Kristine Opoais (center) Madame Butterfly.

by Hugh Gilmore

The first time I saw “Madame Butterfly” performed, I failed to notice some opening dialogue that seemed like blah-blah before the good singing could start. I was wrong.

The opera begins when the American navy lieutenant Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton sails to Nagasaki in 1890. Things are all so different here, he notices. A little crazy, but he soon sees such things as being to his advantage. Shown his house on a hill, he agrees to the lease’s terms: “Nine hundred and ninety-nine years … unless I want to break it.” The divorce laws are more lax than America’s. He makes an arranged marriage to a young Japanese girl.

The house fascinates him. Its walls consist of sliding screens. Where is the living room? Oh, easy, we’ll just slide these screens this way to make a living room. A bedroom? Same thing, slide the screens as you wish. He thinks, Strange people these Japanese, nothing is fixed. Nothing is permanent. Anything can be arranged as you wish. He quickly marries Cio-Cio San, known to all through her quick marriage as Madame Butterfly.

An aria or two, honeymoon flirting and seduction, some nights together, then Pinkerton is gone. The 16-year-old Cio-Cio gives birth to their son while he is away. And stays away. And does not know he is a father. Will he return? Does he feel bound by this marriage? Or does he see it as something flexible, more of a “Japanese” thing, like the sliding screens and lease that so fascinated him?

I saw the Metropolitan Opera’s latest “Live in HD” simulcast at the Plymouth Meeting AMC 12 last Wednesday at 6:30 p.m. My wife would not join me because she finds the story too sad, and Pinkerton’s character too enraging. So I went alone. I booked my usual J10 seat, up in the clouds, at the end of the row. I brought my “opera trail kit” as always – a sandwich bag half-filled with mixed nuts, raisins and few fat chocolate chips, a bottle of water, a plastic cup, and two sample-sized bottles of melancholy enhancement.

Up in the aerie I braced myself to bear witness to one of the saddest tales every written, while listening to some of the most beautiful music ever sung. Poor Mrs. B.F. Franklin, nee Butterfly, and her faithful attendant Suzuki, and her ethereal puppet-son-child –  poor her – after a wonderful courtship in Act I, the second act opens after Pinkerton’s three-year absence. They live now in penury, doubt and heartbreak, held back only by an almost unnatural faith that Mr. U.S. Navy man Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton will return on his United States Ship “The Lincoln” and make them all a family again.

The closing frame of Act II becomes smaller and smaller, the colors sharper, more delineated, the frame reduced, till finally they seem enclosed in a small box on the huge world of the stage – the beautiful Humming Chorus begins its simple, soft melody.

Butterfly gazes resolutely foreword. So tiny. So undefended. Working so strongly to shut out the coming truth that Mr. Pinkerton, the American hero, has been home for a day and has not rushed to see her and Suzuki and the boy their love created, but whom he has never seen. So sad. The chorus continues for what seems like infinity. Only the tender mercy of the curtain slowly drawing over them allows this saddest of all scenes to end. The screen goes black and stays black.

Whoosh goes the breath from my lungs. I notice I’ve been crunched up. My heart expands. I am exhausted. My eyes are glistening, even the smallest bump would set me off. The house lights began to rise ever so slightly and the audience begins uncurling from the protective balls they’ve shrunk into. At that moment, still suspended in emotion, I wish I could keep feeling the effect of that perfect blend of music and story. I wish I could vanish and reappear beside a quiet stream, a chapel even, and nourish the memory of that agonizing tableau of sadness I’d just seen.

But on screen the backstage lights have come on. Stagehands goaded by a stopwatch have begun changing the scenery. The actors are peeling away from one another and suddenly we see her, Madame Butterfly between the acts. She’s transformed, replaced for now by the wonderful performer who plays her, Kristine Opolais. The person.

She looks spent; her eyes glisten, her face frozen in tired determination. She walks with a tired grace toward the side stage where tons of scenery are propped. People see her and step aside. There are no greetings, no jokes. She is clearly worn. She has clearly given her all, every last sinew has been flexed; her eyes can look no farther or deeper into the sad and horrible future swiftly flying towards the person she will become again in Act III. You felt for Butterfly a few minutes ago, now you feel for the poor, battered, exhausted Miss Opolais, the woman who gave us all so much, from so very far within in – she looks tender, almost crushed.

I wanted to pray against what I sensed what was going to happen next, as soon as she finished walking through the tight canyon of stacked scenery: a between-the-acts interview. Oh, please, for once, I feel, please have a sense of decency and back off, leave her alone. Enough is enough.

But no, there it is, the microphone extended, the hostess Deborah Voight, chirping at her – all the usual damned questions. How’d you prepare? How do you feel? How will you now approach the final act, etc.?

Miss Butterfly/Opolais began answering as best she could, but I couldn’t take it anymore. I walked down the steps, through the lobby and left the theater. Out there I walked around in the nearly empty mall parking lot for twenty minutes and tried my damnedest to hold on to that little speck of pity I felt, like a weak coal, while I watched Mother Butterfly and her son and her friend sit through the night holding on to hope and waking in the morning to learn the awful truth that day would bring.