Madama Butterfly/Madamu Batafurai
Transpositions of a 'Japanese Tragedy'

Examines post-colonial issues in Madama Butterfly, the historical background, conflicted representation of the heroine, and controversial reception in Japan.

Arthur Groos (Author)

9781009250672, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 16 February 2023

300 pages
25 x 17.2 x 2 cm, 0.71 kg

'This truly goundbreaking book sheds new and fascinating light not only on the conception and composition of Puccini's _Madama Butterfly_, but also on the Japanese origins of Madame Butterfly's story and the Japanese reception of the opera, which saw its notorious orientalism questioned and subverted through ingenious adaptation and creative re-appropriation. Groos makes us listen differently to a work we thought we knew all too well.' Emanuele Senici, University of Rome La Sapienza

Puccini's famous but controversial Madama Butterfly reflects a practice of 'temporary marriage' between Western men and Japanese women in nineteenth-century treaty ports. Groos' book identifies the plot's origin in an eye-witness account and traces its transmission via John Luther Long's short story and David Belasco's play. Archival sources, many unpublished, reveal how Puccini and his librettists imbued the opera with differing constructions of the action and its heroine. Groos's analysis suggests how they constructed a 'contemporary' music-drama with multiple possibilities for interpreting the misalliance between a callous American naval officer and an impoverished fifteen-year-old geisha, providing a more complex understanding of the heroine's presumed 'marriage'. As an orientalizing tragedy with a racially inflected representation of Cio-Cio-San, the opera became a lightning rod for identity politics in Japan, while also stimulating decolonizing transpositions into indigenous theatre traditions such as Bunraku puppet theatre and Takarazuka musicals.

Introduction: 'Marriage. . . In the Japanese way': 1. Loti and Long – with an eyewitness account Madame Chrysanthème and Madame Butterfly
2. Madama Butterfly: A conflicted genesis
3. Far west/far east: Luigi Illicia's libretto
4. Madama Butterfly between west and east
5. Returns of the native: Madamu Batafurai in Japan
6. Returns of the native: Imaginative transpositions
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Opera [AVGC9], 20th century & contemporary classical music [AVGC6], Theatre studies [AN]