Zhiang led an orchestral performance charitably described as “brisk,” the sound lacking in depth and richness, the scenic episodes insufficiently established in terms of their colors and key theatrical points. Puccini’s seductive orchestration can’t be killed, but it can be thinned and hurried through, and that’s what happened here. (Even the cannon shot, a guaranteed nape-of-the-neck chiller, was a dull thud, somehow off by a hair or two). The playing was tidy, the choral work responsive within the musical framework.

I had not been back to the production since that opening night in 2006. Some of us felt then that both the occasion and the production foretold likely tendencies of the new regime, the occasion suggesting a celebrity-conscious, commercial showbiz atmosphere and a hope of attracting interest and money from folks who’d previously invested neither in opera, and the production representing a film director’s visual sensibility and notion of music’s place in the scheme of things. Of course Minghella’s Butterfly comes as a relief from the deadmarch progression of grim auteurial fantasies we’ve watched of late. It gives us some lovely stage pictures (Han Feng’s costumes are very beautiful), and in its chosen style preserves the creators’ narrative and is played in period. Said chosen style, though, is odd. Screens, architecturally used in any Butterfly as elements of Cio-Cio-San’s house, are made to serve other conveniences, and thus abstracted; at one point, Pinkerton sends one zinging across the stage’s width. For all the atmosphere we want in any production of this opera, there’s no getting away from “realistic” physical behavior among the principals; yet they’re often left standing to converse in limbo across wide spaces on a steeply raked deck.

Then there’s the Bunraku kid and his handlers. Great attempts have been made from time to time over the 120 years now past to ensure cultural “authenticity” in representations of this piece, generally in matters of scenery and costume, geisha manner, and Japanese ritual. David Belasco was absorbed by it in the production of his play that so entranced Puccini on his London visit in 1900. In the 1950s here at the Metropolitan, Yoshio Aoyama and Motohiro Nagasaki did all they could do rectify Western misunderstandings of setting and behavior, and their visually appealing production endured for many seasons. Such efforts have proceeded on the assumption that the overall style of production remained in the Western representational, essentially realistic mode. (“Authentic,” in fact, is in practice a synonym for “realistic”—this, the presenter asserts, is how it really was.) The La Scala offering directed by Alois Hermann and conducted by Riccardo Chailly, which was a restoration of the original 1904 Butterfly, went a fatal step further. It transformed the fundamental level of reality, as visually represented, to that of Kabuki theater, thus creating an unresolvable clash of basic cultural assumptions. (I discussed the video of this production in my post of  6/13/20.) While the Bunraku conceit doesn’t take us quite that far, it does seriously muddle the premises of the opera’s stage world—the building blocks of our belief are jaggedly askew. The puppet, its “bei cappelli biondi” conspicuous by their absence, is at moments endearing, at others annoying, but is at all times a puppet. The handlers, three of them, in black, are alive; the puppet—Cio-Cio-San’s son by Pinkerton, whom she clasps to her bosom, to whom she sings—is dead.