MADAMA BUTTERFLY

La Grande Opera in Villa’s Madam Butterfly is an experience of great impact, since our senses are stimulated to a high level; the vibrations of music hit our body and touch the most sensitive strings of our emotions, making us feel like participants in a piece of history, making us feel involved in the artistic expression of our existence.

“I have always carried a lot of melancholy with me, I have no reason to, but that’s just how I am”.It is melancholy, which oozes from Puccini’s notes, from his works, from his characters, especially female ones, that speaks to us, that leaves us a hidden and profound message. It is precisely this aspect, this element of his art that saves us from the pettiness of the world and of life, as Beethoven wrote in the famous letter to Bettina Brentano.

Madama Butterfly is a Japanese tragedy whose story comes from afar, from the theater of that fascinating man who was David Belasco, in turn taken from the book of a lawyer from Philadelphia, inspired by the true story of Pierre Loti, who went to Nagasaki and “temporarily” married a geisha. But with Puccini everything takes on a different color. The composer from Lucca knows how to musically unite two very distant cultures, two cultures, the Western one and that of the Far East, which in the mid-nineteenth century discovered each other for the first time. He inserts several original Japanese musical themes into Madama Butterfly precisely to make the narration credible and true and he juxtaposes them, grafts them and makes them coexist with his music as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Music unites what men keep well separated in history.

So what is Madama Butterfly about and what can it still say to us, citizens of the 21st century world? A lot, in my opinion, and each one of us listening to this splendid opera will find within themselves a different shade of meaning. But there is an inescapable fact that in the end pierces us, like the blade that kills Cio Cio San: prevarication, carelessness, supposed superiority, and therefore violence in the broad sense, always lead to death.

There are many heartbreaking and tragic opera endings, but I believe that this one has the power to leave the spectator in a state of profound self-criticism that does not end after the applause at the closed curtain.
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Puccini’s melancholy speaks here of a missed encounter, of a missed opportunity, of a humanity that once again fails because it was not able to pursue good. The reflection it brings, however, is a gift for us. Let’s not waste it.

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