When Japanese audiences encountered Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly”—a sumptuous Italianate treatment of a geisha’s doomed love for an American naval officer—they found it implausible, insulting, and riotously funny. In 1925, two decades after the opera’s première, the Japan Times reported “screams of hearty laughter” as spectators took in the posturings of a touring foreign troupe. Puccini’s habit of citing popular Japanese songs did not help matters. As Arthur Groos points out in “Madama Butterfly/ Madamu Batafurai,” a new book about the opera’s Japanese sources and reception, the composer ignored advice about how to use his material appropriately. When Suzuki, Butterfly’s maid, prays at an alleged Buddhist shrine, she sings to the tune of “Takai Yama,” a song that extols cucumbers and eggplants. Furthermore, she garbles the names of Shinto gods, who don’t belong in a Buddhist setting to begin with. It’s similar, Groos writes, to “having a Catholic pray to Adam and Eve in front of a menorah.”
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der October 30, 2023-Ausgabe von The New Yorker.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der October 30, 2023-Ausgabe von The New Yorker.
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ART OF STONE
\"The Brutalist.\"
MOMMA MIA
Audra McDonald triumphs in \"Gypsy\" on Broadway.
INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
\"Black Doves,\" on Netflix.
NATURE STUDIES
Kyle Abraham's “Dear Lord, Make Me Beautiful.”
WHAT GOOD IS MORALITY?
Ask not just where it came from but what it does for us
THE SPOTIFY SYNDROME
What is the world's largest music-streaming platform really costing us?
THE LEPER - LEE CHANGDONG
. . . to survive, to hang on, waiting for the new world to dawn, what can you do but become a leper nobody in the world would deign to touch? - From \"Windy Evening,\" by Kim Seong-dong.
YOU WON'T GET FREE OF IT
Alice Munro's partner sexually abused her daughter. The harm ran through the work and the family.
TALK SENSE
How much sway does our language have over our thinking?
TO THE DETECTIVE INVESTIGATING MY MURDER
Dear Detective, I'm not dead, but a lot of people can't stand me. What I mean is that breathing is not an activity they want me to keep doing. What I mean is, they want to knock me off. My days are numbered.