The new production of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly at the Rome Opera, from 16 to 25 June 2023, is likely to be the talk of the town. Although it marks the return of Italian soprano Eleonora Buratto as Cio-cio-san after her success at the Metropolitan in New York, and although Roberto Abbado, the highly experienced conductor, is conducting Puccini’s masterpiece for the first time, it is director Àlex Ollé‘s opening remarks that set the scene. Puccini’s orientalist drama is restored to the modern eye through his cinematic and hyper-realistic vision, in which the dream of love of the young geisha Cio-cio-san degenerates, according to Àlex Ollé, into a “lost paradise” where Pinkerton’s thirst for power becomes “the symbol of a neoliberal tsunami, the last consequence of a ferocious colonialism capable of destroying everything”.
© Martin Argyrolo – ANO
