Contemporary music theater
Text and music by Thomas Cornelius Desi
based on Giacomo Puccini’s correspondence and his opera “Madama Butterfly” to mark the 100th anniversary of his death and the 120th anniversary of the premiere of “Madama Butterfly” on February 17, 1904 at La Scala in Milan.
When asked why this opera by Puccini was of particular interest to me for a compositional overwriting, I can answer with a question by Arnold Schönberg: When does a piece end?
A strange, almost strangely banal-sounding question. The audience may ask this question about operas because of the length of the performance… but a composer also asks this question, albeit for a different reason.
As far as the length of performances is concerned, a stereotyping of performance durations of 15 minutes – or at most 20 minutes – has become established in contemporary music. This is mainly the fault of concert organizers who “generally” do not want to bother their audiences with more than 15 minutes (preferably less) of new music. The last hundred years of new music have proved to be a nuisance to the audience. Composers have reacted to this in various ways, from the American style of minimal music, to a clerical style à la “Tintinabuli” by Arvo Pärt, to history-forgetting neo-romanticism and the like. Due to the pressure of the market economy, the world of independent music has become a confusing pool of every conceivable fusion of styles, including ethnic ones. Asserting clear boundaries also requires a kind of historical oblivion, namely that of recent history. But back to Puccini.
The question “When does a piece end?” does not necessarily mean the end of the piece, i.e. its “final chord”, so to speak. In other words: “When is the artistic work on the piece finished? Or: When is the work completed?“ – We are familiar with the topos of the “fragment”, the torso. There can be many reasons why a work remains unfinished. The completion of a work requires at least a conviction on the part of the artist that the work is good. Very good, perhaps. In Genesis 1:31 it says: “God looked at everything he had made: it was very good.” Creation, including that of a composition, an opera, turns a person into a creator who then allows himself a sixth day on which he recognizes his work as finished and good, complete. But this has not been the case for a long time. Nietzsche’s composition “Das Fragment an sich” (“The Fragment in Itself”) from 1871 – in itself of little musical significance – shortly before the publication of his first major work “Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik” (“The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music”), which probably concerned a preoccupation with his own musical ambitions in the wake of his encounter with Wagner, already introduced the possibility of a work already conceived as a fragment. At the end of the composition, which breaks off in the middle of the bar, is the note “Da capo con malinconia” – “Again and with melancholy”. We are familiar with the return of the eternal same from the quintessence of the insight presented ten years later in his “Zarathustra”. Since Nietzsche, the fragment and the torso “in itself” have become a topos. Ruins, as they had been planned and built as ruins since the early Romantic period, corresponded to a strange and at the same time memorable idea of giving the incompleteness of life an artistic attitude. But Puccini was not one of these pioneers of the deliberately unfinished. Rather, Puccini was in search of completion and perfection. He was tormented by the idea that he would not be able to complete his last work, “Turandot”, due to his illness. The opera “Madama Butterfly” from 1904 was rewritten by Puccini at least five times in the course of his life. However, the question of a definitive version cannot be answered chronologically, as if the last adaptation were the definitive or “correct” one. The fact that Puccini drafted a very unconventional original concept for “Butterfly” with only two acts, which was rejected by the Milan audience due to various circumstances surrounding the premiere, initiated the composer’s subsequent “tinkering” with his work. I can’t help thinking that Puccini’s primary concern was the success of the opera rather than the consistent pursuit of his operatic concept. This may also have led to an uncertainty about the work. This, too, is a topos of artistic work, hardly better described than in Balzac’s short story “Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu” – the unknown masterpiece – in which a painter spends his entire life “painting away” at a single picture, which ultimately turns out to be a completely unsuccessful chaos of colors. – Since modernism, however, this kind of “failure” is no longer perceptible. This brings us to a point in the attempt to answer the question posed at the beginning by rephrasing it slightly: “Who determines when a work is finished?” – Answer: “The artist”.
The work of art as such thus becomes a purely subjectively determined object, based on an assertion by the artist and no longer on a generally recognizable, because acknowledged, consensus of completeness or “perfection”. This attempt by Puccini to make amends for the failure of the 1904 premiere, perhaps a gnawing feeling, urged him to make “improvements” to the score without, however, restoring the original two-act version. At this point, one could weigh up the fundamental dramaturgical difference between a two-act play and a three- or five-act play, but these formal conventions have also disappeared from everyday theater life. Perceiving “acts” – if such exist at all – not as ellipses from cinema films, leaps in time or changes of location, i.e. following purely “practical” circumstances, has replaced compelling formal dramaturgies. However, the two-act play is indeed a strange form if one is striving for a dramaturgical “climax”. A work that breaks in two in the middle either places the climax at the very end – without any further depiction of consequences, similar to a “movie break”, or will turn it into an “anti-climax” at the end of the first act, an “implosion” of expectations – provided it has succeeded in creating expectations in the audience up to that point.
After reading Antonino Titone’s book on Puccini’s operas, Vissi d’arte. Puccini e il disfacimento del melodramma, I had the impression that Puccini knowingly planned to shatter the classical three-act model. His radical, almost experimental vision was trampled underfoot in the din of the premiere. For pragmatic reasons, the composer then opted for a more conventional, but now inconsistent “Butterfly” version. This complex, never-ending genesis does not answer the question of when a piece is finished. All the more reason, however, to recognize a struggle to penetrate such a conservative genre as opera with new ideas and concepts. Although Puccini followed his great instinct for dramatic processes, he was ultimately more concerned with not jeopardizing his material status quo. Nevertheless, these various almost experimental elements also hint at the beginnings of a new musical theater that bowed to the expectations and conventions of so-called grand opera.
“Butterfly Effect”
Small causes can produce large effects – who hasn’t heard of this? In the world of physics, the image of a fluttering butterfly whose flapping wings then trigger a tornado elsewhere has become the popular image of the “Butterfly Effect”. The title of my Puccini transcription – The Butterfly Equation – is inspired by common terms in mathematics and physics in which the word “butterfly” is used. The causal reference here, however, is the title of a 1972 lecture by Edward N. Lorenz: “Predictability: ‘Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?’ – The idea that the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil then causes a tornado in Texas has, as I said, become very popular. But I would like to point out the word “predictability” here. The “predictability” of future events has always interested mankind. Whether this can exist is unclear, as according to the laws of space-time in physics, time can only run in one direction. It was only in the speculations of quantum physics that models were developed that deviated from this. Music, as an art form that is also directed in time, and with it the theater, has always played and experimented with time. In the worldwide opera repertoire, including “Madama Butterfly”, an interesting phenomenon has now developed: As one of the most frequently performed operas in the repertoire, the majority of the audience knows the plot and therefore also the dramatic ending of the opera. Surprisingly, however, this fact does nothing to diminish interest in the opera. Instead, in the course of the history of interpretation, attention has shifted from “What happens?” to “How does it happen?”. The aforementioned Italian musicologist Antonino Titone pointed out in his analysis of the opera that Puccini had created a “diabolical machine” with “Madama Butterfly”, which “races along at idle”. In fact, the audience does what the protagonist does: everyone waits for something that never happens, or not in the expected way. Doesn’t this already make you think of “Waiting for Godot” by Samuel Beckett? Puccini was almost exactly fifty years ahead of Beckett. In this respect, Puccini – despite all the clichés of pathetic and sentimental “verismo” – was already creating an almost proto-absurd theater. Added to this is Puccini’s awareness that mankind had entered an age of technologically induced illusions. With his verismo, he created the ultimate operatic theater with his last breath, so to speak, before – in fact with his death – sound and film cinema, especially in the form of the so-called “Hollywood ham”, began to trump opera. European composers trained in the grand opera repertoire, such as Korngold and Steiner, lent their musical aplomb to this Hollywood film. Since then, the idea of an “immersive” experience of theatrical illusions has increasingly developed into a separate branch of the entertainment industry that imitates reality.
It is therefore all the more astonishing that in “Madama Butterfly”, despite knowing exactly how the plot unfolds, the audience is always interested enough in the variation of “How does it happen?” – i.e. the question of the performers, above all the sopranos and tenors, but also the staging concepts, costumes and stage sets – to want to see this and other works on stages around the world almost every day. Let’s take a closer look at the original plot: Cio-Cio-San is waiting for her American husband. This early “culture clash” and also the cinematographic mediality of Puccini’s verismo dramaturgically distract our gaze from the child of the two protagonists, who remains mute. The equation alluded to in my title “Butterfly Equation” lies both in the juxtaposition of Puccini’s work and method, as well as the calculated use of recurring motifs – or the juxtaposition of gender relations then and now. In “The Butterfly Equation”, this artistic equation produces an unexpected result with regard to the traditional reception of Puccini. However, it also addresses an aspect of music history or music philosophy with regard to “new music” after 1945, namely the trauma of the wars and the Holocaust. In an almost visionary way, Puccini not only turned to eminently psychological processes in his choice of subjects and protagonists, but also developed models for an alternative live media art form. His “Verismo” is nothing less than an anticipation of a new art form at the dawn of the media revolution through sound film, with all its social consequences. As we know, this live verismo found no successors in the world of opera. Puccini was therefore the last to go, not only in his family’s musical career, which was passed down through generations, but also in the genre of opera. However, Puccini could also be seen as one of the first of a completely new form of musical theater that is oriented towards “immersive forms of presentation”, a form between documentary theater and reality show.
This is where my idea for this “Puccini opera” comes in: the popular talent shows on television are themselves a reality show, in which the focus is supposedly on real feelings. Puccini’s Verismo became the inspiration for setting a mediatized reality as a performative lyrical scene. So I transport the protagonists of “Madama Butterfly” into the present. The phenomenon of the embodiment of a role by a living actor harbors the idea of a revenant as an unreal form of existence. This may remind us of immortal vampires. They die on stage and then rise again for the applause. This wonderful form of poetic abstraction, of which we humans are capable, also transcends the suffering associated with every death. However, this suffering of the dying is often also linked to the suffering of the survivors. A paradoxical situation in which traumatized biographies are reflected. So if we look very closely at the scenic events in “The Butterfly Equation”, different times and forms of existence come together here. For example, a man meets five younger women who could all be his mother, whom he barely knows.
The form of this “opera about an opera” also reflects the original two-part nature of “Madama Butterfly”. Depending on their individual level of knowledge of Puccini’s original, the audience will recognize it as if it had passed through layers of glass, faded mirrors, as if from a long-ago memory, more or less changed by media transformations. So it becomes clear here that this piece appeals to our ability to remember and recognize.
I asked myself the question: What happened to this child? What psychological disposition does this traumatized child have?
At this moment, we enter the second act of this operatic rilettura. Where in the first act the contestants were supposed to be the center of attention – the strange behavior of the host and moderator may have already been noticed. His condescending, arrogant and ultimately sexist attitude towards the young female singers may be reminiscent of certain cases in the course of the #metoo debate, and rightly so. But – as I said – in Act 2 we enter a psychological, dream-like interpretation of the psyche of this child who, in the course of the confrontation with the five women, becomes aware of the traumas he has repressed internally: the adoption by a person from another culture, the loss of his father, the suicide of his mother and the burden of guilt for not having prevented his mother’s death. These events became the voices in the child, which it in turn perceived as the voices of female singers, before the acceptance of these events finally silenced these very voices. The strange figure of the butterfly woman thus becomes a metaphor for unprocessed traumas and repressed, even split-off parts of the personality. In the connection with the sexual aspect for the male host, the Madama Butterfly thus represents not only the repressed true mother, but all women. The fact that the roles, names and dialog texts are clear references to Puccini’s biography intentionally leaves open interpretations as to how the composer’s biography corresponds with his creatures.