Madama Butterfly: Parsing Butterfly's entrance aria

Cio-Cio-san dominates Puccini's Madama Butterfly as few other characters dominate their operas. Pinkerton has no stand-alone arias (Sharpless always chimes in). All other characters are limited to ensembles or dialogue.

Photo by Rod Millington.
Florida Grand Opera [CC BY 2.0
(https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)]

My next three posts will examine three of Butterfly's big solo moments in some detail for musical - and extra-musical - features of interest. First up: her entrance music, "Ancora un passo or via" (heard here with Leontyne Price).

Her entrance is announced by the marriage broker Goro, whose lines are set to the first appearance of an authentic Japanese song, one of ten such native melodies Puccini incorporated into his score. It's a humorous patter song called "Echigo Jishi". The reason for introducing a Japanese song at this point is clear: til now, the two Americans have had the stage largely to themselves. Their music had no Japanese character - the only musical quotation was a phrase from "The Star-Spangled Banner". The sudden introduction of Echigo Jishi puts the clash of cultures into relief.

Butterfly's entrance follows a pattern used several times by Puccini in that

• her appearance is delayed until midway into Act 1; and
• we hear her before we see her.

Mimi asks for a light for her candle from behind a closed door; Tosca calls for Mario from offstage; and Cio-Cio-san sings of her happiness offstage while climbing the steep hill to the rental house where she and Pinkerton will reside. Sometimes the pattern is flipped; in Manon Lescaut and Turandot, we see the title characters before we hear them. Either way, the effect is to heighten anticipation in the audience to "meet" the soprano lead.

I've spent the past several weeks teaching lecture classes on Butterfly for college non-credit programs. When I ask the students what kind of musical materials they expect to hear in "Ancora un passo or via", they always assume it'll be another real Japanese melody. I can't really blame them - after all, we're about to meet an entire community of citizens of Nagasaki.

However, Puccini is less concerned here with Butterfly's nationality than with her state of mind. She's marrying an American! She's all in on things Western. Thus, her solo, while it may not be specifically American in theme, is notably NOT Japanese.

Another interesting device is the use of sequence to depict both her physical activity and her emotional state. "Sequence" is a music term used when a musical motive is repeated in either ascending or descending motion. Think of "Do-re-mi" from The Sound of Music", which uses rising sequences of various motives throughout.

The subject of Butterfly's solo is short and simple:

The significance of the sequential motion is two-fold:

1. She and her wedding party are climbing a steep hill! The contour of the music graphically describes their ascent. (For Virginia locals, quite a lot of Japan's geography resembles that of Charlottesville. The hills, not quite mountains, are of comparable size.) This idea is repeated five times in a rising sequence from A flat to E flat before finally introducing a new theme in the key of G flat, generally considered Butterfly's "love theme".
   
   
2. Also rising in Cio-Cio-san, of course, are her hopes and dreams. With every passo (step), her joyful anticipation increases. She claims to be the happiest girl not just in Japan, but in the whole world.

And now another note on how to process this aria, this time drawing on Puccini's personal life. His marriage to Elvira, a woman he impregnated while she was married to another man, was not a happy one. She wasn't musical; she resented other women's attraction to her husband; eventually this resulted in a messy and sensational scandal.

Although the composer had real-life dalliances with various females, it was in the Pygmalion-like feelings he had for Mimi, Tosca, and especially Cio-Cio-san that he found the best escape from the reality of his domestic situation. He truly fell in love with his female characters, creating variations of "the perfect woman" over and over.

It seems clear that "Ancora un passo or via" is intended to make us fall in love with Butterfly just as Puccini did. The music is impossibly feminine, delicate and exotic. The chorus of female voices supporting the solo vocal line creates an angelic cloud of sound. It's .... heavenly. Here was a woman who would never be jealous, always desirable, always eager to please; the perfect fantasy "escape valve" for Puccini's troubled love life.

The aria ends with an orchestral postlude that doesn't restate the main theme (as happens in "Un bel di"), but introduces a new theme:

Plunk it out on the piano or whistle it. Sounds Japanese, right? Which would you guess: from the Edo period, or after the Meiji Restoration?

Surprise! Puccini made it up. It's no authentic native melody; it's original. Yet it's clearly meant to suggest musical Orientalism: a mostly pentatonic tune avoiding smooth Italian step-wise motion. I call this theme "Butterfly's faith". In other words, it's the symbol of her child-like faith in Pinkerton. It will recur at key points when that faith is made manifest:

• just prior to the wedding ceremony when she shyly tells Pinkerton that she is adopting his Christian religion; and
• in the Intermezzo, the musical chronicle of her all-night vigil once Pinkerton's ship has returned to Nagasaki. Here it's heard in the "dawn" section in a high-spirited rapid version, replete with the notorious bird-calls that contributed to the opera's catastrophic world premiere.

Final bit of trivia: at the end of "Ancora un passo or via", Butterfly announces her groom's name to her bridal party. His full name, of course, is Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton. Yet generations of sopranos have placidly sung "F. B. Pinkerton" at that moment. Want to know why?

The lieutenant's name was originally Francis Blummy Pinkerton, which is wrong! All wrong! "Francis Blummy" sounds not only British, but bloodlessly effete British. Pinkerton is all-American, my friend. So the decision was made to find a name more fitting for a "yankee vagabondo".

However, in the first printed edition by Ricordi and Sons, the change didn't make it into the text. So Freni, Tebaldi, and many others have sung the wrong initials  for the mind-boggling reason that "F. B. Pinkerton" is what it says in their vocal scores. I'm not making this up.

Next post: the iconic aria "Un bel di".