Not so fast, says tenor Scott Piper, who will play Pinkerton in Utah Opera's season-opening production of "Madame Butterfly."
Piper concedes that Pinkerton behaves thoughtlessly and arrogantly. The character has grown up with an overdeveloped sense of entitlement. But he begins to change when he meets Cio-Cio-San, also known as Butterfly. That's clear from Puccini's music, Piper said.
"Something happens in that moment," he said. "We hear his transition. . . . He enters, seemingly flippant, and all of a sudden his music changes; he becomes protective." Rather than decide the marriage is more trouble than it's worth when Cio-Cio-San's uncle storms in to denounce her, he throws the man out and sings a beautiful love duet with her.
"The words change, the music changes, everything changes," Piper said. At the end of the duet, "he starts to talk about the stars. What kind of guy, if he's interested in just doing whatever, would say, 'Look at the stars; come share this moment with me'?"
After the love duet, the opera jumps ahead three years. Puccini and his librettists, Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica, tell the audience what Cio-Cio-San's life has been like during those years: She has raised her son, with only her servant Suzuki for company, and held fast to the hope that her husband would return.
"She has a heart full of love and hope," said soprano Barbara Shirvis, this production's Butterfly. "She does take things at face value. . . . Butterfly continues to feel that if she just loves him enough and hopes enough, it will work out."
Piper likes to imagine the conversation in which Pinkerton tells his new wife, Kate, about his former marriage in Japan, and to speculate on the couple's reasons for traveling halfway around the world to get the child. "The character we don't hear from is Pinkerton," Piper said. "What are those three years like for him? It's much too easy to discard that anything happens to him."
With a premise so heartbreaking and at least one protagonist so difficult to sympathize with, why has "Madame Butterfly" been one of the world's most beloved operas for 100 years? As is the case with so many Puccini operas, it's the music.
"The tunes are unbelievable in how they capture the characters," conductor Joseph Mechavich said. "There's wonderful color throughout the whole piece. The piece is so intricate. . . . Every dramatic pivot is so well-executed, and the orchestration is so wonderfully thought-out.
"Like Mozart, [Puccini] was always thinking of the theater. There are a lot of silences, points when the dramatic action stops and sucks us in. That very long fermata allows the audience to relish that dramatic moment."
One such moment occurs when Cio-Cio-San finally sees the reality of her situation, director Garnett Bruce said. She asks Sharpless, the American consul, if Pinkerton is dead. "There's a silence, then a crashing chord. It's Butterfly realizing that her world is shattering. . . .
"These are intelligent singing actors who are exploring [the opera] and keeping it fresh," added Bruce, who has directed several traditional and nontraditional stagings of the piece. "It's not a museum piece. . . . The emotional journeys are timeless. The betrayal, the mistakes of youth - they apply to the universal condition."
creese@sltrib.com
