Conference Agenda

Huang Ruo’s operatic adaptation of David Henry Hwang’s 1988 play M. Butterfly reconfigures the moment long treated as revelatory in the original drama. Hwang’s play unfolds along two intertwined axes: a real-life espionage scandal between French diplomat René Gallimard and Chinese opera singer Song Liling—who, after a twenty-year affair, is revealed to be biologically male and a spy for the People’s Republic of China—and a sustained deconstruction of the imperialist fantasy embedded in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. In the play, Song’s exposure secures visual and vocal alignment, stabilizing meaning through bodily confirmation. In the opera, however, Song’s countertenor voice persists beyond bodily exposure, prolonging dissonance between voice, gender, and identity. Only in the final moments—when Song returns after Gallimard’s suicide and utters “Butterfly!” in baritone—do body and voice coincide. Even then, the alignment reoccupies Puccini’s Orientalist codes rather than resolving ambiguity.

This paper argues that M. Butterfly does not fail to deliver intersectional representation; rather, it exposes how intersectionality has come to function as a normative listening framework. Premiering in 2022 amid heightened anti-Asian violence and intensified public discourse surrounding race, gender, and sexuality, the opera was primed to be heard as a site of intersectional legibility. Critical responses reveal dissatisfaction not with what the opera represents, but with its refusal to clarify Song’s sexuality or stabilize identity.

Drawing on Nina Eidsheim’s account of voice as a site of projection and Carolyn Abbate’s concept of drastic listening, I suggest that ambiguity operates not as thematic vagueness but as a listening structure. Through close analysis of three musical moments—Song’s performance of Puccini’s “Un bel dì,” the aria “Awoke as a Butterfly,” and the final baritone “Butterfly!”—alongside countertenor Kangmin Justin Kim’s performance and interviews, I show how the opera, as an Asian American work, organizes and frustrates interpretive expectation. By sustaining instability between voice, body, and fantasy, Huang’s opera reframes intersectionality not as an identity endpoint but as a politics of perception—one that the work both activates and unsettles.

Despite local critical acclaim that began in the 1920s, Pelléas et Mélisande did not receive its Chinese premiere until 2016 (Shanghai). The staging was designed as a Suzhou-style garden by theatre director Yi Liming. Although the principal roles were performed by Western opera singers, their acting and costumes drew inspiration from Kunqu opera. Furthermore, the transitions between acts utilised the Kunqu technique of scene changes through sliding doors, as seen in traditional zhezixi performances.

In Peter Brook’s Impressions of Pelléas (1992), which situates the opera within an intimate, fin-de-siècle European salon, the casting of an Asian Mélisande in Asian-inspired costume indicates Brook’s intention to present her as a figure seemingly from “another world”. By contrast, Yi’s Chinese production eliminates any hierarchy, with all scenic elements rendered according to a local understanding of Debussy. Mélisande is no longer constructed as an exoticised “Other” but instead becomes an organic part of the whole.

Current scholarship regarding cross-cultural comparison between Chinese and Western opera remains relatively sparse. Lincoln-Hyde’s comparative study (2023) of The White-Haired Girl and Lucia di Lammermoor provides a valuable approach. Within Western art, Albright’s (2000) analysis of dissonant versus consonant relations between music and stage in multi-media modernist works offers a way which to rethink the consonance that director Yi emphasised between Debussy’s music, its staging and even its reception by Chinese audiences.

Drawing upon interviews with the director, analysis of critical reviews, and primary research on Chinese Debussy reception from 1910, this paper argues that the 2016 Pelléas offers a comprehensive reflection of Chinese perceptions of Debussy, encompassing both the director’s and audiences’ contributions to a distinctly Chinese aesthetic and epistemological engagement with his music across an entire century. I contend that this opera was not artificially Sinicised to cater to Chinese audiences. Instead, it represents an authentic, uncontentious and collective interpretation of Debussy. The dissonance that Western audiences might perceive between Debussy’s music and the Kunqu elements was experienced as consonance by Chinese audiences, reflecting a cultural and aesthetic harmony unique to this context.

Japanese soprano Toshiko Sekiya (1904-1941) toured extensively in Europe and America from the late 1920s to the early 1930s. At the time, Japanese sopranos were limited to oriental roles, such as Cho-Cho-San in Puccini's Madama Butterfly, but Sekiya sought to broaden her repertoire by challenging herself with Western female roles. In the summer of 1928, she appeared at the Teatro del Bosque in Barcelona, performing four roles, including Violetta in Verdi's La Traviata. Her Violetta was well received, and the following year she was invited to sing the role at several opera houses in Italy. Despite Sekiya’s achievements as prima donna, however, her activities in the West have not been fully discussed in Japan, except for brief descriptions in her biographies (Kubota 1942; Watanabe 1984).

This presentation focuses on Sekiya’s reception in Europe and America, as it provides a valuable example of how Western audiences responded at a time when it was still uncommon for Asian singers to play Western roles. Using newspaper articles, as well as sources held by the Nihonmatsu City Board of Education in Fukushima Prefecture, the hometown of Sekiya's father, I will first compile a detailed timeline of the events leading up to and following her first opera appearance in Barcelona. Based on this chronology, I will analyze descriptions of Sekiya in European and American newspapers and evaluate the significance of her nationality to each critic. For example, one journalist referred to her as a “Japanese soprano” and discussed her voice and acting, while another cited Pierre Loti's Madame Chrysanthème (1887) and described Sekiya as “Chrysanthème” in the Guise of “Violetta,” emphasizing her oriental appearance. Next, I will examine the efforts Sekiya made to secure Western female roles: according to interviews with her, she often changed into a kimono and sang Japanese folk songs on stage after opera performances. Taken together, I will conclude that although Sekiya’s self-presentation as Japanese was an effective marketing strategy to increase her visibility, it may have created a negative impression among some European audiences and contributed to her declining opportunities to sing at opera houses in the early 1930s.