When it first appeared at the Lyric Opera of Chicago in the 2013–14 season, Michael Grandage’s affectingly simple production of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly was presented without editorializing comment. The opera depicts an American naval officer’s hasty marriage to and callous abandonment of his young Japanese wife. Given the current political climate, however, it’s no surprise that the program notes at this Valentine’s Day performance addressed the twin specters of racism and sexism which people often read into the opera, with lengthy essays to make it, as the kids say, “relatable.”

Graham Macfarlane, Brian Jagde, and Ana María Martínez in Madama Butterfly. Photo: Todd Rosenberg/Lyric Opera of Chicago.

Remarkably, these program notes were measured. To confront the most obvious criticism leveled at Madama Butterfly—that of “cultural appropriation”—the soprano Ana María Martínez laudably rejected the idea that she, of Puerto Rican descent, should not be permitted to perform the opera’s title role because her heritage is not Asian. The drama, Martínez believes, is fundamentally a human one and should not be circumscribed by race. The philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum, a professor at the University of Chicago’s Law School, concurred in her essay, arguing with a logic increasingly rare among her fellow academics that Martínez’s heritage should equally not confine her to Latina roles and correctly adding that Butterfly is hardly sympathetic to imperialism. On the subject of feminine vulnerability, both women agreed that it is not weakness but strength that allows Butterfly to govern her existence honorably, including even her operatically inevitable suicide. The point is debatable: is it really honorable for Butterfly to commit suicide at eighteen because her itinerant sailor husband turned out to be a bounder? Should his failings really force her to terminate her earthly existence? Is her insistence that he come, in person, to see her lying dead next to the toddler son he wants to claim not more akin to the emotional blackmail that is so often the stuff of melodrama? These questions are left unanswered, but Nussbaum penned the most worrying comment: that her female law students—individuals who will presumably go on to shape the legal traditions of our country—often reject emotional vulnerability, and romantic love along with it, as unacceptably weak for their modern lives.

Anthony Clark Evans and Brian Jagde in Madama Butterfly. Photo: Todd Rosenberg/Lyric Opera of Chicago.

Neither position in that debate, however, precludes one from striving for authenticity. To prepare for the role in past stagings, Martínez consulted with a specialist in Japanese culture to learn as much as she could about the nature and habits of geishas, which, I have been told, Puccini’s opera itself gets wrong. Her portrayal was dramatically affecting, though she seemed too focused on the piano and mezzo-piano deliveries to open the role’s full vocal potential. It would be unjust to compare her performance to those of the legendary Italian soprano Mirella Freni, who died earlier this month, but Martínez could have carried off the role’s passions to greater effect if she had indulged the top of her range more grandly. The evening’s true star was the standout tenor Brian Jagde, who sang Pinkerton with a robust, clarion ring. The baritone Anthony Clark Evans sang serviceably as Sharpless in the first act but was replaced in the second by Ricardo José Rivera, a young artist in the Lyric’s Ryan Opera Center program. The young conductor Henrik Nánási has been getting good notices all over the world and helped cement his reputation with a stellar reading of Puccini’s score. Grandage’s production tends to simplicity but sometimes misfires. Butterfly’s Act I entrance—a notoriously difficult solo with choral accompaniment that begins offstage—failed to resonate, with the character merely deposited on stage in what seemed like an anticlimax.

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