larger, more complex vision to this assignment – a story as ambitious as the complexity and drama of Bates’ composition and Tzykun’s intriguing sets.

Nevertheless, Seattle Opera has brought something really new and exciting to the stage. Though we’re living in a very fertile time for contemporary opera, only a small percentage of new works enter the repertoire. I think this one will find wide success. But see it now, while you have a chance to enjoy the original production and Paiement’s wonderful conducting. We Seattleites, of all people, will bring our own experience to this opera – our special understanding of the impact that Steve Jobs brought to our own professional and personal lives. Seattle Opera’s The [R]evolution of Steve Jobs is on the stage at McCaw Hall through March 9.

Carmen

By Sharon Cumberland

Seattle Opera

Carmen by Georges Bizet

McCaw Hall, Seattle Center

May 5, 2019 Matinee

Review by Sharon Cumberland

See review on Seattle Gay News

Georges Bizet’s Carmen is known as a “warhorse” in the opera world—one of those familiar works with catchy tunes and classic stories that everyone likes, even if they’ve never been to an opera. And if you’ve only been to a couple of operas in your life, you’ve probably seen a warhorse—like The Magic Flute or Don Giovanni (Mozart), Aida or La Traviata (Verdi), La Boehme or Madam Butterfly (Puccini).

But Carmen is the Queen of Warhorses—the very name conjures images of a seductive woman with castanets in a red flamenco dress, who has desperate men groveling at her feet. People love warhorses for a reason; like their namesakes, they are powerful, reliable, and beautiful all at once—and some, like Carmen, are also dangerous. Bizet’s music is feverishly contagious and the libretto is about hot sex, jealousy and murder. What’s not to love?

When Carmen premiered in Paris in 1875, audiences were deeply shocked by the raw, sexy story of a young man driven by passion to abandon his sweetheart and his career for the sake of a defiant, out-of-control woman. The show closed almost immediately, though it was quickly revived and has been top-of-the-ten ever since. Seattle Opera’s current production is updated to the more tame and conventional era of the 1950s, but it’s still a culture with strictly defined gender roles, and Carmen is a woman who refuses to be told how to behave by the men and mores of her day, even at the cost of her life. It’s truly a story for our times—and this exciting production makes the most of it.

On Sunday afternoon conductor Giacomo Sagripanti started off at a surprisingly fast tempo that matched the lively street scene of Seville, featuring a gang of children who not only sang like angels but romped and danced around like little devils. They wove in and out of a busy street scene, snatching and stealing from fruit and candy vendors—one little girl even stole a coat from a military officer—showing on a small scale the license that becomes licentiousness in the larger culture. Somehow we’re not surprised when the innocent Micaëla has to knock over a table to escape soldiers who try to corner her in their barracks when she comes to town in search of her fiancée, Don José. We’re also not surprised when we meet the girls who work in the cigarette factory. Their flirtatious scorn of the men crowding around them sets the scene for Carmen’s femme fatal entrance.

And what an entrance! If Dita Von Teese has a muse, it’s Carmen. Performed on Sunday with seductive irony by Seattle Opera debutant Zanda Ševede, we see a woman in complete control of the macho men around her, alternately teasing, demanding, ignoring, and humiliating them into mass submission with her sexual waves of aggression and indifference. Every aria that Carmen sings (all familiar—you’d recognize them instantly) are testaments to the triumph of sex over love, which is “A rebellious bird, that nobody can tame” as she sings in the Act I “Habanera.” Her embrace of seduction is the famous “Seguidilla” in Act II: “My lover is the devil…I have a dozen suitors—who will love me? I’ll love him back!”

Carmen’s casual ruin of Don José, a country boy who plans to go home to Mother and Micaëla after his army stint is over, leads everyone to disaster. It’s a classic tale of the Bad Girl who represents the forbidden pleasures of sex and irresponsibility versus the Good Girl representing home, family, and duty—but the Good Girl loses out. There is no redemptive love for anyone in Carmen.

Yet the chorus has a lot of fun in this production since every person has a distinct character to play, both in the city scenes and when we see the darker side of society among the outlaws—represented as gun-runners in this production. And there were some very modern moments as well—subtle references to identity expression such as a torero wearing a pink traje de luces, vamping up his dance moves, or a moment when Carmen shuns all the men around her and walks off in the embrace of her two best girlfriends.

I saw the matinee cast which featured singers making their debuts at Seattle Opera. Adam Smith was a very convincing Don Josè, whose descent into madness is represented by increasingly shabby clothes and bad grooming. Emily Dorn as Micaëla the sweet country girl engaged to Don José, overcame her perky Sandra Dee costuming and showed both courage and charm in all of her big stranger-in-a-strange-land moments. Zanda Ševede—beautiful in face, figure, and voice—gave a somewhat low-key, ironic interpretation of a femme fatale that also fit a more modern reading of what might otherwise be a clichéd characterization. I knew girls like her in college—wily, independent, and ruthless. This is a great role for Ševede —all she needs is to learn to dance the sevillana, a folk dance that kids in Seville still learn in kindergarten and that everyone there dances. I wasn’t convinced by Ševede’s abbreviated, rather stiff movement. Carmen would be an expert at this simple, playful, and potentially erotic dance.

Another complaint I have—in an otherwise terrific production—is the decision to make the matador, Escamillo, into a hokey imitation of Elvis or The Fonz. The role was sung powerfully by Rodion Pogossov, and he was a real trooper—hamming it up with a fake microphone after arriving on a motorcycle. But it’s a misreading of this small but important role (which includes the most famous aria of all, “Toreador, engarde!”) In long tradition, the Spanish matadors have been lower class men who risk their lives to rise up in a very segmented society where the high culture loves bullfighters in the corrida but not in the world of privilege—akin to boxers in our culture, except that the major characteristic of toreros, who are as elegant as ballet dancers and as brave as daredevils, is that they are social climbers and therefore highly dignified, demanding respect from everyone around them.

The most famous bullfighting novel in Spanish literature (it’s a genre of its own there) is Sangre y Arena by Blasco-Ibáñez, in which a famous bullfighter has an affair with woman of high society. Even naked in bed together, however, the matador has to address his lover in the formal usted instead of tu. This is a distinction that has many ramifications in a more conventional production of Carmen—is Escamillo toying with Carmen when he really means to move up in the world? Does she care? Or is he giving up trying to penetrate high society and going with a girl he understands? Will she dump him, too, or will he break her heart? It’s a meaningful subtext in the opera, and the fact that Carmen can snare one of these peasant-kings is a real step up in the world for her. So…the elegant and important Escamillo as a corny Elvis imitator? [Loud buzzer sounding].

One of the big stars of this production is another artist making his Seattle Opera debut—the production designer Gary McCann, whose clever settings evoke a whole world without being overly literal or intrusive. It’s exciting to see this level of talent—from everyone—on our stage in a production that is co-commissioned with Opera Philadelphia and Irish National Opera. The dear Speight Jenkins, who guided Seattle Opera from humble beginnings to its current splendor, used to say on the radio, after every opera preview “It’s going to be a great show! Don’t miss it!” I can echo that here—Carmen is a great show—don’t miss it! It’s on at McCaw Hall through the May 19^th matinee.

Il Trovatore

By Sharon Cumberland

Seattle Opera

Il Trovatore by Giuseppe Verdi

Libretto by Salvatore Cammarano

McCaw Hall, Seattle Center

January 12, 20189

Review by Sharon Cumberland

See review in Seattle Gay News

Seattle Opera’s Il Trovatore (The Troubadour) is a welcome start to the new year. In spite of it’s complicated and improbable story, the music is sublime. Any company that tackles this epic tale of devotion and betrayal—with its challenging requirements for chorus, soloists and orchestra—is already in the winner’s circle. And any audience who gets to see this rarely performed Verdi masterpiece is very lucky indeed.

A quick survey of Opera America’s listing of Verdi operas performedin 2017 (the latest year full data is available) reveals that only…well…zero performances of Il Trovatore were given in the US and Canada. There were plenty of Aidas, La Traviatas, Rigolettos and Falstaffs, along with the occasional Requiems, Macbeths, Nabuccos and Un Ballo in Mascheras—so Verdi is richly represented in opera repertoires. But Il Trovatore is so difficult for all four principal singers that companies have to await the magical combination of talents—and usually two singers for every role—in order to pull it off.

The tenor’s big aria, “Di Quella Pira,” is ranked number six on a website called “The Top 10 Horrifyingly Difficult Opera Arias.” The baritone and the mezzo soprano have equally over-the-top challenges driven by the wildly dramatic libretto in which everyone is in passionate love, on the brink of horrible revelations, and facing immanent death. And one of the soprano’s big moments, “D’amor sull’ali rosee,” is six minutes of the most heartrendingly beautiful and challenging pieces Verdi ever wrote. You can go on you tube and hear every famous soprano who ever lived in the electronic age sing it, but nothing compares to hearing it in the opera house. I was deeply moved to hear the young Leah Crocetto sing it on opening night, and am eager to return to McCaw Hall to hear Angela Mead’s performance.

The Seattle Opera stage was somewhat underlit for me—it’s a dark opera, but does it have to be visually dark? I was sitting in a great seat but still had some trouble seeing the singers clearly through the shadows cast over their faces. I was also a bit distracted by the fantasy-style set and costumes, in which the armies have no historical anchor other than references to “endless wars” in several cultures (including our own via touches of camo fabric in conquistador-type costumes). Il Trovatore is set in Arragon—and I think a Spanish setting would act as a sufficient metaphor to remind us of the tragedy of our own endless war, though I admit that the post-modern ideas behind Candace Frank’s costumes were clever. Still, this opera, well sung, could be done in burlap bags and still pack the musical wallop it’s famous for. This is an opera well worth seeing—since you may not have another chance in coming years. Il Trovatore is performed at McCaw Hall through January 26^th. KING FM will broadcast the cast led by Angela Mead oon February 2^nd at 8:00 PM.

Madam Butterfly

By Sharon Cumberland

Seattle Opera

Madam Butterfly by Giacomo Puccini

Libretto by Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica

McCaw Hall, Seattle Center

August 5, 2017

Review by Sharon Cumberland

See review in Seattle Gay News

If you’ve never seen Madam Butterfly, now’s your chance—and you should take it. Seattle Opera’s powerful new production of Puccini’s tragic opera is a perfect coming-together of creative elements that bring musical and visual magic to the story of a young geisha sold in false “marriage” to an American naval officer. You may have seen one of its ever-popular spin-offs—“Miss Saigon,” “M. Butterfly” or one of the half-dozen film adaptations—but the most perfect telling of this heartrending story is Puccini’s opera. What began as a short story by John Luther Long in 1898 was adapted into a hit play by David Belasco in 1900, and took lasting form in 1906 when Puccini’s brilliant librettists, Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica, stripped the story of its Japanese clichés and fake dialect, and focused on the emotional subtext that music expresses so well.

Cio-Cio-San, the 15-year-old Madam Butterfly, believes that her marriage to Lieutenant Pinkerton is binding but, as the audience well knows, Pinkerton considers her a temporary playmate. He leaves without a second thought when called back to America, making false promises to return. Giacosa and Illica’s masterful use of dramatic irony—where the audience knows more than the protagonist—propels the tragedy forward as Cio-Cio-San’s optimism sets her up for a terrible fall. In her most famous aria, “Un bel di,” Madam Butterfly anticipates the joy of Pinkerton’s return, seeing his ship appear on the horizon, seeing her husband approach the house, returning to take her and their love child back to America. Though Pinkerton returns after three years, he brings his American wife who expects to adopt Cio-cio-San’s child. When Butterfly’s illusions finally collapse in the face of reality, she commits suicide.

As grim a this story is, the musical motifs flow and tumble like currents of air in a Van Gogh painting—tortured and beautiful—giving you simultaneous layers of joy and anxiety. On opening night the star role of Butterfly was sung with charming naivety, soaring passion, and perfect pitch by Lianna Haroutounian, who made her Seattle Opera debut to enthusiastic—nay, wild applause. The opening night audience also had the unusual treat of hearing two leading men in the role of Lieutenant Pinkerton since debutant Alexey Dolgov, in the Saturday cast, withdrew after Act I with a cold, while Suday cast Dominick Chenes made an early debut by singing Pinkerton in the second act. Both, to my ears, were highly effective singing actors, though the two different men—Dolgov: wiry and sly, Chenes: soft and sorrowful—created the impression of a heartless Pinkerton who is magically transformed by remorse.

Aidan Lang, in his third year as General Director, continues to bring new talent to Seattle with no fewer than six debutantes in this production—not the least of whom are the Stage Director Kate Cherry and the Production Designer Christina Smith. What a pleasure to see women in these key creative roles. The set consisted of Madam Butterfly’s house—simple shoji screens that slide silently into different configurations as the drama spreads out or sinks inward, arranged under a decorative cube that hangs like a crown or a cage over the action. The lighting by designer Matt Scott, also making his debut, enhanced the nuances of feeling that flowed through the orchestra.

One of the most striking aspects of this production is the choice by directors and designers not to change the natural appearances of singers into some concept of Japanese-ness. As Gabrielle Nomura Gainor says in her excellent program article, “For years my community has been speaking out regarding issues of yellowface, cultural appropriation, and minority representation…[and consequently]…Seattle Opera’s Madam Butterfly will not attempt to change a given singer’s race through wigs or makeup.” While this takes a little getting used to for the audience, since Japanese characters in several cases looked decidedly Caucasian, it quickly came to feel correct because the gestures and costumes were used to convey cultural differences essential to the plot. In these sensitive times, when many of us in the traditionally dominant culture are learning to recognize the relationship between injustice, colonial history, white privilege, and racial/cultural appropriation, it’s befitting that institutions like Seattle Opera should lead the way in discussing and taking action on these issues. Indeed, Seattle Opera is setting an example for the nation on how to use an art form to address issues that need affective expression in addition to political expression.

For instance, Seattle Opera’s Education and Community Engagement program is bringing chamber operas to new audiences by addressing important contemporary issues. Last year’s “As One” by Laura Kaminsky was a tremendously moving depiction of lived experience for gender transitioning people—far more effective in explaining the needs and problems of that community than any journalism or political discussion. “The Combat: A Muslim/Christian Love Story in Time of War” used early music and poetry to address one of the most difficult problems of cultural conflict in our time. And this September the issues raised in Madam Butterfly—racial profiling, western privilege, colonialism—are addressed in a more contemporary chamber opera, “An American Dream” by Jack Perla, about the incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII (September 7-17, 2017 at Washington Hall). Just as Puccini and his audiences were trying to learn, through the arts, about Japanese and American culture in the decades after Matthew Perry’s “Opening of Japan” in 1853, so Seattle Opera in its willingness to
“tackle contemporary issues in our community” is using the arts to add dimensions to our understanding that only the power of music, drama, and singing can achieve.

Setting politics aside, however, Madam Butterfly is one of the best stories about love, betrayal, and remorse ever made into an opera. Puccini and his librettists were Italian—America and Japan were equally exotic to them. We tend to forget that this is an opera that shows our country as a strange place with weird customs and cultural assumptions. We see an arrogant young man swagger into a strange country and throw money around to fulfill his pleasures. In Act I Pinkerton sings “Everywhere in the world/the roving Yankee/takes his pleasure and his profit/indifferent to all risks…” In Madam Butterfly we can see ourselves through the eyes of Italian librettists and composer. We can ask ourselves, while wringing our hands over Madam Butterfly’s misguided optimism, have we changed very much? Are we making progress?

Seattle Opera’s Madam Butterfly is at McCaw Hall through August 19, 2017.