Book Review
Madame Butterfly:
Japonisme, Puccini, and the Search for the Real
Cho-Cho-San
Madame Butterfly: Japonisme, Puccini, and the Search for the Real Cho-Cho-San. Jan van Rij. Berkeley, Calif.: Stone Bridge Press, 2001. 191 pages, $24.95.
In Madame Butterfly Jan van Rij has produced a pleasingly original study that investigates the sources and background of the story used in Puccini's opera. Few readers could anticipate the range of topics that fall within van Rij's purview; his method gathers "so many intakes from so many sides with such different histories finally all converging into the one complex organic entity of Puccini's great opera" (pp. 13-14). This approach moves surefootedly from broad geopolitical and cultural trends to individual family histories, from minor prose fiction and theater pieces to the immediate course of Madama Butterfly's own creation. These varied concerns are ordered with intellectual balance and tact such as one might expect from an author who is by calling a diplomat. (Van Rij has represented the European Union in Tokyo.)
The primary incidents and personal relations the book deals with--be they historical or fictional happenings--take place in Nagasaki, a port city that fostered Western intrusions into Japanese life during the late nineteenth century. More than the expansion of commerce was involved here. An American popular song from the 1920s gives a Western picture of the situation at its crudest level: "Back in Nagasaki where the fellers chew tobaccy / And the women wicky wacky woo. / The way they can entertain / Would hurry a hurricane . . . / They kissee and hugee nice. / By jingo! It's worth the price." 1 Lieutenant B. F. Pinkerton operates more formally and on a higher plane, but his marital arrangement with Cio-Cio-San rests on an officer-class version of this very attitude toward Japanese women. Steering clear of reductive generalizations like this one, van [End Page 72] Rij concentrates on several real-life liaisons between European or American men and Nagasaki women with an eye to their relevance to the opera plot. Unconnected with the opera except as a prototype of sorts is the case of Philip Franz von Siebold. As a physician in the employ of the Dutch government, he lived from 1823 to 1830 in Nagasaki. Thereafter he divided his time between Germany and Japan, marrying and fathering children in both countries. Largely through his scientific writings, the life of this highly placed professional gentleman "naturally aroused interest and curiosity in Europe and America and even in Japan" (p. 24). However, only subsequent East-West liaisons advanced directly toward the making of Madama Butterfly.
A link between the literary-artistic world and the actual one was provided by Pierre Loti's novel Madame Chrysanthème. This novel, published in 1887, transformed into fiction what had been Loti's transient relations, during his service as a lieutenant in the French navy, with a Nagasaki woman. Events first detailed in Loti's novel later found a place in two works titled Madame Butterfly, John Luther Long's extended short story and the stage adaptation of this tale made by him and David Belasco. Their appropriations from Loti are well recognized in the existing scholarly literature, but van Rij goes also in a different direction by showing "Long's amazingly accurate knowledge of Japanese life, customs, and history" (p. 70), though the Philadelphia author had seen nothing of Japan.
These literary works, both the French and the American, appear in two contexts. On the one hand, they arise against a background of nineteenth-century Japonisme, that is, the widespread infusing of Japanese techniques and principles of design into Western painting, sculpture, architecture, and even music. Van Rij explains how this art movement affected several French operas and through them touched Puccini's Madama Butterfly. André Messager's light opera Madame Chrysanthème makes a notable example here, for it was, as its title indicates, an adaptation of Loti's novel. The second context is the collaborative procedures through which Puccini's librettists shaped the Loti, Long, and Belasco materials to suit the composer. Of course, the give and take between the composer and the librettists along with the later revisions of the opera have been covered in earlier publications; 2 here these topics are folded in with a brief account of Puccini's concurrent personal situation and of his "psychological underpinnings." At the close of this chapter, the longest in the book, van Rij explains the strong points of Madama Butterfly in its Paris (1906) form.
The following chapter returns to historical Nagasaki. The move is necessitated by the author's determination to discover support for the idea that Cio-Cio-San and her unhappy experiences as "wife" and mother had a specific real-life model. John Luther Long knew of happenings in Japan through his sister, who lived in Nagasaki for five years; "later on, Long and his sister admitted the existence of real persons behind the story" (p. 172). Using the scattered evidence that has pointed others in the same direction, van Rij not only accepts that Thomas A. Glover (Guraba Tomisaburo, 1870-1945) was the opera's young Dolore but unearths a wealth of probative information from newspapers, [End Page 73] official records, family registers, and the like that bolsters his argument. He displays an assured understanding of life in Nagasaki's "mixed world of Japanese and foreigners" (p. 145), even drawing on cartographical knowledge to locate exactly where certain individuals lived. Most importantly, the identity of Tomisaburo's mother is firmly fixed, while the likely father is shown to be one of two Glover brothers. 3 All told, the chapter comprises a tour de force of persuasion.
Next comes a discussion of "Madama Butterfly in Japan," in which we learn that the Japanese did not take the opera to their hearts despite the fame being achieved by the soprano Miura Tamaki in Europe and the United States; to the Japanese it is totally alien to trust "that a woman's love can become a force that will save her from her fate" (p. 149). Finally, in the book's afterword, van Rij reverts to earlier subjects--first to the nature of Puccini's opera and then to actual events in Nagasaki. He starts his conclusion by diagnosing a "substantive weakness" in the libretto: "Certainly, Butterfly's personality is as attractive as it is dignified but her misperception of reality is unbelievably naive" (p. 153). As for reality, the ill-fated later years of Tomisaburo are recounted; during the chaotic days following the atomic bomb attack on his home city, the elderly Tom Glover took his own life.
Van Rij demonstrates his skills not only in what his book contains but also in what it omits. Musical analysis of Madama Butterfly is forgone, with a deferential nod toward the Puccini studies by Mosco Carner and William Ashbrook. A sign that the author's decision was prudent comes when he writes of Saint-Saëns's La princesse jaune: "The music in some places uses pentatonic scales, apparently for the first time ever in European music" (p. 46). In fact, several well-known composers had gone down this road before Saint-Saëns.
Inevitably, the book contains some tiny, possibly typographic errors
(e.g., 1866 for 1869 as the year in which Judith Gautier first visited
Richard and Cosima Wagner [p. 49]; more amusingly, Elgar for
Puccini's Edgar [p. 80]). But offsetting these flaws a
hundredfold are positive features. The text of the volume is invitingly
short and the design is handily small, with pages measuring about 7 X
51/4 inches. Enhancing its substance and appearance alike is a
handsome collection of photographs, many of which tellingly evoke the
lifestyle of the foreign colony in nineteenth-century Nagasaki. Other
ancillary features--thirteen pages of endnotes, a tabular chronology,
a map of pre-1900 Nagasaki, and two diagrams charting influences on
Madama Butterfly--are deployed to good effect. Lastly,
the preface and the bibliography, taken together, evidence van Rij's
dedicated search for obscure yet highly pertinent information. So overall,
this Madame Butterfly is a rare publication indeed--a thoroughly
serious book that is not only free of all pedantry but absorbing and
entertaining as well.
Christopher Hatch
Christopher Hatch, former editor, The Musical Quarterly; former book review editor, The Opera Quarterly
Notes
1. From Nagasaki, words by Mort Dixon, music by Harry Warren, copyright 1928 by Remick Music Corp., New York.
2. Van Rij's statement that "there is no reason to believe that the initial consulate scene was the original act 2 of Illica's draft" puts him at odds with other writers. See William Ashbrook, The Operas of Puccini, 2d ed. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 100; Arthur Groos, "Lieutenant F. B. Pinkerton: Problems in the Genesis and Performance of Madama Butterfly," in The Puccini Companion, ed. William Weaver and Simonetta Puccini (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), p. 186.
3. A third brother, Thomas Blake Glover, was Tomisaburo's adoptive father. This Scottish merchant, who became a prominent Nagasaki businessman, sometimes helped Japanese young men to travel to England. Tomisaburo himself visited both Britain and America.
