Madama Butterfly

After Aix-en-Provence and Lyon, Andrea Breth's picture-perfect Madama Butterfly production can be seen at the Komische Oper Berlin — and shouldn't leave an eye dry here either. It was not for nothing that Puccini described his masterpiece as the “most sentimental opera I've ever written.”

The young geisha Cio-Cio-San aka “Butterfly” is married to the American naval officer Pinkerton: For him, the whole thing is an “exotic” adventure; for Butterfly, marriage means everything — an end to poverty, a bright future, a new life as a mother. While the reckless dandy quickly leaves Japan to find a “right” wife in his home country, the unsuspecting butterfly and their child await the return of their lover. After three years, Pinkerton is actually just around the corner: With his new wife, he now also wants to take the child away from Butterfly. When the Japanese woman finally realizes the truth, she sees only one way out for herself: death!

Puccini's world-famous opera about the tragic love between a hopeful Japanese woman and a decadent American has not lost its strength to this day. The clarity with which the composer questions the West's colonial recklessness was certainly bold at the beginning of the 20th century. While Pinkerton plays Puccini's most unsympathetic tenor role, his eponymous heroine undergoes perhaps the biggest development of all his opera characters — from geisha to virtuous wife to single mother to suicide.

The master of psychological realism Andrea Breth surprises in her presentation with a painterly aesthetic. Kimonos, cherry blossoms and cranes are used atmospherically when people are quietly guided and focus entirely on the essentials: the figures.

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