Madama Butterfly/Madamu Batafurai : Transpositions of a 'Japanese Tragedy' Hardback
by Arthur (Cornell University, New York) Groos
Hardback
Description
Puccini's famous but controversial Madama Butterfly reflects a practice of 'temporary marriage' between Western men and Japanese women in nineteenth-century treaty ports.
Groos' book identifies the plot's origin in an eye-witness account and traces its transmission via John Luther Long's short story and David Belasco's play.
Archival sources, many unpublished, reveal how Puccini and his librettists imbued the opera with differing constructions of the action and its heroine.
Groos's analysis suggests how they constructed a 'contemporary' music-drama with multiple possibilities for interpreting the misalliance between a callous American naval officer and an impoverished fifteen-year-old geisha, providing a more complex understanding of the heroine's presumed 'marriage'.
As an orientalizing tragedy with a racially inflected representation of Cio-Cio-San, the opera became a lightning rod for identity politics in Japan, while also stimulating decolonizing transpositions into indigenous theatre traditions such as Bunraku puppet theatre and Takarazuka musicals.
Information
-
Only a few left - usually despatched within 24 hours
- Format:Hardback
- Pages:300 pages, Worked examples or Exercises
- Publisher:Cambridge University Press
- Publication Date:16/02/2023
- Category:
- ISBN:9781009250672
£85.00
£84.75
Information
-
Only a few left - usually despatched within 24 hours
- Format:Hardback
- Pages:300 pages, Worked examples or Exercises
- Publisher:Cambridge University Press
- Publication Date:16/02/2023
- Category:
- ISBN:9781009250672
