Earlier this week, as I was doomscrolling on Instagram before bed, I came across a video from the Metropolitan Opera interviewing their new leading soprano in Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. So, imagine my horror when I realized the leading Japanese character, Cio-Cio-San, would be played by a white Lithuanian woman, Asmik Grigorian.
Unfortunately, this shouldn’t have come as a surprise, as Madama Butterfly has a long, long history of casting white women in this role. However, coming from an institution who has prided themselves on their commitment to diversity in recent years, it’s disappointing. In 2020, the Met created a Chief Diversity Officer position, saying in a statement that the role would “help build an equity, diversity, and inclusion program, which will include … decisions related to artistic casting and programming.”
Since implementing this program, the Met has definitely taken huge strides in diversifying not only their team, but also the seasons themselves. In 2022, their first season back post-COVID-19, they premiered Terrence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones — the first time a Black composer’s work has been performed in Met history. This comes after years of operas like Aida and Otello featured white singers performing in blackface. The Met only officially ended their usage of skin-darkening makeup in 2015.
While it is definitely historic for the Met to end a long lineage of blackface and begin to program works by more diverse composers, I can’t help but wonder why pieces centered around Asian identities do not receive the same treatment. The two most frequently performed operas centering around Eastern cultures are Turandot and Madama Butterfly — Butterfly currently being the eighth-most performed opera in the world. Despite its popularity, many opera houses still struggle to cast Asian-identifying cast members or creative teams to portray the story appropriately.
However, to truly understand the gravity of cultural depictions in Butterfly, you need to know the story’s history. Madama Butterfly is an opera based on a play based on a novel based on a short story — all written by white men — about an American naval officer who marries a 15-year old girl in Japan and promises to one day return for her. Many critics of the opera cite Cio-Cio-San’s portrayal as a stereotypical, submissive, and exoticized heroine that perpetuates Orientalist stereotypes. Defenders of the show describe her character as possessing agency and resilience, challenging simplistic interpretations of her as merely submissive.
The key difference between interpretations boils down to one thing: presentation.
According to a 2021 study by Opera America, AAPI performers only make up 2.8 percent of artistic administrative positions and 3.1 percent of technical/production positions in opera companies within the U.S. So, for the most part, these productions are designed and directed by people who are largely unable to comprehend the cultural nuances required when putting on these productions.
“So many of the Butterfly productions we have enjoyed throughout history have presented her story primarily through a white male lens,” Director of Madama Butterfly at Detroit Opera Matthew Ozawa said in a statement on the company’s website. “This fantasy of Japan has been created not by those whose culture is meant to be represented in the opera — namely, Japanese people and, in particular, Japanese women — but by those who, in many cases, have had no direct connection to Japan.”
The Detroit Opera, which operates on a budget of roughly $16 million per year, recently premiered their version of Madama Butterfly featuring an entirely Japanese and Japanese-American creative team and largely Japanese cast. Why is it then, that institutions such as the Metropolitan Opera, who have an annual budget of $312 million, seemingly cannot bring in Japanese creatives to aid in the direction of shows like Butterfly?
It is utterly ridiculous and embarrassing for an entity such as the Metropolitan Opera, the largest opera house in the world, to continuously promote themselves using the platform of diversity when they are not applying that representation to all cultures. If they can afford to build an entire life-sized city block for productions like La bohème, they can afford to hire Japanese creatives. I am tired of white Butterflies.
