Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly

with
Angela Gheorghiu
as Cio-Cio San

Madama Butterfly

EMI Classics, 5099926418728
The opera’s well-known story maps a clash of cultures, the most tragic misunderstanding. An American sailor stationed in Nagasaki at the turn of the 20th century amuses himself with a temporary ‘marriage’ to a 15-year-old local girl. She, however, falls deeply in love, even giving up her religion and family for him. After a couple of months he sails away, leaving her pregnant. She bears his child and spends the next three years waiting patiently for him to come back to her. But the sailor has married a ‘real’ American wife and when he returns to Nagasaki to claim his son, the girl kills herself. In Puccini’s hands this sad tale becomes an epic tragedy. Through the glorious music he lavishes on her, Cio-Cio San is transformed into the composer’s greatest and most fleshed-out heroine, the most challenging of his soprano roles, vocally and psychologically.
An excellent review by Jon Tolansky can be read below.

Soprano Angela Gheorghiu, born and educated in Romania, has been called ‘the world’s most glamorous opera star’. She made her international debut in 1992 at London’s Royal Opera House in ‘La Boheme’, followed by debuts at New York’s Metropolitan Opera and the Vienna State Opera. Two years later she performed her first Violetta in ‘La Traviata’, also at Covent Garden, shown live by the BBC. Ms. Gheorghiu has performed in the world’s most famous opera houses ever since. An exclusive EMI Classics recording artist for the last decade, Angela Gheorghiu has recorded a variety of CDs and DVDs, including performances with her husband, Roberto Alagna.

For full biographies of the performers, as well as podcasts, photos, video and other features, please visit the Madama Butterfly dedicated website on www.emibutterfly.com

‘Madama Butterfly’ is released on 2 March 2009 in all good classical music shops and on the internet. You can pre-order it now from Amazon.co.uk, HMV.com and Play.com. Prices start from £11.98.

Angela Gheorghiu as Madama Butterfly – A Landmark New Recording

As the classical music world celebrates the 150th anniversary year of the birth of the great Giacomo Puccini, one of the most eagerly awaited recordings of recent years is released by EMI Classics. The virtuoso soprano Angela Gheorghiu, one of the most acclaimed opera artists of our time and one of the very finest and most magnificent singers in history, brings to life the role of Madama Butterfly in what many feel is the composer’s most powerfully human and inspired creation. It is a landmark new recording, because it is the first version of Madama Butterfly to appear on EMI Classics for over 40 years, and it is one of the very few new complete opera recordings to have been initiated anywhere in recent years, as necessary budgets are no longer available as they used to be.

Despite the harrowing story of Madama Butterfly, evoked by Puccini in music of searing intensity and realism, the opera has long been one of the most famously popular in the repertoire: one that people have felt they can personally relate to across generations, and across continents. Substantial numbers of performers and audiences, and not only connoisseur music lovers but also people who are only relatively casually acquainted with classical music, are particularly moved by it, feeling a deep empathy with the way Puccini evokes Butterfly’s personality and unfolds her chilling tragedy.

Butterfly – her real name is in fact Cio-Cio San – is a fifteen year old Japanese geisha girl living in Nagasaki, and she marries a dashing young Lieutenant in the American Navy – Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton, who has come to Japan on business. She is deeply in love with him – and she has not the remotest idea that he has no intention of remaining her husband. He has only bought her for the so-called arranged Japanese marriage that was brokered for wealthy travelling people like him in those days – a local geisha wife for whenever they happened to be visiting. And he has never understood that in this case, his beautiful little toy, as he refers to her once, has fallen so devotedly in love with him that she has not only given up her life as a geisha, but she has also done something almost unheard of: she has renounced her religious faith, and therefore all her family ties, because she has taken on his faith. At the time that this story, based on a real event, took place, in the last part of the 19th Century, the consequences of that were that she was totally abandoned by her family and friends. After their wedding night, Pinkerton sails away promising he will return “when the robins nest”. And Butterfly then waits – and waits. After three years she is still convinced that he will return after his travels. And finally he does – but not to come back to her at all. He has married an American wife back home, and he and his real wife are making just a short business stop over in Nagasaki. And there is yet even worse to come. Only at the moment of their arrival do they learn that a child, a boy, was born to Madama Butterfly from the union of love she and her so-called husband shared on their wedding night, all that time ago. There is no future for the child with a penniless, abandoned mother and no father in Japan, and so they wish to claim him and take him back to America. Madama Butterfly agrees – and commits suicide.

The work presents a huge technical, artistic and psychological challenge to the soprano taking the title role. She has to conjure up an idealistic 15 year old girl becoming a formidable, intrepid woman as, against all the odds and the misgivings of the very few people she still sees, she defends her belief in her husband’s fidelity – which is only to be horribly shattered in the end. Like many people of my generation, for many decades I have highly prized my classic recordings of Maria Callas, Renato Scotto and Mirella Freni singing this exceedingly demanding part. And now, for me, this new recording from Angela Gheorghiu is a tremendous triumph: a tour de force performance of vivid characterisation and immense mental power that I find the most convincing, moving and musically perfect reading I have ever heard. Together with the magnificent and meticulous conducting of Antonio Pappano, I believe Angela Gheorghiu realises the full and complete extent of Puccini’s creation – and as such it is an overwhelming experience to listen to. I have made a documentary feature on the recording for the WFMT Radio Network, and comments in it from Angela Gheorghiu and Antonio Pappano reveal their profound understanding of this masterwork.

“For me”, says Antonio Pappano, “the most important point is that you see the journey of this young girl becoming, through her suffering and through her longing, magnificent and majestic and a towering moral figure. For me she is Puccini’s greatest creation”.

And Angela Gheorghiu remarks, “It is of course about a conflict between two completely different mentalities that once existed in two nations – Japan and the United States – but at the same time things happen exactly like that anywhere today between a man and a woman. It can so easily happen in our lives that two people do not have the same level of love between each other at the same time. We all know that sometimes a woman receives love from a man for just a short period of time – maybe even just a day – and sometimes it can be a man who has the same experience from a woman. But, the situation becomes tragic when a woman is carrying a child from her love. She remains pregnant and her biology creates a passion in this situation that is different from a man’s. That is a woman’s fate, and she is forced to accept it. In Japan at the time that Puccini’s opera is set, it was totally against the acceptable social set-up for a mother and child to be living without the child’s father, and so on top of all Madama Butterfly’s suffering at being abandoned, she had no choice other than to take her own life. Today it is almost a la mode to be an unmarried mother, so the situation is very different – and yet, and this is the point, in Madama Butterfly Puccini is so great and so powerful that the pain of rejection Cio-Cio San feels is overwhelming to us now and always.”

In the extremely subtle balance of delicacy and drama in her performance, Angela Gheorghiu brings that devastating truth home to us with inspiration and mastery. Her marriage of vocal virtuosity and impeccable musicianship realises the true, deep reality of this timeless masterpiece – Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. It is indeed a landmark new recording. – Jon Tolansky

The new release of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly is as follows:
Angela Gheorghiu (Butterfly), Jonas Kaufman (Pinkerton), Fabio Capitanucci (Sharpless), Gregory Bonfatti (Goro), Enkelejda Shkosa (Suzuki), Raymond Aceto (The Bonze), Orchestra e Coro dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia – conductor Antonio Pappano.