Windsor Symphony Orchestra music director talks staging Puccini's Madama Butterfly

The Capitol Theatre this weekend will play host to two concert performances of Giacomo Puccini's legendary opera Madama Butterfly, staged by the Windsor Symphony Orchestra (WSO).

The WSO's music director Robert Franz spoke with Windsor Morning host Tony Doucette about what audiences can expect from the performances scheduled for 7:30 p.m. on Friday and 2:30 p.m. on Sunday.

An orchestra creates music with instruments. An opera creates music primarily with very specialized voices. We know where you get the former. Where do you get the latter?

This has been a project that that's been in the works for the last 13 months actually. So 13 months ago, we held auditions in London and here in Windsor for singers throughout Ontario. 

We had just under 100 singers who auditioned for the six main roles in Madama Butterfly. It's such a popular opera and it's really a popular opera among opera singers, but it's popular everywhere.

So people came out of the woodwork to sing for us, and it was really pretty spectacular.

We really landed on a cast I feel confident is not only amazing, but will tell the story in a powerful and profound way to our audience.

How often have you been rehearsing with this group?

It's an amazingly fast process. So what happens is that everybody showed up on this Sunday morning just a few days ago, and we started doing what we called piano rehearsals. So we had the singers and a pianist playing a reduction of the orchestration all day Sunday, all day Monday.

On Tuesday, we rehearse the rehearse the orchestra alone. Then we had a read through with the singers and the orchestra last night. 

[Wednesday night] we go through the opera for the first time. [Thursday night], we dust it off a little bit more.

On Friday, boom! We perform. 

There has been some controversy stirring in recent years over operas like Madama Butterfly, which is set in Japan in the early part of the last century, and it's all about cultural appropriation. Why so much controversy?

In part, it's because Puccini himself was Italian, not Japanese. This story is set in Japan. Puccini himself never visited Japan. But in the late 19th, early 20th Century, this idea of Japanism or this Orientalism kind of style was really prevalent like anything that came from the east was of interest to Europeans. 

And so it was only natural that authors painters and composers would take these sort of influences and put them into an opera. What happened was Puccini was in London, he saw a play Madama Butterfly, a play version of a story that was kind of based on reality. There had been some tales of this woman being married to a French officer originally, then became an American officer and he went and saw this play in English. He didn't speak English, but he understood the story. And so the story was so important to him, that he decided to place it into this opera and create this opera. 

He then went to the Japanese ambassador to Italy's wife in Rome, and asked her. She said, "Oh yes, this story sounds familiar," and so he sort of put these things together. He tried to use some Japanese elements. Some of them he got wrong. Some of them are not accurate to Japanese culture, and so the reality of it is this: If you look at this piece of art, this opera, as an example of what Japan was like, you will miss the boat completely.

If you go to a more universal sense of love and rejection and how people interact with each other as human beings, then you will get right to the core of what it is that Puccini was trying to say. 

And so what we're trying to do is, nobody will be wearing kimonos onstage, there'll be no sort of pretend being Japanese by anyone — although our Cicio-san or Madam Butterfly is actually part Japanese, which is rare. It doesn't always happen that the soprano is part Japanese. 

But the reality is that what we are going to try to do is get beyond the Japan quality of this opera and go right to the core of the telling of this universal story of love and rejection.

It's a story that I think we can all relate to in some way.

And you'll be doing it twice: Friday and Sunday. And an hour ahead of each of the concerts you'll be speaking on stage. About what?

I give a history of how it even came to be this story of Madam Butterfly, based on the real Madam Butterfly, as well as how Puccini came into contact with this story and how he put it together.

And then Aaron Armstrong, our stage director, will give also a viewpoint of like what it's like to put this story together from her perspective. Making sure that the story being told is clear to the audience.

Answers have been edited for length and clarity. Listen to the full interview below: