Madama Butterfly/Madamu Batafurai: Transpositions of a “Japanese Tragedy” by Arthur Groos (review)

Reviewed by: Madama Butterfly/Madamu Batafurai: Transpositions of a "Japanese Tragedy" by Arthur Groos Harry N. Dunstan and Kay Krekow Madama Butterfly/Madamu Batafurai: Transpositions of a "Japanese Tragedy." By Arthur Groos. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. [xxv, 269 p. ISBN 9781009250672 (hardcover), $110; ISBN 9781009250665 (ebook), $110.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index. [End Page 684] With Madama Butterfly/Madamu Batafurai: Transpostions of a "Japanese Tragedy," Arthur Groos has produced a sui generis study that fastidiously documents the full panoply of cultural history underlying not just Giacomo Puccini's opera Madama Butterfly but also the origins of a rich East/West cultural exchange, for which Madama Butterfly remains the primary musical example. Groos further documents how Madama Butterfly evolved in Japanese culture and consciousness in the twentieth century and—ironically—found its way back to modern Broadway, where it began with David Belasco's play Madame Butterfly in 1900. Its story is still being told. Groos tells us the book is the result of a lifelong passion project with Japanese culture and East/West cultural interface and that he was motivated to make use of "untapped" primary sources related to Puccini and Butterfly. As Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities (emeritus) at Cornell University, former associate director of the Centro studi Giacomo Puccini (Lucca, Italy), and a founding editor of the Cambridge Opera Journal and Cambridge Studies in Opera, Groos has been at the core of serious Puccini scholarship for decades. He has also been one of the leaders in the movement to place Puccini studies into a larger, more comprehensive field of study, not just within opera studies but in the far more expansive discipline of the humanities. Groos's work should certainly find its place on the shelves of serious opera scholars. It is difficult to imagine the scope of this book ever being surpassed. The substance of the book is a preface, introduction, and six chapters. Chapters 1, 3, 5, and 6 (and portions of the introduction) are previously published material that Groos has revised and expanded. The scope of topics covered is wide ranging (e.g., geishas, Japanese drama, temporar y marriage, Orientalism in opera, and Italian opera), and it must be said that the book is truly a monograph that especially speaks to scholars with a profound interest in East/West cultural studies of the early twentieth century and to votaries of Madama Butterfly and its culture. The meticulousness of documentation could be overwhelming to the general reader, but the serious cultural/opera scholar will certainly welcome it. Groos is deeply interested in how the original source material, Pierre Loti's seminal novel Madame Chrysanthème (1887), led to John Luther Long's short story "Madame Butterfly," and then to Belasco's stage play adaptation of Long's work— Madame Butterfly: A Japanese Tragedy. It was Belasco's play, which Puccini saw in London, that inspired him to write the opera. In this synoptic approach, Groos makes extended use of the previous "untapped" source material concerning a considerable collection of correspondence between Puccini; his publisher, Giulio Ricordi; and the two librettists, Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa. Another fascinating highlight of this approach is that Groos reveals how the transpositions of this Japanese tragedy proved to be contentious, as Illica, convinced he would eventually recreate a new, original scenario, remained attached to Long's short story, while Puccini remained attached to the play that he experienced as a theatrical event. These varying approaches to drama-turgy (Illica creating a drama from a literary source vis-à-vis Puccini creating one from an experienced theatrical event) highlight the problems of gestation in the creation of Madama Butterfly. The usual process of the creative team of the librettists Illica and Giacosa and composer Puccini was that Illica would produce a scenario and rough draft of a libretto. As the work evolved, Giacosa would "fine tune" the verses and bring his exceptional sense of theater to the final product. This [End Page 685] collaboration—which began in an inchoate way with Manon Lescaut—once formalized, produced Puccini's "Holy Trinity" of La bohème, Tosca, and Madama Butterfly. Sadly, Giacosa's death in 1906 brought this fruitful collaboration to an...