Conference Agenda

Chinese American composer Huang Ruo’s 2022 opera M. Butterfly, commissioned by Santa Fe Opera, offers a compelling case study in operatic adaptation as critical intervention. Based on David Henry Hwang’s 1988 play of the same name—with a libretto newly adapted by Hwang—the opera continues a lineage of responses to Puccini’s Madama Butterfly (1904), challenging its enduring legacy of Orientalist fantasy and gendered exoticism. Hwang’s play subverts Puccini’s narrative by replacing the submissive Asian woman with Song Liling, a Chinese opera singer and spy who deceives and ultimately abandons René Gallimard, a French diplomat who projects his fantasies onto her. Huang’s opera builds upon this reversal but goes further, embedding critique directly into the musical fabric of the work.

This paper examines Huang’s M. Butterfly as an instance of what I call “critical canonicity”—a form of musical adaptation that neither replicates nor rejects the canon but reframes it through historically situated reinterpretation. Drawing on interviews with the composer, adaptation theory, and musical analysis, I argue that Huang enacts a “counter-reversal”: a compositional strategy that distorts, fragments, and recontextualizes Puccini’s iconic motifs. These intertextual gestures—ranging from subtle allusion to structural inversion—reimagine operatic authorship through an Asian American lens.

By transforming Puccini’s musical language from within, M. Butterfly resounds the canon rather than merely revising it, offering a powerful model of operatic resistance and intercultural authorship. Huang’s work opens new spaces for minority voices in American opera, challenging inherited hierarchies while envisioning alternative musical futures.

Susan McClary’s provocative 2006 dismissal of Madama Butterfly as a relic for “the museum of strange cultural practices” crystallizes longstanding critiques of the opera’s Orientalist legacy (McClary 2006, p. 33). Yet this indictment, while compelling, obscures Puccini’s more nuanced—and often self-contradictory—engagement with cultural representation. This study examines Butterfly’s fundamental tension between realistic fidelity and operatic spectacle, tracing its dual manifestations in Puccini’s original creative process and contemporary reclamation efforts by Asian artists. Through close analysis of previously unexamined archival materials—including production sketches, staging manuals, and photographic records from the Italian Library—alongside critical reappraisals by scholars such as Kunio Hara, Ellen Lockhart, Arman Schwartz, and Mari Yoshihara, I demonstrate how Puccini and his collaborators pursued an obsessive, often paradoxical, commitment to realism. Nowhere is this tension more palpable than in “The Humming Chorus,” where documentary precision transcends into surreal enchantment, revealing realism as an inherently unstable aesthetic construct.

The second half of the study investigates contemporary reinterpretations by Asian creatives, uncovering a central paradox: attempts to decolonize Butterfly through heightened realism often inadvertently reinforce the Orientalist frameworks they seek to dismantle. Analyzing case studies such as the Pacific Opera Project’s bilingual 2019/2024 production alongside Yamada Kōsaku’s 1930 production, I exemplify how the desire of Asian creatives to reclaim Orientalist fantasy—through ethnically accurate casting and Japanese-English libretto—is not so distant from Puccini’s original realist project after all. More specifically, I argue that the Pacific Opera Project’s emphasis on linguistic and cultural fidelity, while well-intentioned, ultimately replicates the exoticizing gaze it seeks to critique.

Situating these contemporary interventions within a broader New Realist movement among Asian creatives, I contend that Butterfly continues to serve as a vital site for examining the persistent tensions in cross-cultural performance. Rather than consigning it to McClary’s museum, this study reframes the opera as a dynamic case study, one that simultaneously challenges and perpetuates the limits of intercultural performance and representation. In our current moment of global cultural reckoning, Madama Butterfly endures not as a static Orientalist artifact, but as an indispensable lens for interrogating the possibilities—and pitfalls—of artistic engagement across borders.

“ [François-Joseph] Fétis is the ultimate authority for all musicians but actually a mediocre theorist, the worst historian, and a composer of adamic innocence. He [his book] made me run to the Egyptian museum in Florence one day to examine an antique flute… Rascal! That flute is but a pipe with four holes like those our shepherds have. That’s the way to make history!”

These are Verdi’s words after glancing at an ancient Egyptian flute while researching the cultural world of ancient Egypt for his opera Aida. But was that flute merely pastoral, as Verdi interpreted it? Could ancient Egyptians have used flutes in royal ceremonies? Verdi did not realize that a simple flute from past millennia does not necessarily imply simplicity in performance or ritualistic perspectives. Instead of investigating original Egyptian instruments, he replaced them with two specially-commissioned modern ones—a flute and a trumpet—to construct Aida’s “local color” (Cruz 2002).

Since its composition, Aida’s plot and music have been debated among scholars as examples of Eastern culture viewed through a Western lens, particularly because of their colonial implications (Bergeron 2002, Robinson 1993, Kerman 1956, Said 1993). However, no scholar has yet traced signs of colonial ideologies in Verdi's choices regarding which instrumentation and the notational system should reflect the sonic identity of ancient Egypt. My paper demonstrates how Aida represents colonial exoticism through an organological lens, blending Verdi’s understanding of ancient Egyptian organology with 19th-century compositional techniques.

This research uses archaeological discoveries made after Aida's composition (Fischer 1989, Southgate 1915, Montagu 1978) to display differences between ancient Egyptian instruments and those commissioned by Verdi. These comparisons suggest that despite Verdi’s attempts to create an authentic ancient oriental soundscape, his efforts were overshadowed by the sound of his modern Western instruments and their notational system. While scholars have studied ancient Egyptian instruments and Verdi’s Aida separately, this cross-temporal analysis shows that the reimagination of Egypt in this opera reflects broader 19th-century trends in cultural representation when the desire for historical accuracy intertwined with the challenge of producing “otherness” for European audiences.