Madama Butterfly/Madamu Batafurai (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781009250672)

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 Archival sources, many unpublished, reveal how Puccini and his librettists imbued the opera with differing constructions of the action and its heroine.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.

Author: Arthur Groos
ISBN-10: 1009250671
ISBN-13: 9781009250672
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Language: English
Published: 02/16/2023
Pages: 300
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.48lbs
Size: 9.61h x 6.69w x 0.69d