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Fast Chat: Anthony Minghella
2006 Newsday Q&A

by Marion Lignana Rosenberg

In recent years, the Metropolitan Opera’s opening nights have tended to be swanky but artistically lightweight affairs: acts of different operas cobbled together in the guise of galas, or revivals of familiar productions jazzed up with starrier than usual casts. This season, however—the first under general manager Peter Gelb—opens Monday with a new look at Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. The staging promises to differ radically from the bloated, tinsel-laden extravaganzas loved by the Met’s aging subscribers.

Created by Anthony Minghella, the Academy Award-winning director of The English Patient, with co-direction and choreography by his wife, Carolyn Choa, this Butterfly is highly stylized: minimalist, drenched in color, with touches of Bunraku (traditional Japanese puppetry). Tenor Marcello Giordani, who portrays Pinkerton, described the production as “a play of light and gliding shoji screens” and praised first-time opera director Minghella, saying, “It’s a positive thing that we have a film director because he brings the kind of innovative ideas that the theater needs today.”

Exhausted after a long day of rehearsals, Minghella spoke recently by phone in a caramel-lush baritone with frequent Newsday contributor Marion Lignana Rosenberg.

Novelist and critic Alessandro Baricco observed that Puccini’s career unfolded around the same time as cinema developed, and suggested that there is something cinematic about Puccini’s art. Do you agree?

Puccini is an economist, in the sense that he is driving the narrative forward at all times. For all the potentially modernist implications of film—that it reflects a dream state—and all the aspirations people held for film at its inception, it has always been driven by story. If you look at the first act of Butterfly, it’s going so fast that the audience has to catch up all the way until the love duet. And there’s Puccini’s attempt to deal with a schism in personality, which film is particularly interested in: using the close-up to tell you a character’s innermost feelings. Puccini cuts between the private and the public all the time in his writing.

Can you give an example?

Even in the middle of the marriage scene, you get this moment of going inside to look at Butterfly’s personal things. It’s so much like a film cut—a tiny two-shot after you’ve been in this wide shot.

For a director, how do opera and film differ most markedly?

As a filmmaker, I’m always the author of the film. Part of my work is to make rather than interpret. In this experience [of directing opera], my only job is to interpret. I’m simply trying to enable a wonderful piece of music theater. On a very simple level, when you are working with film, your job is to create a series of shots, which, when they are glued together in the montage, tell a story. When you are working with theater, your ingredients are the fixed stage, the fixed seat from which the audience views that stage, and performance. You have to try to direct the eye around the stage, whereas in film you use the editing process to direct the eye.

What was your starting point for the imagery of this production?

When my wife and I trained, the great heroes of the day were [theater directors] Peter Brook and Jerzy Grotowski, whose principle was “the empty stage”: this notion that the actor and the wooden stage are your language. When I reach into my sense of what’s theatrical, I go back to the duty of the director to invest and respect performance above scenery, above mechanics, above trompe l’œil naturalism. It’s a very simple staging, and that means that the audience can really concentrate on the emotional life between them [the characters]—on this strange transaction between one person who thinks that he’s marrying to satisfy the formal requirements of rest and recreation, and the other who’s buying the whole transaction as the real thing—that awful tragedy between one person’s expectations and the other’s.

When this staging premiered at the English National Opera, traditionalists protested because you used a puppet to portray Butterfly’s young son. What was behind this choice?

I can’t quite follow the logic which says: We don’t expect to see a 15-year-old Japanese girl [as Butterfly], but we’re horrified to see a puppet standing in for a child, particularly as a 3-year-old child can’t possibly behave with an inner life on the stage. For me, using a puppet seemed a very theatrical and organic solution to the demands of the opera. I certainly am not an iconoclast.

Madama Butterfly so deeply permeates our popular culture—I’m thinking of Miss Saigon, M. Butterfly, even Baricco’s novel Silk. Do you feel that it has new and surprising things to say to today’s audiences?

That’s a loaded question. What does Bach’s “Well-tempered Clavier” have to say to an audience? How is it that an exercise showing you a new tuning of a keyboard happens to be a transcendent piece of art? One of the questions that destroys art is to constantly ask for it to speak to the nuance and requirements of the day. It feeds us in a much more profound way. For a second, we can be a young girl in Nagasaki, a young sailor who doesn’t know what he’s wandering into, a consul who sees the damage being done—and that enables us, as great drama can, to learn vicariously rather than through the pain of our own lives. For me, that is its relevance. And what’s more extraordinary is that music created over 100 years ago is as fresh and extraordinary and transporting now as it was then.

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