True Left

For those unfamiliar, Madama Butterfly is the story of a 15-year-old Japanese geisha named Cio-Cio-San. She marries an American naval officer named Pinkerton, who takes advantage of a law that allows him to temporarily marry her. Pinkerton returns to America shortly after their union. In her infantile innocence (musically represented by simplistic melodies that also symbolize the “Orient”) Cio-Cio-San believes Pinkerton’s deceptive promise to return. Eventually, after three years, he does — with his “real” American wife Kate. They want to take the son Cio-Cio-San birthed after Pinkerton left and give the child a “proper” American upbringing. Unable to live without Pinkerton, Cio-Cio-San kills herself.

Orientalist operas like these remain exceedingly popular in the United States. Many find them to be a space of beauty or escape. Yet, as an Asian American woman, I can’t help but associate them with violence and dehumanization. For nearly two centuries before the current rise of anti-Asian violence in America, our opera culture has glorified violence against, and profited from the objectification of Asian women.

To earn my living as a professor of music, I find myself in the absurd position of having to teach this material. Orientalist operas are included in every major introductory college music history textbook, where their musical contributions are uncritically lauded. Of the five textbooks I’ve used over the years, only one bothered to give the issue of Orientalism any serious critical consideration.
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The most nefarious forms of Orientalism arose in the latter part of the 19th century. The great composers and rising stars of opera including Verdi, Puccini and Bizet created works like “Aida,” “Madama Butterfly” and “Carmen.” These productions featured lurid treatments of sex, violence and opulence that would have been considered offensive if they depicted European women in a European setting.

Reports of scandal and brilliance fueled the public’s desires to see these Orientalist spectacles for themselves. And American demand for these works has remained consistent ever since. The repertory report of the Metropolitan Opera, America’s oldest and most established opera house, shows that Verdi’s “Aida,” set in ancient Egypt, has been staged 1,175 times. After Puccini’s “La Bohème,” it is the second-most performed opera since the company’s founding in 1883. “Carmen” comes in fourth with 1,023 performances, and “Madama Butterfly” eighth, with 891. At the Met, these works are an essential part of a venture that drew $120 million in operating revenue last year — even during COVID-19.
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I’ve long loathed having to teach these operas. But now, amid the tragic and abhorrent rise in anti-Asian violence, I find it impossible to look at the students in my class and explain that the “Oriental” woman’s role in opera is to die. That her death is essential to ensuring the tormented, tempted male tenor-hero, unable to resist her exotic allure, will be redeemed. That these are important musical conventions worthy of study.

In Bizet’s Carmen, the naïve but “good” hero Don José cannot resist the seductive power of the Romani woman Carmen. So, he kills her to destroy his temptation.

Some redemption!

These Orientalist narratives are so trite it’s shocking that anyone would take them seriously. Yet they map directly onto the narrative of “sexual addiction” that the Atlanta shooter offered, and that many Americans — including the police who investigated the shooter — readily accepted.

My students deserve better. And they know it.

In the days that followed the Atlanta shooting, my class shifted gears. Opera, and the history of Western classical music, is a story. We talked about who gets to tell the story, for whose sake, and at what costs? The students have their own questions — about musical debts, and about their future roles in shaping musical institutions.

My class recently finished its survey course textbook. That story has been told. For my students, it’s about the choices they will now make, and the new chapters they get to write. Who gets to have agency, and who must stay an archetype of sacrifice and victimhood? Freed from bigoted tropes, who could Cio-Cio-San have become, how could she have changed the world and what stories would she want to pass on to us?