I’m just back from Lebanon (that would be Lebanon, New Hampshire) where I heard a performance of Puccini’s Madame Butterfly. If you pay no mind to the ridiculous racist orientalist anti-American story, it’s a pretty good opera. The orchestra, though small, was excellent and the singers top-notch. The music is a little on the overwrought side, and the garish emotional display makes Dostoevsky seem in comparison like drawing-room comedy. It’s a sad, dated story. While Emma Bovary found the solution to her problem in arsenic, Anna Karenina in the locomotive and Edna Pontellier in the water, Cio-cio-san elects the knife — more evidence, if more is needed, for women’s paucity of choices in the grand old days. But great melodies, no question. The opera crowd was, as usual, a little on the geriatric side — and as a consequence I felt quite youthful bounding up to the balcony. At breakfast the next day, a friend admitted to being moved by Cio-cio-san’s suffering. "Did you cry," I asked. His reply: "I’m not saying."
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