Madame Butterfly by Puccini, De (2022/2023), Dirigido por Alexei Stepanuyk,, Regente Mikhail Granovsky, Konstantin Chudovsky, Alexey Bogorad, Ekaterinburg Opera, Ekaterinburg, Rússia

In Japanese tragedy, as Giacomo Puccini defined the genre of his opera Madama Butterfly, West and East meet. American lieutenant Pinkerton becomes engaged to a geisha, but soon sails from Japan and returns there with an American wife: foreign marriages are not valid in the United States. It was no coincidence that the Italian Puccini turned to this topic: at that time, Europe was experiencing another wave of enthusiasm for the East. In the 1850s, Japan opens the border after two centuries of isolation. At the World Exhibitions in Paris and London, Japanese prints and graphics are shown - they are imitated by Monet, Cezanne and Van Gogh; free-cut women's dresses like a kimono are in fashion; the interiors are filled with paper lanterns, vases and Japanese-style screens. This is how Madama Butterfly appeared: it combined Italian sensibility and oriental restraint, European operatic scope and oriental striving for chamber form. The genre of the performance at the Ural Opera can be defined as an expectation opera: the external action is devoid of fuss, attention is focused on the internal action - the expectation of the imminent return of Pinkerton - and together with the heroes of the opera, the audience gazes and listens intently to what is happening, afraid to miss this return. Directed by Aleksey Stepanyuk, following the author's genre subtitle, with all the scrupulousness and psychological depth, he builds a tragedy on the stage - a global tragedy of the end of traditional Japanese culture and a personal one - the naive and selfless Cio-Cio-San.