Mme Butterfly

The One Man Opera


The Marlborough,

Princes Street,

Brighton,

Thursday, June 5-7

 

Ever since he first saw Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, opera singer Ignacio Jarquin has wondered what could have happened to the orphan who remains in the final scene.

Now the former music director of Brighton Gay Men’s Chorus has answered that question.

“Mme Butterfly is a follow-up of what happened to the child who remains on stage in Puccini, with his mother having killed herself on one side and his father running away on the other,” explains Jarquin, a Mexican who trained at the Vienna Conservatory and Conservatoire National de Musique et de Danse in Paris.

“The finale of Madame Butterfly naturally created this question in me because this is another drama waiting to happen.”

His one-man opera, made in the Japanese Noh theatre style with the help of contemporary composers including Michael Finnissy and librettist Andrew G Marshall, picks up Puccini’s opera 30 years on.

Tomisaburo’s father Pinkerton is back in America and running for re-election as governor of Georgia. He decides the time has come to find his father after his mother’s servant, Suzuki, confesses his whereabouts. “She raised him like her own child and confesses to him that his father is in America. That triggers a desire to cross the sea and go to see his father. Being mixed race, his life is miserable knowing that he has a father and that is a motivation to leave Japan behind and seek a new life.”

Over in America, Pinkerton, as governor in Atlanta, is in the middle of a crisis.

The last thing his people want is the governor to meet his illegal mixed-race son because he is campaigning on a bill of purity of race and Christian family values.

Nor do his people want Tomisaburo hanging around outside his father’s mansion.

“He is trapped somewhere between meeting his father and accomplishing his dream. He is caught between being Japanese and American. He is caught between having a father and not having father, between being a child and an adult.”

Pinkerton, a former naval officer, is cast as a governor “to up the stakes”, reveals Jarquin.

“He is a man who takes decisions, a man who creates values, a man voted to represent everyone, so he couldn't be more flawed as a character given we know his past.”

Depression-era America The setting, 1930s depression-era America, is another key element.

“It is a similar socio-historical situation as we have today. There are all these problems with new commerce, with the Japanese, Chinese and Mexicans coming to America, and although at that precise point there is still bit of respite, in a couple of years there are going to be laws to send these people to concentration camps.”

Traditional Japanese storytelling, with dance and masks, lends the piece “spiritual, otherworldly layers”.

“The ghost of butterfly is present as well. She appears and there are Noh-inspired dances.”

Finnissy wrote the score with themes and motifs from Puccini which link to the original.

“Someone who knows the opera will recognise those but obviously this was written with its own vocabulary.”

Jarquin is performing the show alone because he wants to see how far he can “stretch opera”.

“It’s about keeping all its elements – the dramatic storyline, the dramatic expression, the singing, the music – and looking how much can you stretch those and peel them down and it still be opera.”