I will need more than this first listening, and some experience of the 1904 version in the theatre, to form any firm opinion of the “original” Act 3. But I’m not inclined to dismiss it out of hand. I don’t want to never again hear “Addio, fiorito asil,” and its absence does reduce Pinkerton’s tenorial status while making his dramatic presence after Act 1 hardly more than fragmentary. We expect more from our leading Puccinian tenor. But perhaps we are expecting only our comfort in conventional operatic effusion, rather than the strongest fulfillment of a tragedy. The latter belongs to Cio-Cio-San, the impoverished fifteen-year old geisha who let herself be brokered into marriage with a handsome, assured, relatively wealthy man of foreign extraction and religion who sweeps her off her feet not so much with typical American bravado as with typical Italian romantic persuasion. (As an enthusiastic young woman I knew some years back who sang often in Italy once explained, “You know they are lying, but you just don’t care.”) Butterfly, though, doesn’t know, and does care. From the first magical night, her story is an ascent, not a fall, to tragedy, as she eventually faces the full meaning of her destiny and, now a woman of eighteen, fulfills it according to her code of honor. She rises to tragic stature while Pinkerton sinks to a shameful irrelevancy. Why should he be given his moment to pull the same gorgeous flim-flam on us he pulled on her? Perhaps the story is tougher, and truer, without that. Still, Pinkerton’s agony is also real. Despite his Act 1 bravado and insousiance with Sharpless, he truly does fall under Butterly’s spell, and the love duet truly is a love duet, full of tenderness and caring as well as sexual passion. Pinkerton probably means it—or thinks he means it—when he promises to return “when the robins nest again.” He’s a Navy man. There’s no contradiction between the “sincerity” of the love duet and the failure to man up at the end—that’s a common human perplexity above which only the noblest rise.

So, as I suggested above, I would go to a Butterfly that reverted to 1904 for Act 2, Part 2 with an open mind. Not this one, though. Beyond the inherent contradictions of opera on video (and it’s really an awful way to watch all but a few operas), there are two problems here for me that intrude at a fundamental level, before we even get to the normal discussables of performance. The first is the central production concept (Alvis Hermanis, dir., with a topflight design team and a dramaturg). In some ways, this is “traditional”; i. e., it’s in period, it preserves the creators’ narrative and tries to interpret on the basis of elements present in the musical and verbal text. So for a change, the argument isn’t one of principle, but of selection among these elements. Hermanis seems to have reasoned that since, although Cio-Cio-San does her best to “identify as” American, she is in fact Japanese, and trained as a geisha; since there is a Japanese ceremonial element (reinforced in the 1904 Act 1) in her story; and since Puccini made use of Japanese themes, harmonies, and instrumental colorings in constructing his motivic web, it would serve the drama to present her character as a figure from Kabuki theatre, and to keep auxiliary Kabuki-ish figures recurrently present in his stage picture.