Madam Butterfly, Puccini
Welsh National Opera, Apollo Theatre, Wed 13th and Sat 16th March

Madam Butterfly was not well received at its first performance, and Puccini spent an anxious few months afterwards reworking the score, cutting some 600 bars of music and adding others, to produce the work commonly performed today. The production with which WNO are touring this spring, attempting as it does to reconstruct the original version of the opera, gives a rare opportunity to judge precisely what it was that those first audiences objected to.

On this evidence it was probably not the music: though not perhaps as brimming with memorable tunes as some of his other works, it nonetheless shows the composer at the height of his powers when it comes to screwing up the emotional tension. Indeed, at moments of crisis the simple melodies and slightly emptier textures with which Puccini responded to the Japanese theme serve only to dangle the audience's emotions more agonisingly in suspense.

More likely it was the subject matter, even more bleak and heart-breaking than other operas of the period, which audiences found hard to stomach. For one never knows quite whom to blame for Butterfly's awful fate - the arrogant, brash, insensitive American who buys her hand in marriage purely to satisfy his animal lusts; or the Japanese society which can not only connive at but actively encourage such contracts - leaving one feeling uncomfortably powerless as the inevitable climax approaches.

This is not to say that Puccini ought never to have cut Butterfly. The lengthened last act, rather less well paced than the climactic scenes of most of his operas, bears testament to the fact that composers usually knew best when it came to revising their work. Apart from this, though, this is a production largely without reproach. The simple staging, emphasising the human element of the piece, while perhaps slightly static at times, was exquisitely beautiful at others - perhaps most movingly during the famous "Humming Chorus". Nuccia Focile excels in the title role, mixing moments of sublimely delicate sensitivity with others of great emotional power, soaring easily over the mighty WNO orchestra. Much of the singing, in fact, is commendable: Anna Burford makes a wonderfully rich-voiced Suzuki, and Christopher Purves a melifluous, sympathetic Consul Sharpless. Perhaps Carlo Rizzi could have reigned in the orchestra rather more in places to allow Paul Charles Clark (as the infamous Lieutenant Pinkerton) to be better heard at the top of his range.

This is not, perhaps, the ideal night out for the easily upset - there were very few dry eyes in the house by the time the final curtain fell. It is, however, a chance to hear some wonderful music, some of it rarely played, performed with skill and sensitivity.

Matthew Rogers, 13 / 3 / 02