Lessons in refrigeration

There is no such thing as a moderately good performance of Madama Butterfly, or, to be more precise, it’s not possible to be slightly or rather moved by a performance. As with some of Shakespeare’s plays, and most of Wagner’s music-dramas, one is either shaken and overcome, or refrigerated and indifferent. So it’s sad to report that Glyndebourne’s first ever Butterfly, toured in 2016 but now settling on home ground, is a stolid, undistinguished affair, with some decent moments and much that seems routine and a fair amount that is worse than that.

Is it a good idea to update an opera that is set in Nagasaki to the 1950s, when the city was still reeling from the effects of the second atom bomb? Goro’s office and the tattoo parlour opposite seem to have survived; anyway, the office is where Act One is located, making a nonsense of the opening exchanges between Pinkerton and Goro, as well as introducing an element of sleaze that is the opposite of what Puccini intended. The love duet that closes Act One, the composer’s most lovely and tumescent music, should entrance us, while its closing bars should carry a faint but painful warning of the privations and misery ahead. None of that happened at Glyndebourne.

Musically, the main blame for that must fall on the conductor Omer Meir Wellber, whose tempi in Act One were all so leisurely that I wondered whether Pinkerton would ever be granted his night of love. Butterfly’s entry, in particular, the first magical moment in the opera, was both absurdly prolonged and her voice so distant that she was merely not there until suddenly she was. But each silence — there are many in Act One, signalling embarrassment, hesitancy, expectation, change of emotional direction — was merely inert, achieving the opposite of the intended effect.