This was La Scala’s Japanese production. Two of the principals, the designers of sets, costumes and lighting and the producer himself all came from Madam Butterfly’s own country and brought with them what the booklet calls ‘authentic orientalism’. The booklet also quotes from a review in La repubblica: ‘A magnificent production..., a success for all participants, from the prima donna to the director and the conductor’. Prospective buyers should perhaps bear that in mind as they read on.
The singers are ill-matched, both with one another and with Puccini’s score. Only one has a voice apt for the music, and he stands out to the disadvantage of the others: Giorgio Zancanaro’s fine tone and even production make any intervention by Sharpless doubly welcome and his lack of a full-length solo doubly a matter for regret. But the Japanese ladies hardly begin to measure up to what should be the vocal standards expected at La Scala, while the Czech tenor is altogether too stolid in voice and style to make a suitable Pinkerton. Maazel’s conducting is curiously both leisurely and fussy. The stage production is as laboured and cack-handed as any I’ve seen. Certainly it does not lend itself well to filming – nor does Hayashi’s Butterfly. One can imagine the diminutive figure and the stylised sky being touching and effective in the theatre, but the camera looks for a more expressive face and exposes the incongruity of real people in a realistic drama moving against a token background. Butterfly’s house, which is normally made to work without trouble, requires a team of hooded, ghoul-like figures to manage it. The shosi and attendant production-effects come near to ruining the most magical of scene-endings in all opera; and the death scene, in which the ghouls deplorably take part, is a dismaying exercise in ingenious bad taste. La Scala owes a long- standing reparation to Puccini for the disgrace of its original reception of his masterpiece; this production adds insult to injury