Can I still love "Madama Butterfly"?

The return of Anthony Minghella's legendary Madama Butterfly to the repertoire of the Vienna State Opera also marks the return of a debate that could hardly be more explosive: how do we deal today with works that were created from a colonial perspective - and yet are part of the core of the operatic canon? What do we actually hear this evening? And what do we see?

Hardly any other cultural-political term is currently as charged as "cultural appropriation". Hardly any other term is able to excite feature pages, social media and rehearsal stages in equal measure. For some, it is a necessary corrective to centuries of dominance, for others it is a moral muzzle that places artistic freedom under general suspicion - a debate that is rarely conducted quietly.

What is meant is the adoption of aesthetic, religious or social forms of expression from one culture by another - particularly problematic when this adoption takes place within a power imbalance. Those who can appropriate without fear of consequences are usually on the stronger side.

Puccini's opera was written in 1904 in a world of imperial expansion. Japan was never formally a colony of Western powers. But after the forced opening of the country by Commodore Perry in 1853 and the so-called "unequal treaties", Western citizens lived in the newly opened port cities under special conditions. They lived in their own Western-style enclaves, flew their own flags, celebrated according to their own rules - and in the event of a dispute were not subject to Japanese courts but to the consulates of their own country. This practice was called extraterritoriality: a legal term for a very concrete experience - you were abroad and yet not really subject to its laws.

Pinkerton operates in such an atmosphere. His nonchalance, his ironic patriotism, his self-evident access to home and marriage are not merely personal characteristics. They are the expression of a system that guarantees him freedom of movement. The marriage "for 999 years, terminable monthly" that he concludes with Cio-Cio-San is an operatic exaggeration - and yet it gets to the heart of the matter: he can leave. She can't.

While the real balance of power was shifting in Japan's port cities, a completely different form of rapprochement was taking place in Europe: an aesthetic one. Around 1900, Japonisme was both a fashion and an obsession. Woodcuts, kimonos, lacquer work - Japan became a projection surface for elegance and foreignness. Music, on the other hand, eluded this admiration. Many considered it brittle, difficult to access, "primitive".

Puccini works in this field of tension. He approaches the foreign not as an ethnologist, but as a man of the theater. He studied Japanese song collections, had melodies sung to him and even integrated the Japanese national anthem into his score with "Kimi ga yo". The song "Miya Sama", which he uses for the rich Yamadori, was familiar to European audiences from the successful operetta The Mikado by Gilbert and Sullivan - a biting satire on Victorian society and its enthusiasm for Japan.

Puccini also works with pentatonic turns of phrase, glockenspiel and plucked strings reminiscent of koto or shamisen. None of this results in an ethnographic protocol. It results in a stage Japan - a sonic sign of foreignness that is conceived from Europe.

This is the neuralgic point. Puccini does not depict Japan; he constructs it. For him, exoticism is not a sonic archive of a foreign culture, but a deliberately used theatrical device, an effect. Japanese elements become signs of foreignness. Even the famous motif of Butterfly's father's suicide - long thought to be authentic - comes from a Chinese music box. The difference is not documentary, but aesthetic.

However, those who accuse it of cultural appropriation are perhaps overlooking the sophistication of the score. The melodies with "Japanese" connotations are often heard precisely when Butterfly wants to assert herself as an American - when she wants to be called "Madama B. F. Pinkerton". The music contradicts her. It reminds us of an origin that cannot be erased. Exoticism is not merely decorative here, but psychological commentary.

He is not only the bearer of colonial power. He is also musically exoticized. His performance aria is permeated by American signals, including echoes of "The Star-Spangled Banner". For Italian audiences around 1900, America was also a projection space: young, aggressive, self-assured. Pinkerton's patriotism, his mixture of sentimentality and cynicism, seem like a cipher for a foreign modernity. The opera thus not only constructs an exotic Japan - it also constructs an exotic America. The difference lies in the power imbalance. Pinkerton's exoticism has no consequences. It decorates his figure, it characterizes him, but it does not take anything away from him. He remains sovereign, mobile, unassailable.

The situation is different with Cio-Cio-San. Her exoticism is not just a color, but a shackle. It makes her a projection surface. As a "delicate Japanese woman", as a childlike bride, as a promise of unconditional devotion, she is reduced to an image - and it is precisely this image that allows Pinkerton to treat her as an episode. Her strangeness is not an aesthetic effect, but part of a power structure. She is desired because she is exotic. And this is precisely what makes her vulnerable.

So is Butterfly the Western fantasy image of the sacrificial Asian woman? The libretto flirts with this idea. Puccini's music, however, contradicts it. Her voice - especially in "Un bel dì" - opens up an inner space that is not decorative, but existential. This is not an ornament, but a consciousness. In the music, Butterfly is transformed from a projected image into an acting figure.

For decades, it has been debated whether she is merely a victim of colonial structures. This perspective is legitimate - but it is not the only one. Butterfly's actions follow a logic that cannot be explained by cultural subordination alone. She resists her family, rejects Yamadori, who is courting her, and refuses any pragmatic solution. For three years, she clings to the idea that her marriage is an absolute commitment. For her, love is not a contract, but destiny.

One could describe this behavior as a one-sided amour fou - a love that knows no relativization. Cultural history is rich in such couples, right across the genres: Romeo and Juliet resort to poison and daggers, Tristan and Isolde sink into a night of love, Bonnie and Clyde die in a hail of bullets, Thelma and Louise chase over the cliffs in a convertible. Great lovers do not fear death; they accept it as the final consequence of a passion that does not tolerate half measures.

But Butterfly's case is more radical. Her love remains without a counterpart. Pinkerton does not love with the same intensity, not with the same consistency. He can leave. She can't. While the great lovers fail the world together, Butterfly fails alone. Her love finds no echo, no reflection. She does not die for a shared passion, but for an idea that only she herself upholds.

And this idea is not only for herself. It is also for her child. The moment Pinkerton returns, the inner logic of the tragedy changes. Butterfly's death is not only a gesture of passion, but also an act of maternal responsibility. If she cannot act as a wife, she at least wants to act as a mother. She believes she must secure a future for her son - even at the cost of her life. It is precisely this combination of absolute love and motherhood that gives the character her shattering greatness.

Anthony Minghella's Madama Butterfly was created in 2006 for the Metropolitan Opera in New York - at a time when the term "cultural appropriation" was not yet a hot topic in the press. The production was an overwhelming success and from there made its way through international opera houses before finding a home in Vienna. It was therefore not a reaction to an already heated cultural-political debate. And that is precisely why she seems remarkably forward-looking today.

Minghella - known to a wide audience as a film director with works such as The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley and Cold Mountain - always thought in images, in reflections, in visual axes. His opera direction is characterized by this cinematic sensibility. The large mirror on the stage is not a decorative element, but a visual thesis: We always see ourselves when we see. Reality and projection exist simultaneously. The stage design becomes a commentary on the gaze that appropriates Japan.

This is precisely why the production has aged well. It does not attempt to "correct" or modernize the historical work. It does not replace one image of Japan with another. Instead, it makes the artificiality visible. The Bunraku puppet for the child is not an attempt at ethnographic authenticity, but a deliberate setting: the theater shows itself as theater. The artificiality is not hidden, but emphasized. And this is precisely what creates emotional truthfulness.

The collaboration of Carolyn Choa, Minghella's wife and choreographer, is central to this. Her familiarity with East Asian theater and movement traditions lends the production a ritualized precision that clearly distinguishes it from the merely folkloric. Movements become signs, gestures become writing. The silent opening scene - Butterfly alone at the birth of her child - shifts the focus: before we see an exoticized figure, we encounter a human being. The production does not start with the ornament, but with the existential situation.

At a time when the debate about cultural appropriation often falls into two camps - here the defense of the canon, there the moral accusation - this production shows another possibility. It does not conceal the projections. It exposes them. It makes visible that we are always looking at an image - and asks what this image does to us.

Perhaps our task today is not to morally dispose of historical works or to celebrate them uncritically. Perhaps it is to reveal the mechanisms at work in them - power, projection, longing, desire. Madama Butterfly appropriates Japan. But it also shows how appropriation works - how a gaze takes possession and destroys in the process.

And this is precisely where its enduring impertinence lies: this opera is not just about a tragic love story. It tells of what happens when we desire the foreign - without being prepared to really see it.