by GILBERT WONG
Cross-cultural love has never seemed as doomed as in Giacomo Puccini's Madama Butterfly (now taking flight in a New Zealand Opera production in Auckland).
Almost a century after it was first performed in Milan in 1904, the opera's human tragedy can still wring sobs from devotees.
In his story of a young geisha falls in love and marries an American naval officer who then abandons her with child, Puccini mined deep into the core of womanhood and the female ability to give and hold on to a deep love.
The cynics can deride the story's sentimentality or call Cio-Cio San, or Butterfly's faithful three-year wait for the return of Pinkerton as self-delusional, but the purity of her emotional life continues to relieve us of the scepticism that is a hallmark of our age.
Tonight the story, which ends after Pinkerton returns with his American and a completely crushed Butterfly kills herself is played out again in the opening night of the NBR New Zealand Opera's season at the Civic Theatre in Auckland.
The costumes are a key element and their designer Philip Markham, a Wellington artist and former ballet dancer, relished the opera company's brief to keep Butterfly in her period, a time when cross-fertilisation saw Japanese adopting western dress and customs while Japanese art, in turn, informed European Impressionist painting.
For Markham, long an admirer of Japanese aesthetics and design, the project which includes designing the sets was all the excuse he needed to immerse himself in Japanese architecture and clothing design.
As the opera opens, the costume designs, exquisitely rendered by Markham, who embellished the originals with gold-leaf, show a traditional Butterfly clad in a demure kimono. This is the Butterfly, embodiment of Oriental mystique and aesthetic precision, who so captivates Pinkerton.
Later, and before her wedding, Butterfly's plain, elegant robes provide more of a sense of the woman beneath the silk. Her personality and emotions come forward, her hair is down, she sings of her love.
In contrast, the wedding gown is a triumph of exotic finery and ancient tradition, her juni hitoe or 12-layered gown, worn over a plain white chemise, is no exaggeration. Traditional Japanese wedding gowns can have up to 40 layers of the finest and lightest silk.
After her wedding Butterfly will deny her Japanese heritage and renounce her religion, her family who disapprove of the marriage and her ties to the past that shaped her. The wedding gown is the sunset of what and who she is before she unites with Pinkerton.
Markham: "In Japanese design, beautiful things are contained within beautiful things and not all is revealed at once. Butterfly comes to Pinkerton as a beautifully 'wrapped package'."
So begins her wait as Pinkerton sails away. She adopts slightly westernised clothing. Markham says he wanted to suggest that she was conforming to her idea of an American housewife. She wants to be plain and unattractive to men. Her days of being a geisha are over. Pinkerton is the only man in her life.
When the tragedy of Pinkerton's deception becomes clear she reverts to what she could never in reality give up: her traditions. The costume Butterfly chooses to confront her self-administered death is based on male suicide robes. The back-story here is that Butterfly's father was ordered to commit suicide by the emperor.
For Markham, this presented a logical solution as to why the westernised Butterfly would possess a suicide robe. It is plain, elegant and white, the colour of death and mourning in the east. Her hair falls backward like a shadow. Her face is already a death mask. The splendid layers of her costumes have drifted away, as will her life.
* Madama Butterfly, NBR New Zealand Opera, Civic Theatre, Auckland, until April 8.
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