Friday 21 June will be staged at Teatro La Fenice in Venice "Madama Butterfly", Japanese tragedy in two acts by Giacomo Puccini with a libretto by Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica (based on the story of the same name by John Luther Long and the tragedy of the same name by David Belasco). The opera was staged for the first time at the Teatro alla Scala on 17 February 1904 and was reworked several times by the author in the following years. The work was proposed in the definitive version and published in the printed score of 1907, proposed in French in Paris in 1906 and in Italian in New York in 1907.
Puccini's masterpiece will be presented at the Teatro La Fenice in a new staging of great artistic interest, which will form part, as a special project, of the 55th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, with two series of performances in June and October, in start and end of the show. Sets and costumes will be entrusted to Mariko Mori, one of the most interesting contemporary Japanese artists, author of installations inspired by the intersection between the ancient Japanese cultural tradition and the most sophisticated contemporary technological means as well as the profound balance between man and nature. Using avant-garde materials, multimedia tools and 3D modeling and printing techniques and making use of the very original "head design by milliner by Kamo", Mariko Mori will propose a scenic container and a set of costumes and accessories of unusual visual impact, which will allow develop in an unprecedented way the crucial encounter between East and West which is the basis of Puccini's work.
The direction of the show will be entrusted to the Spanish director Àlex Rigola, for many years artistic director of the innovative Teatre Lliure in Barcelona and since 2010 director of the Theater section of the Venice Biennale, who will be joined by the light designer Albert Faura and the dancers Inma Asensio, Elia Lopez Gonzalez and Sau-Ching Wong.
From a musical point of view, the concertation of Puccini's score will be the work of the Israeli conductor Omer Meir Wellber, already applauded last year at the Fenice in Carmen and in Elisir d'amore, who will conduct all the performances except those of 23 and 27 June entrusted to Giacomo Sagripanti. The Orchestra of the Teatro La Fenice and the Choir conducted by Claudio Marino Moretti will accompany the double cast in which the sopranos Amarilli Nizza and Svetlana Kasyan will alternate in the role of Cio-Cio-San, the mezzo-sopranos Manuela Custer and Rossana Rinaldi in that of Suzuki , the tenors Andeka Gorrotxategui and Giuseppe Varano in that of Pinkerton, the baritones Vladimir Stoyanov and Elia Fabbian in that of Sharpless; Julie Mellor will be Suzuki, Nicola Pamio the nakodo Goro, William Corrò the prince Yamadori, Riccardo Ferrari the bonze uncle. In the minor roles of Yakusidé, the imperial commissioner, the registry officer, the mother of Cio-Cio-San, the aunt and the cousin, the artists of the Chorus of the Teatro La Fenice will take turns Ciro Passilongo, Bo Schunetton, Emanuele Pedrini, Nicola Nalesso, Enzo Borghetti, Marco Rumori, Misuzu Ozawa, Manuela Marchetto, Marta Codognola, Emanuela Conti, Sabrina Mazzamuto and Eleonora Marzaro.
The premiere on Friday 21 June will be followed by 8 consecutive performances, Saturday 22 (round C) and Sunday 23 (round B) at 17.00, Tuesday 25 (round D), Wednesday 26 (non-subscription), Thursday 27 (round E), Friday 28 (non-subscription), Saturday 20 (non-subscription) and Sunday 30 (non-subscription) at 19.00. The evening of Saturday 29 June is part of the initiatives "La Fenice for the city" and "La Fenice for the province" aimed at residents of the municipality and province of Venice, in collaboration with the Municipalities of the Municipality of Venice and with the provincial administration .
Welcomed by the audience of the Scala in Milan with boos and laughter, Madama Butterfly was dragged to her inauspicious debut (February 17, 1904) by an unfortunate invention of Tito Ricordi, who wanted to "color the picture with greater suggestion" by scattering some employees in the gallery "with special musically tuned whistles. It didn't seem real to the shouters to take advantage of it”. By now it is clear that the fiasco was due to a claque, probably sent by Sonzogno, Ricordi's rival publisher- impresario. Puccini's faith in his creation, however, did not waver, and he obtained a striking confirmation with the great success smiled at Madama Butterfly starting from the revival of May 28, 1904 at the Teatro Grande in Brescia (a success that has never failed since), so much so that conquer in a very short time to this masterpiece the rank of classic of musical theatre.
Four years before the inauspicious debut in Milan, during the summer of 1900, Puccini had attended a performance of a drama with a similar subject in London that David Belasco had taken from a novel by the New York lawyer John Luther Long, changing its ending from happy to tragic. His theatrical flair had made him recognize in the protagonist Cio-Cio-San a fascinating character, whose characterization was singularly adapted to his inclinations as a composer: at the hands of the trusted Illica and Giacosa the work was totally centered on the protagonist, around whom the other characters were rotated. Refined timbral alchemies and continuous references to oriental musical models (the use of defective scales or heterodox harmonic procedures emerges) accompany the psychological journey of the fragile geisha from the initial ingenuity to doubt and the painful final resignation with extraordinary sensitivity and delicacy, so much so that of the most humanly and finely characterized characters in the entire history of melodrama.
Madama Butterfly is also an act of condemnation against the obtuse and barbaric violence of the so-called Western civilization, against its sadism, its superficiality, its cynicism, its unfounded sense of superiority. Light years away from an easy and sterile orientalist oleography, it forcefully places the theme of the contrast between cultures of which the protagonist is the victim, focusing on it (on a naive and naïve little Japanese girl) the psychological investigation, with results that can only be compared in the most inwardly rich female figures (Violetta, Tat'jana...) in the history of melodrama.
Of great importance is the musical style of the work, which does not avoid linguistic contaminations of the most daring: alongside the already mentioned influence of Japanese music, which takes shape above all in the frequent use of the five-tone scale, elements of the cultured Western tradition converge (the fugato, Wagnerian echoes, references to Massenet, reminiscences from Bohème and Tosca, but also the scale for whole tones and other oriental modalisms derived from Russian music) and that of use (the anthem of the US navy, today the national anthem American): an extremely ductile mélange of models that allows on the one hand various combinatorial possibilities in the invention of sound, such as to guarantee the continuous adherence of music to the action or its profound dramaturgical significance, and on the other a continuous reinvention of the sound that avoids the deterioration of language into an aestheticizing orientalist cliché, whose mannerism would have miserably trivialized the authenticity of Butterfly's human story.
mariko mori
Internationally recognized artist, whose works can be found in museums and private collections around the world, Mariko Mori achieved international fame with the Wave UFO installation presented at the Kunsthaus Bregenz in 2003 and subsequently exhibited in New York, Genoa and the Venice Biennale 2005. He has received numerous awards, including the Honorable Mention at the 47th Venice Biennale for Nirvana (1997), and the 2001 Japan Cultural Arts Foundation Award for Contemporary Japanese Art. Oneness, a retrospective of her work, was presented in Groningen, Aarhus, Kiev, Brasilia, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. Her recent large sculptures include Tom Na H-iu (2006) and Plant Opal (2009): both are based on elements that interact with the natural environment. You are currently working on the Primal Rhythm project, a monumental permanent installation closely linked to the landscape of Seven Light Bay on Miyako Island in Okinawa Prefecture. Her current focus is on a world in which humans are one with nature, and in which the pace of human life moves in accord with that of the natural environment. Her projects aim to make this need flash in our consciousness and to celebrate the balance that exists in nature. An idea that is reflected in the themes of life, death, rebirth, and the universe. His often monumental installations have been exhibited in prestigious venues around the world, including the Royal Academy of Arts and the Serpentine Gallery in London, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, the Center Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Prada Foundation in Milan, the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and his works have become part of the Guggenheim collections, among others Museum and MoMA in New York and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. She lives between London, New York and Tokyo.
