Perhaps the most unpleasant aspect of November 17’s horror show put together by the administration of the Met Opera was the audience’s reaction – deeply hypocritical and tinged with a considerable dose of guarded narcissism; not entirely the audience’s fault; for we are conditioned to react in a certain way to certain things, while societal ostracism is usually the non-conformist’s sorry lot today. Was it ever different? Never mind.

Let me begin with the music, since music is still, by definition, the most important part of any operatic production. Or so one would think.

Madama Butterfly has never been a favorite of mine. This, however, is truly a matter of taste, as opposed to what I’m about to discuss here. Whatever my personal problems with the score and libretto, I realize (and can prove conclusively) that the opus is definitely a masterpiece, sitting at, or very near, the absolute peak of man’s compositional ability. On November 17, the Met allowed its paying audience to hear very little of that masterpiece. Most of the music was mercilessly destroyed by the conductor.

Maestro James Levine has two outstanding qualities. One is his uncanny ability to make possible the production of masterpieces at the Met that would not otherwise be seen (production costs, availability of plausible performers, etc.). The current staging of Aida and the entire Ring cycle are among the man’s notable achievements. His other outstanding quality is his habit of slowing down the tempi throughout the score, any score, which always kills the music. Just kills it. On the night in question, all those impossibly sweet verismo melodies did not sound like melodies at all. They were pretty much impossible to follow – so slow was the execution, so pronounced the drag, that by the time the orchestra got to the tenth bar of a passage, any passage, even a lenient listener like myself could not remember what the first bar of that same passage sounded like. Open-minded neophytes must have been profoundly bored after about twenty minutes. When folks complain about “opera losing its audience,” they should consider the potential next generation of opera buffs being repeatedly turned off by the conductors’ mindless insistence on slowing things down in an epoch in which “fast-paced” is synonymous with “Exciting,” while “slow” usually means “stupid.”

There was, to be sure, one exception. For reasons unot immediately apparent, in the heroine’s final aria the original tempi were restored. Maybe everybody just wanted to get it over with and go home.

The audience did not seem to notice anything. The fact that the production featured, apart from everything else, a little music, was lost on pretty much everyone. I don’t think replacing the entire score with a few loops from, say, Les Mis, would have made any difference.

I’m very sensitive to music, and besides, each time I listen to Butterfly, I make an effort to get into it very seriously in order to figure out my own personal problems with the score and maybe come to enjoy it as much as I enjoy Tosca, Boheme, and Turandot. With the kind of conducting we were subjected to, my getting into it proved to be out of the question.

There are instances on record (including some with Mr. Levine conducting) of the listeners reacting joyously to a performance – no, seriously, I myself have witnessed genuinely grateful reactions at the Met over the years. The night in question was not one of them.

Most folks’ faces expressed a kind of dutiful bureaucratic satisfaction one is expected to manifest at a corporate conference when one does not wish to get fired. Thing is, the joint efforts of the Met and their cronies in the media succeeded in creating an aura of mild sensationalism, a “palpable buzz,” as some pundits say, around this production. How? It doesn’t matter. The house was packed. It is difficult for folks with confidence problems not to look dutifully satisfied. It is after all the safest facial expression in all of history. It must have saved hundreds of thousands from the wrath of medieval tyrants, Spanish Inquisition, the guillotine, Union and Confederate vengeance, German concentration camps, Russian concentration camps, and on and on.

A middle-aged Asian lady stood in front of us (we had standing room tickets), turning around to say “shhh!” each time our annoyance reached audible levels. Maybe she identified with the sorry lot of Cio-Cio-San, the poor and passionate Japanese girl seduced, and abandoned while pregnant, by the vile B.F. Pinkerton.

The opera’s plot is simple, very easy to follow, and plausibly sentimental. The librettist’s sympathy is wholly with the heroine. Which is to say that those who knew nothing about music and understood less could, with some effort, keep themselves mildly interested by simply following the story. A lot of folks, I’m sure, were doing exactly that. I did some checking. In the second intermission, I approached a middle-aged lady in one of the orchestra seats, asking whether she had been able to hear the pizzicato towards the end of Act Two (I had to make certain, you see, that it was the orchestra that had screwed it up, and not the acoustics in that section of the auditorium). She blinked. She had no idea what I was talking about. She said, “I’m not sure, but you could probably ask my husband when he gets back.” Maybe I should have asked some others. I didn’t. I was too disgusted.

A fellow behind me complained (drawing another “shhh!” from the lady identifying with Cio-Cio-San) that the soprano was just awful. I thought she was hardly the worst thing happening to us.

The amount of good music composed over these past few centuries, including popular music, is astoundingly small. There are very few good operas. Sixteen, to be precise. Some pedants will point out that eighteen or nineteen would be more correct. Fuck them. I’m not a pedant. The last one of the sixteen was written in 1924, by Giacomo Puccini. Since then, despite the constant diligent efforts on the part of the opera industry and the few dozen mysteriously prestigious music schools around the world, nothing new and noteworthy has appeared. That is why, in my opinion, that which we already have should be preserved with utmost care.

Even though opera is mostly about the music, other components of the show are very important too. Aren’t they?

Of course. Opera is a festivity, a celebration, a fête. The first composer to realize this was none other than Giacomo Meyerbeer who insisted that the sets and costumes always be lavish – sumptuous. Meyerbeer’s successors, including Verdi, Wagner, and Puccini, took this concept as a matter of course – took it for granted, in fact. Maybe we should too. The sets in the great sixteen operas should always be in line with the music, i.e. elaborate and realistic.

Verismo opera is naturalistic to a fault – it is, after all, one of the genre’s requirements. Puccini, the undisputed champion of verismo, takes advantage of the movement’s orchestral and melodic devices to depict every little nuance of the mise-en-scéne. Thus the slightest deviation from the composer’s plan should be seen for what it really is, i.e. as the director’s desire to show off at the author’s (and the audience’s) expense. Taking liberties with a great man’s creation is a cowardly act – Puccini has long been dead and cannot tell the director what he thinks, exactly, of his “interpretation.”

The idea of presenting Butterfly as a traditional Japanese show is considered modern, even though I remember such “interpretations” going back to at least my childhood, and I’m no spring chicken, either. Instead of a Japanese house and garden mentioned in the libretto (a “normal” production set for this opera is ridiculously cheap to put together – a little plywood, a bit of paper, some good lighting – three hundred bucks, I would estimate) we saw a large section of Coney Island’s boardwalk – cut out, painted black, varnished, and mounted over the stage at a fifteen-degree slant. Members of the company’s ballet group fussed on it the entire night, moving back and forth rectangular Japanese paper screens they must have borrowed from a nearby sushi place, and brandishing in the semi-darkness not mentioned in the libretto a lovely collection of souvenir quality Japanese lanterns – for no good reason.

Of the two dozen dreadful staging decisions, the worst one revealed itself in Act Two.

The abandoned Cio-Cio-San, a.k.a. Madama Butterfly, has a child by Pinkerton. Now this child is three years old. The boy does not have a single line in the score. His task is to hug Mommy periodically, tug on her sleeve, and horse around near the edge of the stage the rest of the time, endearing the audience. Before killing herself in Act Three, Mom sends him outside to play. Maybe a shortage of appropriate candidates for the part in this six-and-a-half-billion world of ours was to blame; or maybe the female relatives of the Met’s and Juliard’s respective managements have stopped having children – I don’t know. Maybe some kind of parents’ league had raised objections, even though it was Saturday and the kid performing the part would not have had to get up early the following morning. In any event, a three-feet bald doll was substituted that throughout the remaining two acts was dragged around the stage by three corps-de-ballet members in black who moved the doll’s head, arms, and legs in such a way as to give a grotesque impression of a child’s gesticulation. The doll bore an unpleasant resemblance to tacky horror flicks involving dolls, and generally looked ominous, adding a macabre aspect to the tedious evening. Maybe it was supposed to symbolize something, like, here’s what comes of a Japanese girl sleeping with American sailors – she ends up giving birth to a wooden doll – I don’t know. Perhaps in line with the producer’s mindset, the doll did not leave when the woman who had given birth to it sent it away, the idea being that the three-year-old child was too curious to avoid witnessing his mother’s suicide – a psychological atrocity neither Puccini nor Luigi Illica, his librettist, sane men both, would have thought of, no matter how pissed at the world they may have been when working on this opera.

The program I browsed through afterwards revealed in educational fervor that the doll is a direct descendant (in the cultural sense) of the national Japanese puppet tradition called burnaku. To the best of my knowledge, burnaku is not normally accompanied by a symphony orchestra performing turn-of-the-nineteenth-century Italian verismo scores – no more than hockey sticks are used in kayaking, or slalom skis in crossing the Sahara, or divers’ flippers in rock climbing. With goals in mind not immediately apparent, not even to themselves, I suspect, today’s directors and set designers often attempt to combine the uncombinable. The latter does not become any less uncombinable for it, no matter what tone-deaf opera-industry critics write in their reviews, or however sophisticated and open-minded the public pretends to be.

Music appreciation should probably be one of the principle criteria upon which directors for operatic productions are selected. The director of this particular production does not seem to have any idea that music in verismo opera is somewhat more than just occasionally disagreeable background noise. To hell with the nuances – Puccini’s are too numerous to grasp for anyone who is not really interested – but the most obvious dramatic turns should have been noticed and utilized, or am I missing something? For instance, the male choir backstage in the beginning of Act Three – whose sole purpose is to depict the sunrise – is clearly verismo’s tribute to old man Verdi’s legacy. Guiseppe Verdi depicted the tempest’s wails with a string of half-tones hummed nasally by the male section of the chorus in Rigoletto. Puccini’s choir goes “Aah! Ahh-ahh-ahh!” backstage – a musical impression of the rising sun, one would think. Yet the entire stage (in this production) continued to be steeped in very modern, very advanced bluish twilight – no change. The actual stage dawn set in about ten minutes later. Maybe the director, or the light engineer, figured that a bunch of men getting out in the street and going “Ahh-ahh-ahh!” ten minutes before dawn was some kind of ancient Japanese custom.

Also, it wouldn’t hurt a director to have some idea of … I’m not too judgmental, am I? … of drama and mise-en-scéne. For instance, when Sharpless, the American Consul, cautiously suggests to Butterfly that her husband might never come back to her, the orchestra falls silent, and we hear a single drum hit – suggesting, one would think, that the abandoned wife and mother does something dramatic here – turns away, or drops her fan, or something, anything. She did nothing. Or – the tension in the final scene is predicated on the entire body of music preceding it, which is why the staging there is most effective when one keeps it simple. The woman stabs herself with the ritual dagger. Enter Pinkerton running and shouting “Butterfly!” The brass section plays the solemn leitmotif. The female half of the audience sobs. Done!

Nope. Instead of stabbing herself, Butterfly lifted the knife over her head and with her free hand started to wrap herself, and the raised knife, in delicate sheets of white Japanese polyester. Then, at the very moment when the ladies watching this should have been sobbing (which would have proved that they were capable of emotion … dutiful satisfaction cannot be classified as emotion … ), a ballet task force of eight, in black tights, ran onto the stage. Making reptilious movements, they crept towards the heroine, and then backtracked, unspooling broad red bands, following the director’s plan to convey to the audience a fact well-known in Japanese medicine, i.e. that a steel blade entering live human flesh can produce a lot of blood.

After witnessing this night-long fiendish vandalizing of a masterpiece, folks clapped dutifully and appeared to be somewhat relieved. No one had any reason to sob in the end – so no one did.

Going through the reviews some days later, I found nothing but praise, plus a slew of stock phrases indicative of reviewers’ ignorance and indifference, such as “ever-apparent conductor’s mastery,” “the unruffled flow of the opera’s polyphony,” and on and on. The set seems to have really impressed the reviewers – how novel! how totally unexpected! Maybe they’ve never been to a Japanese restaurant. They should visit one. Most of them are pretty good.

The distracting ballet nonsense got its share of praise as well. Surely folks would have liked it even better had the dancers performed some occasional up-and-down jumping, shouting “Bush is an asshole! Bush is a moron!” The public’s obsession with that idea has yet to show any signs of abating in this man’s town.

The moral of this story is as follows. If whoever is responsible for the mess I just described really wants to see lots of symbolism, minimalism, etc, etc, - why, there is no ban on composing new operas specifically tailored to accommodate such concepts.

Forgive us, Giacomo.