“Madame Butterfly”, Puccini’s global hit at the Lyon Opera

Madame Butterfly © Ruth Walz

To kick off 2025, the Lyon Opera is spoiling us with one of the most popular operas of all time: Puccini’s global hit, Madame Butterfly. From a rather sordid story, the Italian composer rewards us with a gem of sophistication.

Nagasaki, Japan, 1904. A young American officer on a stopover, Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton, rents a traditional house and plans to marry, for pure exotic entertainment, a 15-year-old geisha, Cio-Cio-San (“Madame Papillon” in Japanese). ). To hell with Consul Sharpless’s warnings, Pinkerton is determined, seeing this union as a pastime and explaining to his compatriot that he will soon, upon his return, take a “real american wife”. For her part, and despite her family’s reluctance, the young Japanese woman takes marriage very seriously, renouncing her religion and succumbing to her elder brother.

Three years have passed, Pinkerton returned home and got married, giving no news to Butterfly who faithfully awaits his return, impatient to present him with the child born from their brief romance. But what threatened to happen inevitably happens. The late return of Pinkerton, and his wife who came to pick up the child, causes the despair of the broken geisha, who kills herself.

Despite a catastrophic reception at its premiere at La Scala in Milan – where the opera was whistled – a second version revised by Giacomo Puccini triumphed barely three months later at the Teatro Grande in Brescia. A total success which will never leave the opera, still today, one of the most popular throughout the world. The extremely refined score, particularly in the orchestral parts, integrates “Japanese” thematic or sound elements here and there, broadening the composer’s already very broad palette of exotic Far Eastern scents.

Conductor Sesto Quatrini will direct the orchestra and choirs of the Lyon Opera in this new production, the direction of which will be entrusted to the German Andrea Breth. The latter, by questioning Western views on Japanese society, will thus opt for a postcolonial reading of the work, which seems a minimum today given its rather “charged” subject.

Madame Butterfly – From January 22 to February 3 at the Lyon Opera – www.opera-lyon.com