asente@decwrl.UUCP (Paul Asente) (11/09/84)
The record is getting fairly heavy airplay on KQAK in San Francisco lately; I haven't heard it on any other local stations. (Same station that stopped playing 99 Luftballoons months before it hit the pop charts.) I don't know about the video, but the story of the opera goes basically like this: Lt. B.F. Pinkerton is stationed in Japan at the turn of the century. He marries Cio-Cio San (pronounced "cho-cho san"), a 15 year old geisha girl, also known as Madame Butterfly. Pinkerton is your basic cad, even if he is a tenor. All he really wants is to get his rocks off, and before the wedding drinks a toast to the day he'll have a real, Americican wife. Cio-Cio, however, loves him and ends up being ostracised by the community and rejected by her family. Act 2, three years later. Cio-Cio San awaits Pinkerton's return. She is the only one who thinks he'll come back and rejects other lucrative marriage proposals since she still loves Pinkerton. Well, he comes back, alright, but he brings his new American wife with him. Cio-Cio San doesn't get to meet him but meets his wife. She decides that what is best for her little child (by our hero) is for him to go live in America. She sends him out to play where Pinkerton will see him and then commits suicide. Finis. The Malcom Maclaren version basically tells the same story from Pinkerton's viewpoint. As in the opera, he feels quite remorseful in the second act when he discovers what a cad he's been. The aria being sung is "Un Bel Di," "One Fine Day," which Butterfly sings at the beginning of act 2 describing that some day Pinkerton will return. It's the big hit of the opera. -paul asente "I'm the village idiot; I don't have anything to do with this pathetic little opera. I just felt like passing through." -P.D.Q. Bach, "Hansel and Gretal and Ted and Alice"