“None of these ‘women in Puccini’s operas’ can be understood without history.”1
In 1996, the State Opera of South Australia’s ladies’ chorus was dressing for a performance of Puccini’s Turandot.2 This opera was first performed in 1926, one of many European operas of the “long nineteenth century” to be set in Asia.3 Covering skins that varied from pink to olive with white-yellow face make-up, elongating Caucasian eyes with black eyeliner, and scooping individuality into formal hats and identical white robes, Australians of European background metamorphosed into ‘ancient’ Chinese Imperial court women. Moving with small steps in formations that characterised Asians as indistinguishable clones and members of a populous “herd,” we sang Italian lyrics first heard almost a century ago in Europe and America. We were walking metaphors of cultural hybridity, projections of a desiring Western imagination, sponsored by Boral Industries and Southern Television Corporation.
This discussion enlists the perspective of an operatic performer and utilizes the lens of cultural studies to investigate the interplay of culture and ideology in the performance of “Asianess,” particularly female Far-Eastern Asian-ness, in nineteenth-century Grand Opera.4 It interprets some codes of racial signification that structured Puccini’s operatic spectacles, Turandot and Madama Butterfly,5 operas that were performed before Europeans (particularly Victorian Britons), and it concentrates on the stereotype of the “exotic Asian woman,” who was usually played by a European in “cultural cross-dress.”6 Shifts in the staging structure of a 1996 production of Madama Butterfly7 can be construed as a response to social values that have changed outside the operatic theater’s “time warp” over time (nearly a century after the opera’s first performance).
William Weber, in Beyond Zeitgeist, envisions musical history as something other than a coherent progression of distinct musical ages dominated by their canonical “great” composers.’8 Such a concept, Weber posits, has forced musical history into literary and philosophical categories, such as “Baroque,” “Classical,” and “Romantic,” that emerge from and are energized by an underlying universal master plan. According to Weber, music’s historians and scholars have invested faith in the transcendent nature of this historical vision, so that musical history functions as a type of totalizing belief system rather than a flexible, multi-faceted method of documentation and interpretation that addresses the multiplicity of motivations, contexts, and expediencies that constitutes “history.” Music’s actual development, from Weber’s viewpoint, has been discontinuous and non-teleologic.
Anthropological historian Henrika Kuklick, in The Savage Within,9 observes that in the nineteenth century, increasingly secularized Europeans (particularly in Britain) were eager to find new systems of universal structure and theories of function that would explain (and justify) their own (preferably superior) position in an expanding world. Europe’s bio-racial theories, and Marx’s totalizing system based on workers’ relations to the means of production, are examples of this impulse toward total coherence and control. The dominant Victorian British model for all human growth and change, including progress in art and music, was based on evolutionary patterning. Infusing an Enlightenment secular rationality with biological science, this model assumed the existence of an upward, progressive impetus in humanity’s development that was driven by our ability to think and to order society in a rational manner. (It also allowed for the idea of some decay.) This Utopian assumption, that embraced all areas of human endeavor, never recovered from the impact of World War I and the ongoing breakdown of European territories and racial hierarchies. It is surprising that, in spite of the general disillusionment, musical history was still viewed as a coherent, ascending system evolving from within an exemplary, rational civilization.10 Grand opera, the paradigm of European culture that reached its zenith in the nineteenth century, reflects much of the irrationality and psychic anxieties of this era.
In the recent past, opera’s adherents have behaved as though the art form provided a refuge from the tyranny of analytical and social critique, and as if the emotionally charged experience of opera was set apart, and, according to a “common liberal humanist assumption… shorn of history and beyond or outside of power relations.”11 However, over the last decade, it has been subject to the analytic attentions of scholars from a variety of disciplines that have not traditionally been aligned with musical history. The unabashed interdisciplinarity of cultural studies has offered musicologists and historians multiple channels through which to examine music’s historical and social contexts, as it incorporates a variety of interpretive strategies from disciplines including the social sciences, film theory and anthropology. Motkus maintains that “culture and cultural products, such as the arts, must be studied within the social relations and system through which culture is produced and consumed,” thus highlighting the contingency of cultural studies to the study of society, politics and economics.12
In Beyond Zeitgeist, Weber focuses on musical output as cultural product when he states that economic exigencies and systems of desire and its satisfaction had more to do with the development of musical styles than composers’ sensitivities to the prevailing Zeitgeist. In his opinion, Mozart’s responses to the demands of patronage determined his style, rather than his sensitivities to the “Spirit of the Age.” Stressing the importance of “everyday business” to the emergence of musical styles, Weber also suggests that the frottola, the light genre of the sixteenth century, was developed mainly in deference to the request of a Mantuan patroness.13 Likewise, in the nineteenth century, composers such as Puccini and Verdi wrote Grand Operas to appeal to a paying public, creating musical and visual fantasies to please and entertain, but not to politically challenge the dominant ideologies of its privileged audiences, who were beset by fears of social disorder emanating from working class discontent, and the problems of retaining global power.14 The use of European languages and only passing pentatonic references to Asian musical forms cocoons the Asia of nineteenth-century opera within the European imagination, as a fantasy construction. This fantasy is not, however, disconnected from the politics and ethics of the real world: the psychic satellite of opera orbits the everyday economic planet, and each exerts a profound influence on the other. Audiences and their desires create an interlocking system of supply and demand.
Reception theories from literary studies are useful tools with which audience reactions and perceptions, a vital part of a musical work’s cycle of construction/performance/reception/reconstruction, may be examined, and film theory demonstrates how creative production is inevitably situated within economies of desire.15 Film theory is of particular use in analysing racialized images in opera, as the two art forms both depend on a synthesis of actors, music and dialogue (libretto).16 The original creative material of both movies and opera is subject to the interventions and interpretations of producers and directors. Film’s interpreters share their focus on the audience’s desires and “ways of seeing” with anthropologists, who investigate the meanings generated by public displays of racialized image. In the nineteenth/twentieth centuries, anthropologists developed displays of ethnological photographic records as evidence of “backward” and “advanced” races and engineered ethnic displays at museums and world fairs.
A brief investigation of the central assumptions that framed nineteenth-century middle and upper class perceptions of Asia on the stage indicates that operas from that era were profoundly inflected with a priori ideas of Caucasian superiority. “We can learn about the obsessions of [nineteenth century Europe]… by studying the cultural clichés that make it onto the operatic stage for public consumption.”17
In order to address opera in its cultural and ideological contexts, the impact of scientific racism on its nineteenth-century audiences, and their sensitivities regarding class structure, should be considered.18 It was the Victorians who naturalized and institutionalized the concept of race, elevating it from an idea to an objective reality.19 Racism in nineteenth-century opera was partly a symptom of the transformation of race studies into a science.20 In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Anthropological Institute and the Anthropological Society of London institutionalized theories such as biological determinism and comparative anatomy. Their professional middle-class members claimed for themselves specialized authority in racial matters. These theories were based on the writings of Knox, Gobineau, Darwin, and others, the photographic typologies of A. H. Keane, and the observations of travel writers, and were not immune to mythologizing impulses. Both anthropological institutions abandoned the idea of a humanitarian, ethical approach to science, claiming that such attitudes were inappropriate, sentimental and an impediment to “objectivity,” a stance that facilitated Britain’s management of Empire and its recruitment of the cheap labour required to maintain its industries.
“Colored” (non-white) races were fixed in place by their physiological characteristics, for their coloring, features, and build supposedly determined their psychology, temperament, and moral character. In terms of nineteenth-century ethnology, the lighter-skinned Japanese and Chinese were evaluated differently by Europe’s elites than were darker-skinned races. Although not seen as equal to Europeans, Far Easterners were higher up the nineteenth-century racial hierarchies than were their Middle Eastern and African counterparts. The Japanese were higher than the Chinese, but they were never the equals of Europeans (in the latter’s own opinion)21: their “extraordinary and surprising” technological developments in the late 1800s were considered by the influential ethnologist, A.H. Keane, to be due to “their capacity for at least imitating the features of foreign institutions.”22 It was Keane’s “scientific” opinion that the Japanese and Chinese could not be trusted, although the Japanese were:
on the whole of a kindly and lovable disposition, especially when compared with the Chinese and other branches of the Mongolian family… beneath many genial and amiable qualities there is often betrayed a spirit of treachery, suspicion and revenge, which will for years pursue its victim under the cloak of the most seemingly cordial friendship. A mercenary disposition and unbridled licentiousness are also amongst the darker shades of [the] picture.…23
Japan and China’s ancient governmental hierarchies and sophisticated art forms were acknowledged by the new sciences as civilized, if regressive, societies that were more irrational than Western cultures that had benefited from the Enlightenment. Members of nineteenth-century European/American opera audiences did not constitute an ideologically homogenous group, although they were of the upper and the upwardly mobile middle classes that consumed the masses of new scientific books and journals flooding the market with emerging racial theories. These readers were heavily influenced by prevailing ideas of biological determinism and similar hierarchic theories that created a void between themselves and non-European cultures. Reaching deeply into its art forms of opera, theatre, visual art and photography, Europe’s newly institutionalized racism both demeaned and aestheticized Asians, especially women. It positioned them as exotic, Oriental, and Other in static, ancient cultures that provided lavish spectacles for the enjoyment of the rational, progressive, if somewhat less colorful, European self.24 The Other’s biologically determined capricious cruelty, despotism, and irrationality heightened the drama, the challenge and the romance for the “outsider” protagonist who usually found himself alone among an alien land and people.
Operatic tales of love, death and betrayal in Asia and the Middle East circulated through major European cities, the self-acknowledged centers of high art, in French, English, German or Italian.25 Opera was a part of a wider addiction to “ethnicity as spectacle” that gave nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europeans a window through which they could inspect their world and its inhabitants at a comfortable distance. They also frequented the ethnic sections of museums, traveling Indian shows, and circuses, but most of all, the International Exhibitions of Britain, America, France, Holland, Austria, and Germany that displayed people and customs, crafts and every aspect of foreign cultures. Beginning in 1851 with London’s Crystal Palace Exhibition, these massive events fostered commerce and were meant to promote Europe’s status as an empire-builder. Supported by Anthropological Societies, who wanted to reify their new theories of race, they were also held in large grandiose structures, that contextualized and dwarfed the exhibits.
Throughout Europe, lavish opera houses were built, refurbished, and redesigned, in the major centers of culture: Vienna, Frankfurt, Munich, Paris, Moscow, Barcelona, Leningrad, New York, Buenos Aires, New York, Prague, London, and Beyreuth. Opera’s luxuriant musical composition required that it be performed in equally sumptuous spaces that could accommodate a large stage and orchestra, and elaborate seating for the very wealthy. Chandeliers, paintings and sculptures, ornate costumes, and stage effects, and the audience’s jewels, furs, and grand apparel reflected opera and its patrons’ status. Marbled white opera halls of fine design framed the actors and the drama within a visible European Empire that pursued and drew its wealth from much of the rest of the world. Grand framing structures signified the audience’s relationship to this world, partly real and imagined, affirming hierarchy.
Opera’s entrepreneurs, librettists, and composers were themselves a part of this system: their job was to supply the type of product that was required by the patrons. David Levin, in Opera through Other Eyes, reflects that operatic plots of the nineteenth century reflected “certain anxieties about consolidating aesthetic and social wealth [and]… marshalling huge aesthetic resources in a massive display of massive display.”26 He also observes that they reclaimed “lost cultures and epochs” evoking Empire, by focussing on ancient themes, justifying their own “claims to mammoth, imposing political power.”27 According to Levin, opera was a “cultural hand-me-down of the elite… [an] orderly transfer of the cultural trappings of power from one generation of the ‘entitled’ to the next. The violence that underlies this transfer is often displaced to the stage.… [These operas] feature a struggle for accession to political and social power.”28
Beige-colored Europeans sang the roles of their exoticized “Others”: non-whites were never used, even to represent themselves, partly because Europeans disapproved of the public display of real “mixed-race” love relationships.29 The dark side of the dream was that many aspects of opera became an enactment of racial and class inequality, what music scholars William Ashbrook and Harold Powers refer to as an “unconscious manifestation of racial arrogance.”30 Of the several classificatory modes by which European groups and individuals assessed each other in the latter half of the nineteenth century, race and class were pre-eminent, especially in Britain. However, race proved to be a more acute determinant than class: Asians and Caucasian-Europeans of comparable rank were not recognized as equals even if they were dressed in similar clothes. Commentators of the time variously described Japanese nobles’ adoption of Western dress as “aping,” “disfiguring,” and “unseemly and comical.”31
This type of demarcation of difference between an inside and an outside group is a central process in the structuring of racial stereotypes. Most scholars of operatic history would have to admit that Opera has repeatedly used racial (as well as class and gender) stereotypes in its fantasies. Many theories may be used to investigate the machinations at work in the formation and application of these stereotypes.32 Social psychologists have conducted extensive research into racial stereotyping and prejudicial behavior, seeking to understand the mental and social processes that make it possible to regard others so completely alien that violent or exploitative action against them is “justified.” Stereotyping has played its part in the major tensions and conflicts of the twentieth century: white/black racism in America, ethnic atrocities in many parts of the world, Nazism and the Holocaust, racially-based terrorism, rejection of refugees, and domestic and sexual exploitation of Asians, particularly women.
In the last thirty years, anthropologists have been keen to reveal and dismantle the effects of ethnic bias in anthropological theories that justified racial domination and oppression. In Myth and Stereotype,33 Rosemary Breger defines not only the structure of racial stereotypes, but also a method that describes their function in different cultural contexts. This approach is based on Foucault’s theories of discourse as a public mode of presenting and structuring an object and its social space, as outlined in The Archaeology of Knowledge.34 At certain points over time, these statements intersect and agree with each other, as in the nineteenth century, when literature, travel and historical accounts, memoirs, and evolutionist theories concerning both women and Asians intersected and concurred with performative representation of Asian women. The stereotype is ostensibly accepted as truth when it appears in several discourses, and is repeatedly projected in the public domain. Opinions, ideas and impressions, sheer fantasies and mistakes become tangible, knowable things: “The more often something is said by an ever-larger group, the more it is accepted as ‘true.’”35 This agreement among the in-group gives rise to a sense of secure identity and of control over the out-group.
Gilman, a social psychologist, has indicated in Difference and Pathology that stereotyping in itself is a necessary process by which individuals and groups make sense of the world, and justify status within it.36 Negative stereotypes usually contain a minimum of fact, and, when competition from an out-group threatens the status, resources or security of an in-group, the process can become pathological, and generate stereotypes that legitimize the denial of others’ rights, power, autonomy and identity. A representational, psychic mode by degree impacts on the material world, and an out-group’s image is either idealized or demonized, its differences rendered homogenous, and its diversities simplified. In Gilman’s words, “[W]e create images of things we fear or glorify. These images never remain abstractions; we understand them as real world entities. We assign them labels that serve to set them apart from ourselves. We create ‘stereotypes.’”37
A process of aestheticization occurs when an insider group tries to deny that an outsider group is similar to itself, and thus renders that group fantastic, unreal or innocuous. In so doing, it concentrates on superficial and trivial aspects of another culture and people, obsesses with artifice and artefacts, and sees outgroup members as fantasy beings, fetishised things that will absorb lack and satisfy desire. For example, in the mid-nineteenth century, Western travel writers construed Japan as a “fairyland,” and Western males habitually described Asian women as “dolls” (pretty, small, and easy to control) or benign elves. Such stereotypical Asian images, in the context of Western Empire, connect with and influence international relations. In Foreign Bodies, David Napier sees this interaction in terms of microcosm and macrocosm:
[T]he microcosmic symbol stands in sympathy with the larger phenomena that constitutes what we call “reality”: the symbol becomes the basis for other sympathetic relations, so much so that the actions occurring in the real, actual or architechtonic world may be inseparable from their symbolic content.38
Since the nineteenth century, when Europe dominated large sections of the world economically and politically, Asian women have been assessed and described by European onlookers, mainly male travellers, diplomats, and traders confined to areas such as treaty ports, as simplified beings who behave in predictable ways: they are deferential, erotically available, and self-sacrificing, or inscrutable, lethal and cruel. These evaluations feed the dynamics of subordination and power in European grand operas that are biased towards the creators of the boundaries, who choose the structures within which images are defined.
In the lexicon of Imperialism, the domination of a nation was often equated with sexual access to its women. In much the same way as World War I propaganda used to depict nations as women, and nineteenth-century political cartoons encapsulated philosophical ideas and emotions in female form, opera’s lead female singers embodied racialized exoticism, and were also metaphors for national identity. Puccini’s protagonists Madame Butterfly and Turandot project Western stereotypes of Asian women that respectively aestheticize and demonize Asia.
In Madama Butterfly, Puccini and his librettists seem to dignify Asian women, departing from the stereotype by positioning a European man unfavorably in contrast to an Asian woman. Captain Pinkerton is ostensibly an anti-hero, inviting audience disapproval for his heartless exploitation of a sweet, young Japanese girl, and Butterfly is the heroine, by virtue of her sensitivity, loyalty, and long-suffering endurance. While audiences sympathise with Butterfly, she is depicted like most Asian women in the literature of the time, as an idealized racial stereotype. Butterfly is associated with heightened, almost cultish eroticism; the geisha-face was designed to “float” like the moon in the dimness of the teahouses. “Real” geisha were the least accessible women to European men in Japan, contrary to the popular Western myths in which every teahouse woman or courtesan in a kimono was a “geisha.” Not only an exgeisha, Butterfly was also childish, simple, occupied with trivia, gullible, and grateful for the attentions of a European man. Sacrificing her religion in spite of familial disapproval and rejection, Butterfly suffers, waits for years, cares for Pinkerton’s Amerasian child, and ultimately loses both husband and child. She ends her life via seppuku, a ritual practiced by the Samurai class to restore honor in extreme circumstances, as a symbolic punishment for miscegenation.39 The status-quo intercultural order is restored as Pinkerton and Kate claim the child (who rarely looks Japanese in most operatic productions) to raise and educate as an American, and Pinkerton has a “real” marriage to Kate. The audience is made aware that nothing good can come from interracial sexual fraternization as it was against the scientific “natural order.”40
Puccini’s Imperial princess Turandot, before Prince Calef’s conquest, creates havoc as she overrides “nature” and forswears the company of men. She is possessed with the avenging spirit of her ancestor, Lou-Ling, a virgin princess who was raped and killed centuries before. Turandot not only isolates herself from potential suitors, but murders them if they fail her three-part questionnaire. She is thus cast as an extreme stereotype, the monstrous, castrating goddess-woman, the sibyl or sphinx. In another sense, she represents China’s reported insularity, cruelty, and despotism to outsiders.
According to public officials Ping, Pang, and Pong, Turandot’s disinterest in men was clearly against the natural order, bringing disaster to the land. China had been peaceful before her strange behavior, they say, but now “China is finished!” Spring does not come, and the snow does not thaw. The villagers beg her to “come down,” that is, abandon her virginity and become sexually active. Turandot was desirable but not docile, approachable, or sexually available, and disinterested in giving life. She is instead identified with the solitary yet erotic moon, the lover of the dead, shining coldly on graveyards. Her light is a “deathly glow,” and her kiss is of death and blood.41 She is “white as jade, cold as ice, the beautiful Turandot.” Her refusal to give up her lofty virginity spurs droves of international would-be lovers to risk the death penalty by answering her triple-trick questions.
Turandot does, of course, eventually descend, as Calef answers all three questions correctly. Her continuing coldness is overcome as he finally thaws her “frigidity” with a kiss, a thinly disguised metaphor for sexual intercourse, or perhaps invasion by another nation. “She was ice, now she is aflame!”42 Calef, as the Prince of Tartary, represents the invader who easily answers her questions, wins the kingdom, and both defeats and wins the unruly woman.43 As the Chinese apparently could not manage it by themselves, Chinese national disorder is put right by a rational outsider. This opera expresses anxieties about disordered society and also affirms Imperialist scenarios of rational male (the West) conquering and ordering the feminine, mystic East.
Turandot was the last major Grand Opera to deliver Orientalist spectacles about Asia. Film took over opera’s role, beginning with early black and white films and progressing to modern-day epics like The Last Emperor.44 In the late 1930s, idyllic representations of the Japanese became negative, as “The Yellow Peril” images became particularly virulent.45 Stereotyped or caricatured images were powerful tools in controlling fears of Japanese aggression. Later, the Chinese communist revolution and Japan’s trade wars and industrial development triggered a similar reaction, illustrating Gilman’s point that “[s]tereotypes arise when self-integration is threatened… [they are] ways of dealing with the instabilities of the world. This is not to say that they are good.”46
From 1941 until 1952, Hollywood produced anti-Japanese feature films, and pseudo documentary films. As Europe lost its colonies and territories in Asia, America took over its imperialistic role. Due to American engagement in World War II, and the Korean and Vietnam Wars, widespread serviceman/prostitute/local encounters (after an initial silence) spawned an ongoing rush of literature and film in the West that portrayed Asian/American relationships of desire, bringing in their wake a new wave of racialized female stereotypes that associated Asian women with a conquered people, servility and hyper-sexuality. The old stereotypes reappeared in a new context, indicating that “stereotypes are inherently protean, not rigid, and that they pass from one discourse to another.”47 Over time, they are often repressed, and lie dormant, but reappear in another context, giving the impression that they are indestructible. These enunciative modalities build on, reinforce, and comment on the messages and images portrayed in the other. Throughout the twentieth century, numerous novels featured Butterfly-like Asian women.48 Films, theatre, and television repeatedly screened reproductions, in various forms, of stereotypical Madame Butterflies who were loved, impregnated, left to die, but nostalgically remembered by her faithless Western lover.
Supported by the development of large-scale global operatic spectaculars, both Turandot and Madama Butterfly enjoy undiminished popularity in contemporary times, and often sell better than more recent works. Opera’s audiences have changed since the nineteenth century: they are no longer culturally homogenous: globalization, multiculturism, and actual or tele-travel has ensured that public experience of other cultures has expanded greatly. As opera’s expensive staging and personnel demands keep ticket prices high, a large proportion of opera’s audiences are still from the middle and upper classes, including the ruling elites who create foreign policies and set immigrant quotas. Ethical and political questions arise about the implications of perpetuating fetishized Asian images replete with the value judgements and obsessions of their creators, out of context and out of time.
Racial insult is easily elided during an operatic performance, as opera works by the entrapment and ravishment of the senses and emotions, as audiences escape into the magnificence of music, singing, and the spectacle of a highly-charged, sensual event, willing to forgive all just to hear a favorite aria sung with splendor. Simply getting Asian directors and singers to replace Europeans in appropriate roles apparently does little to change opera’s Orientalist ideology: the actors become complicit within Orientalist structures for financial and career advancement. Increased contact with and awareness of the complexities of other cultures does not seem to greatly lessen the West’s desire for the East as a site of alternative site of fantasy: Orientalism finds new outlets in video games and martial arts films, and glossy international magazines project images of Eurasian femininity and fashion. Some global entrepreneurs and artists, from both East and West, widen the gaps between “self” and “other” and make use of sophisticated technical expertise and equipment, international commercial communication networks, and international demands for large operatic spectacles, to mount Orientalist extravaganzas unmatched in the nineteenth century. A wealthy international audience pays generously for the thrill of viewing major global productions in a variety of different locations. In 1997, director Zhang Yimou staged Puccini’s Turandot in Florence, Italy. In 1998, he directed it again in Beijing.49 Sean Metzger observes that this latter $15-million production drew 4,000 people, mostly from overseas, for its opening night. This was mainly because the ticket prices excluded the locals: “the top ticket price for the night was U.S. $1,250, nearly half the national per capita income that year.”50 Metzger comments that Yamou’s production “manipulated old stereotypes,” and was structured around “an intercultural aesthetic that hinged not only on Orientalist visions of race and national culture but also on certain fantastic expectations of excessive sexuality.”51
Yamou added brilliant and accomplished elements of Chinese culture to the production: “the drum corps that opened Turandot in the Forbidden City attempted to replicate a Ming-dynasty convention in which percussion preceded court events.”52 Authentic costumes, dances, fabrics, and an executioner proficient in martial arts contributed only a superficial, aesthetic splendor to the production. Chinese nationals were represented by large numbers of dancers and non-singing artistes not integral to the opera’s dramatic heart. Radical re-thinking of opera’s stereotypical representations is required if this paradigmatic art form is to deliver more than entertaining spectacles and nostalgia for grand despotic regimes and oppressive lifestyles, both supported by wonderful music and glorious singing.
It is possible to escape from the signifying racial codes of nineteenth-century Eurocentric philosophy, ideology and scientific hierarchism. The destabilization of universalities and meaning of the twentieth century has made it theoretically possible for directors and designers to think outside of the identity systems that emphasize the binarisms of self and other, in-group and out-group, and that connect behavior to race, and race to fixed hierarchy. The semiotic concept that any sign (signifier) engages in an ambiguous relationship with many possible referents (signifieds), is useful in imagining an embodied operatic character (the sign) disconnected from a hierarchical, stereotypical racial identity (the signified), located in a geographical place, (Japan, China), but not within imposed hierarchies of race. A staged presence does not have to signal a prescribed menu of behavior, if that neutrality is signalled cleverly: signs can attach to many possible referents. In Empire of Signs, Barthes indicates that an actor’s (or singer’s) presence can be negated, and replaced by a “pure sign.”53 He uses the example of a fifty-year old male Kabuki actor, in the mask and costume of a young woman, who does not imitate or represent a woman, but absents his own identity, becoming a pure signifier of the idea of woman. This application of the Zen concept of inner void is reflected in conventions of the Japanese language that treats characters in novels as inanimate objects, unlike humans and animals.
[T]he fictive characters introduced into a story (once upon a time there was a king) are assigned the form of the inanimate; whereas our whole art struggles to enforce the “life,” the “reality” of fictive beings, the very structure of Japanese restores or confines these beings to their quality as products, signs cut off from the alibi referential par excellence; that of the living thing.54
The non-specific, abstracted nature of signs, and the referential ambiguity of Barthes’s Zen approach is one way to sidestep self-conscious appropriations of Asia and Asians (at the visual level at least: words and music need to remain intact in order to preserve the art-work’s cohesion and integrity).55 Buddhist and Taoist ideas of interconnectedness, the inner void and the fluid self, when used to stage an opera such as Madama Butterfly, can undercut biologically time-warped oppositions between an irrational Other and a rational Western self by negating and absenting the racialized body.
Some contemporary artistic directors and producers have demonstrated an awareness of the dissonances generated by racially deterministic, performative representation by re-shaping opera’s visible ideologies and structuring philosophies, and by visualizing opera through different eyes. Moffatt Oxenbold’s 1999 Adelaide production of Madama Butterfly for State Opera of S.A. partially evaded entanglement in ideological, semiotic structures common in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and diluted the essentialism mixed with desire that fixates Japan and its people within ancient stereotypes. Oxenbold did not attempt to create “real” Japanese scenes, but employed devices from Japanese drama, such as black-garbed stage assistants (Koken), whose interventions abstracted and alienated the action from reality. A body of water separated the stage from the audience, and thus symbolically from the “real” world, emphasising a retreat from geographical location to the imagination. Oxenbold’s production added a degree of dignity to an opera in which Japanese society has been mocked with dubious stage mimicry of “old Japan,” unlikely looking Japanese singers, and tawdry sets. The audience was not denied visual beauty of color or design, but it was refused the type of staging that has traditionally, and painfully, replicated the Japan of fans and teapots. Structured according to principles of Zen, the stage arrangements, sets, costumes, and design were reduced to bare essentials. Kabuki and Noh theatrical elements and stylized movements directed attention to the opera’s artifice. Minimalist make-up signified racial ambivalence, and the singers’ bodies became signs relating to elusive and mobile referents: Butterfly, not encased in “yellow-face,” was racially indeterminate. Clad in garments that suggested the idea of kimono rather than replicated it, she did not sport painted, slanted eyes and did not move in an exaggerated manner that Westerners had in the past been careful to emulate as an “Oriental” way of moving (small steps, hurried gait). This lack of mimicry decentred the protagonist’s ethnicity, giving the impression that the opera’s emotional and dramatic themes could have happened anywhere. The sign “Butterfly” only ambiguously adhered to Japan.
For a European audience, the production’s tragedy was potentially more shocking: there was no secret relief that such bad things happened to someone who was securely “Other” and not to one of “us.” The events could not be safely relegated to “over there,” raising the following questions: how would an audience react if the cultural roles were reversed? What if this was a European woman exploited by a Japanese man? Would the opera’s plot still seem “exotic,” or racially provocative, or just tawdry?
The ingrained bitterness of a racist past may be permanently ingrained in opera’s structure. However, directors and producers who attempt to remodel the art form at least begin to imagine alternatives to racially based power relationships and stereotypes. Modifying opera’s visual forms may be nothing more than band-aid therapy, but audiences are thereby informed that times have changed, and that music is to be held accountable for its complicity in social oppression.
Opera’s richness has grown from the grubby soil of commerce, ideology, and public sensibility, and is grounded in the social realities from which audiences may hope to escape. By its ability to lift the spirit, Opera seems to transcend all of that. Its virtuosity inspires us with hope and implores exemption from the everyday scrutiny of critics who would spoil the fantasy. This essay asked the question, “Whose fantasy?”
1. Catherine Clement, Opera, or the Undoing of Women, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 20.
2. Giacomo Puccini, Giuseppi Adami, and Renato Simoni, Turandot. An Opera in Three Acts. La Scala, Milan, 1926. The Australian Opera’s production of Turandot was presented by the State Opera of South Australia, Adelaide Festival Theatre, Adelaide, 1996.
3. Although Puccini’s opera was produced in the twentieth century, his life, work, and ideas (especially concerning women, Asia, and Orientalism) reflected themes prominent in the nineteenth century; Turandot was his last, unfinished work.
4. “Far Eastern” is of course an extremely Eurocentric term. As Derek Scott observes, in Orientalism and Musical Style, the East is, “far from us and therefore the word relies on a metageography for its meaning.” See Derek B. Scott, “Orientalism and Musical Style,” The Musical Quarterly 82, no. 2 (1988): 323.
5. Giacomo Puccini, Giuseppi Giacosa, and Luigi Illica, Madama Butterfly. An Opera in Three Acts. First performed, La Scala, Milan, 1904.
6. As discourses about Southern and Middle Eastern Orientalism use different codes of signification from that of their Far Eastern counterparts, this discussion does not engage with operas such as Samson and Delilah or Aida. The latter operas project images of a different fantasy landscape and people: Madame Butterfly and Turandot are not mythologized in the same “belly-dancing” mode as Salome or Delilah. They represent erotic dynamics of females from two different fantasy landscapes: in the (masculine) gaze of visual art, Asian women were usually painted inside their kimonos and not naked as were countless Middle Eastern or Turkish women.
7. Giacomo Puccini, Giuseppi Giacosa, and Luigi Illica, Madama Butterfly. An Opera in Three Acts, La Scala, Milan, 1904.
8. William Weber, “Beyond Zeitgeist,” The Journal of Modern History 66, no. 2 (1994): 321–45.
9. Henrika Kuklick, The Savage Within: The Social History of British Anthropology, 1885–1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
10. Weber considers that music’s interpreters persisted with approaches that were not tolerated in other fields (from which they were isolated) because of the widespread disillusion and fragmentation of the twentieth century, as the arts became a refuge of unity and heroic fantasy: “The intense intellectual passion for this mode of thought is spiritual in nature: its popularity stems from a need to perceive a higher unity within an increasingly disunified and desacrilised culture” (Weber, 323).
11. Dorinne Kondo, About Face: Performing Race in Fashion and Theater (New York: Routledge, 1997), 230.
12. Heidi Tolles Motkus, “The Art of Cultural Studies,” Phi Kappa Phi Forum 83, no. 13 (Summer 2003): 8.
13. Weber’s information on the frottola is found in William Prizer, “Lutenists and the Court of Mantua in the Late Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries,” Journal of the Lute Society of America 13 (1980): 4–34, and Isabella d’Este Lorenzo da Pavia, “Master Instrument Maker,” Early Music History (1982): 87–127. Weber cites Zaslaw’s idea that Mozart’s choices of composition were chiefly determined by their economic viability: the composer abandoned pieces for which he did not have a patron or audience: in other words, his “daily professional activities” were a part of the system “through which culture is produced and consumed.” See Neil Zaslaw, “Mozart as a Working Stiff,” in On Mozart, ed. James Wood (New York: Woodrow Wilson Center Press), 1994.
14. Sean Metzger observes that like Carlo Gozzi’s Persian-inspired play of 1761, Puccini’s Turandot, emerged from a “series of uneven cultural exchanges and unabashedly orientalist fantasies.” In a letter to one of his librettists, Puccini encouraged his wordsmith “to find a Chinese element to enrich the drama and relieve the artificiality of it.” See Giuseppe Adami, ed. Letters of Giacomo Puccini (London: Harra, 1974), 272, quoted in Sean Metzger, “Zhang Yimou’s Turandot,” Asian Theatre Journal 20, no. 2 (Fall 2003): 209–9.
15. Gina Marchetti has given a particularly clear analysis of the ways in which Asian female images have been projected in motion pictures. See Gina Marchetti, Romance and the “Yellow Peril”: Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
16. The libretto was the starting point of operatic musical composition. Operatic music is a vehicle of narration and is mostly subordinate to the libretto’s demands; however, it may diverge from and intensify the drama and dominate the production. Delays in librettists Adami and Alfano’s output probably contributed to Puccini’s failure to complete Turandot.
17. Linda Hutcheon, Opera, Disease, Death (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 11.
18. The Victorian British craze for Japonisme and Chinoiserie was also a powerful determinant of racialized meaning at the time, but space presently available does not permit its discussion.
19. Shearer West, The Victorians and Race, 2nd ed. (Aldershot and Vermont: Ashgate, 1998), 2.
20. For much of the information in this paragraph, I am indebted to D. Lorimer, “Race, Science and Culture: Historical Continuities and Discontinuities, 1850–1914,” in West, The Victorians and Race, 1998.
21. According to Keane’s Ethnology, the Chinese possessed pronounced Mongolian characteristics, but the Japanese were only “slightly tinged with it.” “The Mongols” were classified as beneath Caucasians.
22. See A. H. Keane, Ethnology: The Primary Ethnical Groups, 2, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1896), 479.
23. Keane, Ethnology, 479.
24. The term “Other” is well-worn and due for a change: in the absence of another term as compact and accessible, I use it as a form of shorthand.
25. In Italy, where most operas popular in Europe were composed, people from all classes attended the opera (perhaps because of its large outdoor venues such as the Arena di Verona), but in most other Western countries, opera halls and after-show dinner parlours were dominated by the upper and middle classes.
26. David J. Levin, ed., Opera through Other Eyes (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1993), 14.
27. Levin, Opera Through Other Eyes, 14.
28. Levin, Opera Through Other Eyes, 14–15.
29. There are undocumented reports that a Japanese woman sang operatic arias in late 1800s in Britain, but this was an exception to the rule that continued through the first half of the 1900s.
30. William Ashbrook and Harold Powers, Puccini’s Turandot: The End of the Great Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 11.
31. Toshio Yokoyama, Japan in the Victorian Mind (Hampshire and London: Macmillan, 1987), 107. See also Liza Dalby, Kimono (London: Vintage, 1993), 95–96.
32. Daniel Bar-Tal, Stereotyping and Prejudice: Changing Conceptions, Springer Series in Social Psychology (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1989); Simon James Beal, “Stereotype Knowledge, Personal Beliefs, and Racial Prejudice in Children” (Honors thesis, University of Adelaide, 2000); Richard Dyer, The Matter of Images: Essays on Representations (London and New York: Routledge, 1993); J. F. Dovidio, “Racial Stereotypes: The Contents of Their Cognitive Representations,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 22 (1986): 22–37; Sander L Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985).
33. Rosemary Breger, Images of Japan in the German Press and in Japanese Self-Presentation (New York and Paris: Peter Lang, 1990).
34. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Travistock, 1972).
35. Breger, Myth and Stereotype, 5.
36. Gilman, Difference and Pathology, 16.
37. Gilman, Difference and Pathology, 15.
38. David A. Napier, Foreign Bodies: Performance, Art, and Symbolic Anthropology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), xviii.
39. Butterfly’s honor would not have been particularly compromised by such a desertion in Nagasaki in the late 1800s: these types of transactions of economic expediency were common at that time, and were regarded pragmatically by the populace. It is more feasible to conclude that a “broken heart” and the alienation from her family would have precipitated the suicide, rather than honor. However, European playwrights, librettists and novelists loved to include a “hara kiri” (an incorrect term) scene in tales of Japan.
40. In the racially obsessed climate of the late 1800s, miscegenation was frowned upon. It was held that inter-marriage with other races lower on the hierarchy would lead to the degeneration of the Caucasian races.
41. Giacomo Puccini, “Turandot.” Esso Nights at the Opera, State Theatre of the Victorian Arts Centre, dir. Graeme Murphy (Melbourne: ABC television and Australian Opera, 24 November 1991).
42. Giacomo Puccini, Esso Nights at the Opera, Act 3.
43. As the Tartars were Turkish-Mongolians, Calef was thus “Chinese” enough to avoid intimations of miscegenation.
44. Mark Peploe and Bernardo Bertolucci, The Last Emperor, dir. Bernado Bertolucci, prod. Jeremy Thomas, Tokyo, Columbia Pictures, 1987.
45. See Phil Hammond, Cultural Difference, Media Memories: Anglo-American Images of Japan (London and Herndon, VA: Cassell, 1997). For a Japanese perspective, see Japan Photographer’s Association, A Century of Japanese Photography (New York: Panthenon, 1980), 325–356.
46. Gilman, Difference and Pathology, 16.
47. Gilman, Difference and Pathology, 18.
48. Examples of “Butterfly” literature include: Richard Setlowe, The Sexual Occupation of Japan (New York: HarperCollins, 2000); James Webb, The Emperor’s General (London: Penguin, 1999); Graham Greene, The Quiet American, 1952, (Hammondsworth: Penguin in association with Heinemann, 1962). See also a “Butterfly” musical: Claude-Michel Schonberg, Alain Boublil, and Richard Maltby, Cameron Mackintosh Presents Miss Saigon: A Musical (London: Wise, 1990).
49. Zhang Yanou, Turandot in the Forbidden City, Working People’s Cultural Palace, Beijing, September 1998.
50. Henry Chu, “A great wall comes Down: Puccini’s “Turandot” Makes Its Long Awaited Debut in China,” Los Angeles Times, September 7 (1998), sec. F, 1.
51. Sean Metzger, “Zhang Yimou’s ‘Turandot’” Asian Theatre Journal 20, no. 2 (Fall 2003): 215, 209.
52. Sean Metzger, Asian Theatre Journal, 210.
53. Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs (New York: Hill and Wang, 1970).
54. Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs, 5.
55. Derek B. Scott discusses Orientalist musical signifiers that permit the “immediate comprehension of musical allusion.” These include tunes based on a pentatonic scale, “perfect fourth and fifth intervals moving in parallel motion,” gong crashes and dissonance. According to Scott, the “final eleven tragic Orientalist measures of Madama Butterfly” provide a paradigmatic model of the Far Eastern Orientalist “sound” used by Western composers. See Scott, Orientalism and Musical Style, 327.