Madama Butterfly

In the organizer's words:

Lieutenant Pinkerton has fallen in love with geisha Cio-Cio-San, called Madame Butterfly, and wants to marry her according to Japanese custom, without wanting to enter into a permanent union. Butterfly, however, really loves Pinkerton and has a child by him. She waits in vain for years for the return of the lieutenant. When Pinkerton then returns with his new American wife to pick up the child, Butterfly stabs herself. "Madama Butterfly" goes back to a novella that supposedly describes a true incident. Since the American fleet forced the opening of Japanese ports around the middle of the 19th century, the influence of Japanese culture in the West began in reverse as well. Soon operas and operettas were being performed in this newly discovered country, which, despite its rapid technological progress, promised a completely different modernity by preserving its own culture. The exoticism of the milieu led Giacomo Puccini to far more than a mere colonialist appropriation of distant music: he studied sources on the music of Japan, incorporated original melodies, and was inspired by refined instrumentation and special timbres. They make the "Japanese tragedy" one of the most touching operas in history. Eike Gramss' production gently shows the clash of two cultures in a dazzling Japanese world. This content has been machine translated.