Madama Butterfly returns to the Met – but without Anthony Minghella

It is September 2006. Anthony Minghella, the British film director’s first sortie into opera. His Madama Butterfly, has just premiered at the opening of New York Metropolitan Opera’s 2006/7 season. It is also rookie general manager Peter Gelb’s first production for his new house. Two inexperienced stars dangerously aligned.

Gelb, from the start a risktaker, had bet his reputation as new kid on the Met block on a British newcomer. A film director. No opera experience. The Lincoln Center stage is challenging, not least in sheer scale. Season ticket holders are as demanding critics as their notorious La Scala shouty counterparts. Perhaps, a tad more polite, but not a lot. What could possibly go wrong? 

Nothing. Minghella’s Butterfly was a stunning success, lauded to the skies by critics, setting Gelb’s tenure off to a flying start and having audiences begging for more. But that was not to be. There was no more. This was Minghella’s only opera. Two short years later the director was tragically struck down at the age of 54 by a stroke while undergoing surgery for throat cancer. A huge talent snuffed out far too early.

Met operas had taken five years in gestation before Gelb’s arrival. Everything from the smallest button to the largest towering set was made inhouse or in the Brooklyn warehouse. Having looked at the 2006 season, Gelb decided it needed some vim. A new Butterfly. From chrysalis to flying free and colourful was achieved in a year. With some snarling from the Met’s notorious unions for background muzak.

His experience with Madama Butterfly had fired Minghella’s imagination, the new artform turbocharging his creativity. A fresh, intriguing landscape beckoned. With Truly, Madly, Deeply, Mr Wonderful, The English Patient, The Talented Mr Ripley and Cold Mountain to his credit Minghella had nothing to prove. 

Taken with the new medium he declared his intention to direct more operas. Minghella loved his experience in New York. The Met stage had opened up an exciting new creative vista for this permanently restless artist. Possibilities. Possibilities.

In a behind-the-scenes rehearsal film Minghella, neophyte or not, is clearly fully in charge of the rehearsal process in New York. The clarity of his direction of the singers is remarkable. The impression is left that he had found his metier.

The moral challenges posed by Butterfly were topmost on his mind: “Everybody keeps coming down and saying ‘it’s so beautiful. That’s the worst thing to say. We don’t want it to be beautiful. It’s absolutely, shockingly heart-breaking.” 

A Minghella innovation was the casting of the baby, who appears after Pinkerton returns, in the middle of Act II. Minghella used a puppet, manipulated by plainly visible, but discreetly clothed puppeteers. In the current run junior appears in his cute sailor suit courtesy of British puppeteers Blind Summit Theatre. The London based studio is a fixture on the arts landscape since providing the puppetry for the opening of the London Olympics in 2012.

Bunraku puppetry has come on a bit since 2006. Your Reaction opera critic is kicking himself for having missed Bind Summit’s The Sex Lives of Puppets at London’s Southwark theatre in January, nominated for an Offies Award. Not an off-taste standards gauleiter, an off-West End show awards hander-outer. 

Watch this space – 25 February is the announcement of the winner. Would love to know what the Met’s intimacy directors might make of the bonking puppets. “No, no, right string down a bit”.

Some of my fellow opera goers found puppet-kid spooky. Minghella points out that managing a two-year-old child on an opera stage distracts the rest of the cast. A puppet is more easily managed. And, in Butterfly the baby is critical.

Minghella said: “When the baby comes in everything makes sense. From that moment onwards… when they see the baby… it’s like a grenade goes off. The whole opera sucks in on this child.” 

The short video reveals Minghella as action-man during rehearsals. Pinkerton’s coat is being unbuttoned. “It’s not choreography. It’s desire.” There’s a dispute about Butterfly’s veil. He puts it on to prove a point. If he can see though it, so can she. But, he then gently offers to put things right. “We’ll make it OK”.

It is January 2024. Minghella’s Butterfly is back at the Met. The emotional impact of his production is as searing as it was nearly twenty years ago. As the drama unfolds, a part of the mind drifts inevitably to “what might have been” territory.

For readers unfamiliar with the storyline, here is a synopsis. Hands up anyone who does not know it’s about an American cad sailor who gets a Japanese geisha up the duff, after she’s included as a surprise fitting with a house purchase in Nagasaki? 

Briefly, Pinkerton, er, sweats the domestic assets, heads back to the good old USA to marry a good ol’ American gal, then returns three years later to find his Japanese wife has inconveniently given birth to a son. He and Miss Gilded Age USA decide to take the son back with them to the US for a “proper” upbringing. Butterfly commits suicide. 

Minghella’s judgement is spot on. This is a shockingly heart-breaking tale. The themes of naivety, callous indifference, sexual abuse – Cio-Cio-San (Butterfly) is only 15 – broken trust and patronising cultural supremacy have resonated down the century and a quarter since Puccini and his librettists, Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica wrote the work. 

Madama Butterfly needs no sniffy critiques or boycotts from the politically correct thought police of today’s generation who think they are unique in having spotted dastardly behaviour. Giacosa, a follower of Henrik Ibsen, wrote plays about contemporary social problems and psychological investigations of people in crisis. Butterfly is not a romantic, lightweight work.

The stage floor is lacquer-black. The rear ascends sharply, characters entering and exiting at the top. Suspended above is an angled mirror – now a common device – adding a dimension to the action. The house is represented by traditional opaque, Shoji, sliding panels.  

The action is framed by moving lanterns manipulated by extras. The whole effect is simple, austere, a perfect canvas for displaying the magnificently clad chorus of geishas. Designer, Han Feng, provided the costumes. 

Before the performance chorus master, Donald Palumbo, brought members of the chorus, two in full kimono fig, to join us at the Metropolitan Opera Club. I don’t care what Minghella says about the 
“b” word, the costumes were truly beautiful and when their wave of colour swept across that black stage, the effect was magical. 

Close up, the difficulties of negotiating the Met stage kitted out in Feng’s costumes became obvious; ascending a steep series of steps backstage while having to appear simultaneously over the top; not standing on your neighbour’s kimono, never mind your own. Later that same evening the chorus pulled it off brilliantly.

Polish soprano, Aleksandra Kurzac was Butterfly. She also sings Liu in Puccini’s Turandot later in the season. A rediscovery for the Met – she was the robotic doll Olympia in Les Contes Hoffman as far back as 2004 – it’s hard to know what took so long to return her to New York. In between she has performed consistently in Europe and in 2015 married French wunderkind tenor, Roberto Alagna. 

Not that that’s got anything to do with anything. But, perhaps it has. Poirot Malone, Reaction’s crime critic, exercised the little grey cells and recalled that during the Covid lockdown the couple appeared in an HD Met Gala Concert. Maybe that was the route back. If so, it is certainly to the audience’s advantage. 

Kurzac has a wonderful voice, matched by an ability to capture the pathos of Cio-Cio-San and convey her touchingly persistent optimism, rooted in the sterile soil of Pinkerton’s integrity.

Matthew Polinzani, the American tenor, is a Met familiar and made a polished Pinkerton. Schmuck! Fluent and agile is the best way to describe his voice. The music simply flows from him.

In 2017 Zian Zhang became the first ever woman to conduct the BBC London Proms. The Chinese conductor moved to the USA in 1998 and although she has appeared with various orchestras across the country this was her Met debut. A sparkling interpretation should ensure the Maestra’s return. 

Cio-Cio-San dies, stabbed by her own hand. She is alone, spotlit centre, standing on that black stage. In the margins, a woeful Pinkerton appears. Repentant? Who knows. 

Butterfly sinks to the floor, attendants dance around her in circles, unwinding two exceptionally long scarlet obis, the sashes wrapped round the waist that give a kimono shape, retreating across stage, leaving them as twisted, red streaks of blood, gashes contrasting with the black, reaching out from the corpse, dramatically reflecting in the mirror above. The audience is drawn into the awful climax. Almost implicated.

Wow! Anthony Minghella’s heady mixture of shock and beauty has stood the test of time. 

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This article was amended on 5 February 2024. An earlier version said that Claire Warden was the Met’s “intimacy coach”. Claire Warden has never worked as the Met’s intimacy director.