By Jeff Wolf
February 1, 2004

The first opera I saw was Puccini’s "Madama Butterfly" in 1969, and the setting was anything but exotic — a Kentucky high school auditorium on the Ohio River, about as unlikely a place as you could imagine for a kid from West Texas to see an Italian opera set in Japan.

After 12 years in Abilene schools and two years at McMurry, I had set off to explore the outside world and transferred to Kentucky Wesleyan in Owensboro. Growing up in Abilene, I’d never had an opportunity to see live opera. And even though recordings I tried to listen to sounded like unintelligible squawking, I figured opening myself to new experiences was my main purpose at the time, just like seeing Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin at the Fillmore in New York the year before. So when the Indiana Opera Company ventured across the river for a one-night stand at Owensboro High School, I went to find out what the fuss was all about.

Despite the less-than-ideal circumstances, at Butterfly’s entrance I was transported to a realm of the imagination I didn’t know existed. It’s one of those magical moments in music that hardly anything can spoil. This live opera stuff, I said to myself, has possibilities.

The Abilene Opera Association’s production of "Madama Butterfly," which opens Friday night at the Paramount, marks the 100th anniversary of the work’s premiere in February 1904. Puccini was taking a risk with the "Oriental" music and the opera’s departure from conventional structure. Nevertheless, considering how famous this staple of the repertoire has become, it seems odd today that the Milan premiere was a disaster. Fortunately, Puccini believed in "Butterfly," and audiences soon embraced it.

Local opera fans will recall AOA’s dramatic 1999 staging of "Tosca," which followed "La Boheme" on Puccini’s big-hit list. It was while attending a performance of "Tosca" in London in 1900 that Puccini saw a play about a Japanese girl abandoned by the U.S. Navy lieutenant whose son she bears, and the composer began working on an operatic version of the story.

Act I presents a sweeping panorama of Japanese culture, with a multitude of possibilities for spectacular staging. Because of Hollywood’s wholesale adoption of Puccini’s "Oriental" music, the new sound world Italian audiences found so strange does not strike us as alien, and its beauties are immediately apparent.

Despite being renounced by her family, Butterfly falls in love with Pinkerton, the American officer, and gives up everything to marry him. During the last 10 minutes or so of the first act, Butterfly and Pinkerton sing a passionate duet in which she emerges as a flesh-and-blood woman rather than a two-dimensional cardboard cutout. If those 10 minutes don’t move you, a vital part of your humanity is gone.

Three years elapse between acts, and the narrowing of focus on Butterfly’s character in Act II is where Puccini departs from traditional operatic structure. The relatively small Paramount should be perfect for this intimate portrayal, which usually seems awkward on a wider, mostly empty stage.

On a hill overlooking the ocean, Butterfly waits for Pinkerton to return and sings one of the greatest songs ever written for soprano: "One fine day," she tells her serving woman Suzuki, "we’ll see a wisp of smoke rising from the distant horizon of the sea, and then the ship will appear." And the aria concludes: "I shall await him with unshakable faith." It’s enough to break your heart.

Since the mid-1990s, Abilene opera-goers have grown accustomed to top-flight productions here, thanks to the efforts of producer Jane Guitar and a behind-the-scenes supporting crew as long as your arm. Mounting an opera is as complicated as running a presidential campaign. It’s no small achievement to pull off one or two solid shows, but doing it year after year — well, it’s a delight we shouldn’t take for granted.

A world-class cast has been assembled, with established European stars in the principal roles and an accomplished French conductor leading probably the best orchestra AOA has put together.

Having access to a production of this quality of musical entertainment in the heart of downtown is one measure of how far 21st century Abilene has traveled from the town where I grew up. Skip this, and you’re missing one of the best experiences of the year.

Careful, though — see a live opera, and you might get hooked, just as I did back in Kentucky.

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