Madama Butterfly

Even under normal circumstances, Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly is a good introductory work for people who love musicals but haven’t quite gotten into opera. It’s a relatively short piece, as operas go. The music is irresistibly melodic. And the libretto — by Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica, based on a play by David Belasco — tells the compelling story of a former Japanese geisha who kills herself when she’s betrayed by her husband, a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy. (The tale is familiar through its many adaptations, including Miss Saigon, which is vastly inferior to Butterfly in every respect.)

However, the phrase “normal circumstances” doesn’t remotely apply to the Metropolitan Opera’s stunning new Butterfly. This staging has generated tremendous interest because it’s the work of Anthony Minghella (the writer-director of such films as The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and Cold Mountain) and his wife and collaborator, Carolyn Choa. Eye-popping publicity photos indicated that this would be a Butterfly the likes of which no one has ever seen before — unless one was in London last season and happened to catch it at the English National Opera.

Moreover, Butterfly is the first opera to be presented under the aegis of the Met’s new general manager, Peter Gelb, whose bold initiatives to popularize opera include a closed-circuit telecast of the opening night performance and festivities to audiences seated in Lincoln Center Plaza and in Times Square, an open-to-the-public dress rehearsal of this production, a new 24-hour Met Opera station on Sirius Satellite Radio, and the plastering of advertisements for Butterfly all over town.

With breathtakingly beautiful sets, costumes, and lighting by Michael Levine, Han Feng, and Peter Mumford (respectively), this Butterfly is extraordinary from its very first moments. In a silent sequence that lasts several minutes, Butterfly appears in red-lit silhouette, standing far upstage at the top of a huge, sharply raked platform. As she slowly advances toward the audience, more lights come up, black clad figures join her on stage, and we’re given a chilling foretaste of the young woman’s tragedy as the unnerving music of the opera’s fugal prelude begins. There are a great many other breathtaking stage pictures throughout the production, most notably during the extended love duet that ends the first act and in the opera’s overwhelming final scene.

One of the production’s many coups de théâtre comes at the very start of Act II and, again, occurs in complete silence. We see a brief glimpse of Butterfly and Pinkerton happy in their home life. Then a shoji screen moves across the stage, passing in front of them — and Pinkerton disappears behind it, leaving Butterfly bereft. Minghella also deserves praise for several directorial touches that would be equally effective in a more traditional presentation of the opera. To cite only two examples: When the wealthy Prince Yamadori finds his marriage proposal to Butterfly rebuffed, he grabs her arm as if to throttle her; and when the American consul Sharpless hints that Pinkerton may never return to Butterfly, she becomes so furious that she knocks over the tea service.

The cast is superb. Cristina Gallardo-Domâs, one of the most talented and exotically beautiful sopranos on the current scene, has been entrusted with the awesomely challenging title role, and she gives a tour-de-force performance. Tenor Marcello Giordani sings and acts uncommonly well as Lt. B.F. Pinkerton. Dwayne Croft is luxury cast as Sharpless, Maria Zifchak is a warm presence as Suzuki, Greg Fedderly plays the oily marriage broker Goro without overacting — and then there’s the Bunraku puppet that plays the role of Butterfly’s young child. Manipulated with amazing art and skill by black-clad members of a troupe called Blind Summit Theatre, this puppet had the audience alternately chuckling, sighing, and weeping.

The sense of occasion surrounding Butterfly was ratcheted up even further on opening night because this was the first time that Met music director James Levine — who was recently sidelined for a few months by a rotator cuff injury — has conducted the full opera there, and the first and last performance of it that he is scheduled to lead this season. Levine gave a predictably masterful account of the score, bringing out all the beauty of Puccini’s orchestrations without ever swamping the singers.

Butterfly was heralded by an almost unprecedented shower of publicity. One might almost describe it as “hype” — but that word, according to the dictionary, means “exaggerated or extravagant claims made, especially in advertising or promotional material.” There’s no exaggeration in what you’ve heard about this production. Not only it is better than you’ve been led to believe, it’s better than you could possibly imagine. Count it as unmissable.