Yesterday, the radio opera was Madama Butterfly. I assume everyonehas at least heard of it and maybe something from it, even if not the whole thing. Certainly from the song “Poor Butterfly” all the way to “M(onsieur) Butterfly on broadway, creative artists have assumed that everyone knows the story (which is probably as old as humanity, though the odlest i can trace it to is “Madame Chrysantheme” by Pierre Loti, which itself inspired the opera “Lakmé,” set in india with an English cad, whereas of course Butterfly is set in Japan with an American cad. It’s always beautiful to listen to, and always makes everyone cry, which “Lakmé” doesn’t necessarily/ I’m pretty sure that’s because somewhere between Loti and Puccini the detail got added of her having birthed a child in his absence, and that really ups the stakes. It also makes the opera more difficult to produce, but everyone stages it anyway. Totally unrelated, but May 12, today, always reminds me of my (very) long ago youth. In my last year of high school and my first couple of years of college I enjoyed playing bridge, and preferred the high school club even after graduation because the college one was duplicate bridge, and very, very serious. You know kids that age – we all thought we were clever. We had nicknames for certain kinds of tricks, such as one where all the cards were honor cards was called a “Summit Conference.” A trick where three cards were honor cards and one not was called a “May 12th, because, on May 12, 1960, Khrushchev had walked out on a summit conference – and that was such a short time before it was practically still news.
Well, this is interesting. Sure too bad this didn’t come out earlier.
There’s a whole lot of information here, and some, but not all, of the snippets which follow the longer first section have some relevance to that section.
