(While this Japanese-directed production last year had its issues, it had its fans in Tokyo, and I was interested to see how it would fare overseas. Unfortunately its foreign debut in Dresden was cancelled due to the pandemic. I had written the article below for the international run, so I’m reprinting that here.)

The iconoclastic Japanese stage director Amon Miyamoto has a problem with Madame Butterfly. The stereotypical image of a spurned geisha? The sexual exploitation of a 15-year-old girl? A warped Western view of his country?

No, he feels that the opera mistreats the American.

That would be Pinkerton, the US naval lieutenant who purchases Butterfly’s temporary companionship for 100 yen, speaks blithely on their wedding day of one day taking a “real American wife,” leaves Japan almost immediately after marrying and impregnating her, and returns unannounced three years later with a new bride to retrieve his son and take him back to the US. He is typically portrayed as a villain, and it’s not hard to see why – the opera has even been criticized by some as anti-American.

Miyamoto, as usual, takes his own path in a co-production of the Semperoper Dresden, Tokyo Nikikai Opera, Royal Danish Theatre and San Francisco Opera that debuted in Tokyo in October. The busy director, whose work encompasses original dramas, classic musicals, traditional Japanese theater and more, has become an increasing presence outside Japan; his recent work includes a sensational version of The Magic Flute commissioned to open a new opera house in Linz, Austria, and a fusion of 16th-century Noh drama with video imagery performed before Japan’s then-Crown Prince (now emperor) and French President Emmanuel Macron in Versailles. He was reportedly on the short list for artistic director of the Tokyo Olympics.

Notwithstanding the expectations that come when a Japanese directs this show, Miyamoto’s Butterfly is only incidentally about Japan. In his mind, the 1904 opera is a story not of clashing cultures or victimization but purely of love between two individuals forced apart by circumstance. Taking his cue from the music, he feels that Pinkerton is as conflicted as Butterfly in what proves a doomed romance. “There’s no way we can listen to the glorious duet at the end of Act I,” says Miyamoto, “and doubt that Pinkerton worships Butterfly, as she does him. No one could sing with that passion unless he genuinely felt it. That moment to me is the key to the opera.”

The novel concept opens with a newly added silent scene showing Pinkerton on his deathbed in America some 30 years after the events in the opera. He is attended by his child with Butterfly, now a young man with no memory or knowledge of his infant years. The father, tortured with guilt over Butterfly’s fate, passes his son a letter that reveals the tale in flashback. The occasional glimpses throughout of the agonized Pinkerton climax in an innovative ending, where his final cries take on a touching new significance. Far from the bad guy who callously plans to dump his fleeting lover from the start, Pinkerton emerges alongside Butterfly as a tragic figure.

Whatever the accusations elsewhere of cultural appropriation, Madame Butterfly is and has always been hugely popular among Japanese audiences, who are equally flattered and bemused by Puccini’s exotic take on their country; it was already being performed in Japan in the composer’s lifetime. In addition to homemade productions of the opera itself, the Japanese have created numerous versions of their own over the years, such as a Bunraku puppet drama, a non-musical television work and an original ballet last autumn conceived to Puccini’s music. All have followed the general contours of the opera portraying Butterfly as the abandoned lover and Pinkerton as the cad. A reminder of Japan’s long affection for the piece came last October with the passing of the venerated actress Kaoru Yachigusa, who starred in a joint Italian-Japanese film of the opera in 1954.

Still, Japanese directors are naturally expected to bring some semblance of reality to what amounts to a Western fantasy. Miyamoto has never shied from taking on foreign works about his native country, with all the distortions that involves. Past productions include a German-scripted opera of Yukio Mishima’s novel Kinkakuji (The Golden Pavilion) in Strasbourg, France in 2018; an American-composed musical based on the Kurosawa film classic Ikiru in Tokyo also in 2018; a Kyoto-set opera The Art of Tea by Chinese composer Tan Dun at the Santa Fe Opera in 2007; and most notably his maverick Broadway production of Pacific Overtures, the American show about 19th-century Japan that earned a Tony nomination for Best Musical Revival in 2004.

Madame Butterfly, however, is the mother of them all, composed at a time when Japonism was at its height in Europe. Puccini had never been to Japan, but that didn’t stop him or librettists Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica from conjuring up a world to fit their vague notion of what such a country should look like. While Butterfly was not the first grand opera to be set in Japan – at least two others, Madame Chrysanthemum (1893) and Illica’s own Iris (1898), preceded it by several years – it is far and away the most famous depiction of the nation in musical theater and helped shape its image abroad; Miyamoto calls Cio-Cio San (Butterfly) “the world’s best known Japanese.” (Gilbert & Sullivan’s blockbuster 1885 operetta The Mikado, nominally set in the country, was in fact a lampoon of English society and not about Japan at all.) The director incorporated portions of the opera into a contemporary drama he commissioned in Yokohama some years back called Madame Butterfly X, but this marks the first time he has taken on Puccini’s work in its complicated entirety.

Initially reluctant to take on a show he saw as a virtual “#metoo opera”, Miyamoto took new interest upon a suggestion that he look through the eyes of Butterfly’s son, leading him to rethink the relation of the characters to the story. He shrugs off the numerous inconsistencies and outright errors in the opera. For instance, he observes that if Butterfly’s father was indeed a samurai, as stated in the text, the entire timeframe of the show would have to be earlier than indicated since the position of samurai had been abolished in the late 1860s when Japan entered the modern era. He chooses nevertheless to locate the story for his own purposes around the time of the Sino-Japanese War (1894-95), putting Pinkerton’s death in the mid 1920s. He laughs that Puccini didn’t give him much leeway, noting that his interest as director is in the human element inherent in the music rather than the strict historical or cultural context.

His production is surprisingly abstract for a show designed for Japan, including ample use of projections and overlapping views of past and present, perhaps as a means of getting beyond a schematic East vs. West contrast (the sets are by Polish designer Boris Kudlička, costumes by Japanese fashion legend Kenzo Takada). In Miyamoto’s mind, the sweep of the score touches upon universal emotions that transcend the setting, and he lets the music take him where it will. His image of Pinkerton as haunted years later by remorse suggests that the lieutenant was just as trapped as Butterfly by the conventions of his society in giving up the woman he loved in order to marry within his social circle. Miyamoto also expresses the view that Butterfly dies not for some outmoded notion of honor but for her husband and son’s happiness, in other words, for love rather than pride. While his notions go against the libretto in some ways, he says that the answer is all there in Puccini’s music.

Audiences on three continents will have the chance to decide for themselves on Miyamoto’s singular interpretation. Last year’s sold-out production in Tokyo won accolades with a superb all-Japanese cast, and now moves on to Dresden, Copenhagen and San Francisco.