How does one explain the appeal of opera? Is it musicals for the snobs amongst us? Theatre for playwrights who have trouble with realistic dialogue? Or a specific artform with it’s own framework that forces composer & libertist to be at their artistic peak before they can create true opera? I am sitting in the Coliseum, London home of the English National Opera on a warm Friday night in early summer so unless I am a masocist you can guess my answer. Opera is somewhat like Haiku, in that there are fairly strict boundaries outside if which one should not stray but that if created artfully produce something of utter beauty. Haiku can in three short lines take one out of the world for a brief moment like all good poetry. Opera does the same & normally for longer; even Pagliacci & Cavalaria Rusticana are an hour each & I have not mentioned Wagner, a man who saw opera as a test of the true mettel of a person. Puccini falls somewhere in between. Madame Butterfly is 2 hours 45 minutes long but Puccini also invented the perfect three minute pop song with his catchy arias.
This production was created by Anthony Mingella, the late film director & is suitably beautiful using a minimal of props. This is a great opera but perhaps not the best to start with given it’s length. The English version is good but even so I found myself following the lyrics on the LED screen above the stage & the poetry of the sound comes in part from the Italian language.
This was quite a traditional production, albeit with the use of puppets for a few characters. It is hard to find fault with such a production & Butterfly herself sounded like am angel.
Un bel dei indeed.
