from Part VI - Puccini through a Political Lens
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 August 2023
This chapter examines the representation of race in Madama Butterfly and Turandot and the controversies that surround the performance of these works today. It shows how casting, design, and other elements in contemporary productions of the two operas become entangled with the fraught racial politics inherent in their scores and librettos. The chapter makes a particular note of the participation of musicians, directors, set designers, costume designers, and critics of Asian descent whose active presence adds an additional layer of complexity to the discussion. Madama Butterfly began to be discussed in Japan soon after its première and by the mid-twentieth century companies were beginning to seek out experts from Japan to lend enhanced cultural credence of their productions. More recent productions, however, have moved away from striving for ‘authenticity’ and begun to re-envision Puccini’s text in radical ways. Productions of Turandot have either staged the opera in authentically Chinese fashion or drawn on the abstract modernist impulses inherent in the work. Chinese audiences have been far less exposed to the work and Chinese artists less involved in its rethinking, at least until the late twentieth century. The advent of social media has broadened the questioning of the ethics of these works.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.