Sena Jurinac in ‘Madame Butterfly’, London 1959

An education in Puccini: Butterfly at the Garden

My earliest experience of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly was Covent Garden’s revival of 1957, when Victoria de los Angeles sang the title role under the musical direction of Rudolf Kempe. One of the five performances was broadcast on the BBC’s Home Service, and a tape was re-mastered by Paul Baily and published by the Royal Opera House CD Heritage Series in 2007. The performances were much praised, for De los Angeles at thirty-three was at the height of her powers in this role and Kempe provided a fresh reading of the score, restoring Puccini’s intended structure with the second scene of Part Two following directly on after the Humming Chorus instead of the then prevalent custom of being separated by a second interval. The opera’s impact on me as a child innocent of life’s miseries was overwhelming. A preparatory reading of the synopsis had not prepared me for the force of Pinkerton’s betrayal, so I understood it for the first time live in the fifth row of the orchestra stalls.

Less than two years later, a little older and wiser, I returned to Butterfly at Covent Garden, when Sena Jurinac assumed the role. She had been the first great singer I had heard live in the theatre, when attending my inaugural opera, Don Giovanni at Glyndebourne in 1956. That Donna Anna, a part she sang far less often than Donna Elvira, is tantalisingly preserved only as far as ‘Or sai chi l’onore’ on a tape in the Music Preserved collection, but it is enough to prove how completely she outclassed her colleagues in that production. Her performance set a standard which has haunted me ever since.

During the 1950s, Jurinac was associated in Britain primarily with the operas of Mozart and Strauss. She was the incomparable Ilia in Idomeneo that Fritz Busch introduced to Glyndebourne in 1951, the English professional premiere of Mozart’s great opera seria. Her interpretation may be heard complete in the HMV recording conducted by John Pritchard, but she is even finer in the excerpts made with Fritz Busch in 1951 shortly before his untimely death. It is impossible to imagine singing of a more limpid beauty, even in a cast which included Birgit Nilsson as Electra, Léopold Simoneau as Idamante and Richard Lewis as Idomeneo. Grete Busch, the conductor’s widow, later recalled: ‘In Sena Jurinac, one was witnessing a natural talent such as God bestows but rarely. In addition, he had lavished on her youthful freshness and beauty, and an instinctive acting ability born of artless naivety. He gave Glyndebourne its brightest star, affording endless pleasure to the most critical of disillusioned, implacable conductors.’ Her other Mozart roles were Cherubino and, later, the Countess in Le nozze di Figaro and both Dorabella (the role of her debut at Covent Garden in 1947) and Fiordiligi in Così fan tutte, as well as both Elvira and Anna in Don Giovanni; but she was perhaps even more closely identified with the Strauss travesti parts of Octavian in Der Rosenkavalier and the Composer in Ariadne auf Naxos, interpretations which came to be regarded as definitive during the 1950s. She managed to combine a purity of line and silvery tone with the warmth of southern sunshine. She was born in Bosnia and grew up in Croatian Zagreb in what was then the state of Yugoslavia, or the southern Slav lands.

Jurinac moved to war-ravaged Vienna in 1944 and it became her home. She was a member of the State Opera during its golden post-war age, and, during the period of Herbert von Karajan’s direction from 1956, she began to expand her reach beyond the German repertoire and into the Italian. Her first Butterfly came in 1957 under the musical direction of Dmitri Mitropoulos. The Viennese music critic Karl Löbl wrote: ‘I do not think there has been an equally moving Butterfly on the operatic stage since the unforgettable Maria Cebotari’. Karajan then asked her to take on Desdemona and, the next year, Elisabeth in Don Carlos under his own direction. Lord Harewood, then working at Covent Garden, heard some of these performances and invited her to repeat her Butterfly in the January 1959 revival preserved here.

The critical reception in London at the time was muted, probably because of the shadow of De los Angeles’s iconic performance. Opera magazine featured Jurinac’s Butterfly on the cover of its March 1959 issue, but its editor Harold Rosenthal wrote inside that ‘by following Victoria de los Angeles in the role, she set herself a very difficult task. Whether she fully stood up to this challenge depends very much on what the individual listener expects of a Cio-Cio-San’. While making his own preference clear, he went on: ‘Jurinac failed to move me, precisely because her Butterfly is conceived in almost too grand a format…she appears to lack the natural simplicity that Cio-Cio-San demands. In addition, certain aspects of her interpretation seemed contrived and to lack spontaneity. Yet there were wonderful moments – the ‘Un bel di’, the letter duet, and the great emotional outbursts that precede the Flower Duet and the death scene were both magnificent. Then too a little phrase would suddenly be uttered with such poignancy that, as with Callas, it took on a fresh meaning.’ He concluded: ‘Her voice has always been one of the few really beautiful vocal instruments to be heard today: rather cooler than it used to be perhaps, but exquisitely managed, and the complete servant of its user.’

What are undeniable are the differences between the 1957 and 1959 performances, which therefore afford a fascinating comparison. Act 1 is a mere two minutes longer in the latter performance conducted by Bryan Balkwill; but he adds a full eight minutes to the timing of Act 2, with virtually every section allowed a bit more space and rubato than under the relatively swift Kempe. Balkwill became something of a fixture in this opera in London, conducting it during the same season at Sadler’s Wells and returning to Covent Garden for subsequent revivals, including notable performances with Renata Scotto in 1963, which were even more expansive. The 1959 revival also benefited from the first Covent Garden Pinkerton of Charles Craig, more robust and Italianate than the lighter-voiced John Lanigan in 1957. Jess Walters is a more ‘classical’ richer-sounding Sharpless than the characterful Geraint Evans in 1957, and the young Josephine Veasey makes an auspicious debut as Suzuki, blending gloriously with Jurinac in the Flower Duet.

Recollecting the two sets of performances many years later, Lord Harewood was unequivocal in his preference for those with Jurinac, whom he judged the most complete and affecting Butterfly in his long experience. Roger Beardsley, who remastered these tapes, likewise came to prefer Jurinac’s interpretation for its humanity and tragic dimension. My own allegiance to the unique natural innocence of De los Angeles may partly be explained by the power of first impression, but listening now to this recording more than 50 years after it was made brings a fresh perspective. Instinct tells me that Kempe was right to keep it moving in a score which can threaten to tip over into sentimentality. Yet, experience has taught me that a big theatre often demands broader tempi if detail is not to be lost. And detail is what Jurinac provides. You cannot imagine her saying, as did De los Angeles, ‘I never had to think about technique when singing it. I never thought ‘Now this note is coming’ or ‘Now I have to do so-and-so.’ I could just give myself totally to the role’. Rather, you sense that Jurinac has lost some of the artless naturalness that so charmed her early listeners. Paradoxically, she has become more studied but also more emotionally involving. For example, note how she manages, within the broad sweep of the aria beginning Un bel di to inflect the little questions ‘Chi sarà, chi sarà? E come sarà giunto? Che dirà, che dirà?’ with short vowels and a kind of quizzical playfulness; or, after her final outpouring of love for her son, the choked ‘Va, gioca, gioca!’ Then you appreciate how every little detail contributes to the cumulative arc which describes Butterfly’s journey in Part 2.

Covent Garden’s production of Madama Butterfly had been directed by Robert Helpmann with simple but beautifully evocative designs by Sophie Fedorovitch. When I launched my first season as Director of the Royal Opera in 1993, I chose to do so with the final outing of that production. Alas, the singing was no longer of the former quality, a reminder of what had been lost in realising these operas today, but also of what has been gained by preserving these historical live recordings. Perhaps surprisingly, the only more modern singer to stand comparison with my early experiences of the piece with De los Angeles, Jurinac and Scotto has been the Polish soprano Magdalena Falewicz in the long-lasting production by Joachim Herz of the original version. It takes artists of this calibre to administer the cathartic shock that first hit me all those years ago at Covent Garden. This finely preserved performance with Sena Jurinac certainly delivers on that count.

© Nicholas Payne, 2013

Recorded live at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, 19 January 1959

Original recording from The Harewood Collection