Madame Butterfly and the endings that always make us cry

In the last act, of the last scene, the geisha kills herself. It is one of the most sung endings in the world and yet one hopes that not this time, that Madama Butterfly does not cut her throat with the dagger, that Puccini finally takes pity on his creature and that we do not cry aloud again with his tragic fate. But not. When the curtain falls, the handkerchiefs are not enough to wipe the taste of tears from the lips. Why do we cry when we already know the end? What kind of bones do we have to have to not break our souls over and over again with the same story?

Since Giacomo Puccini’s opera premiered in Italy in 1904, several generations have been moved by the tender Japanese woman who falls in love at the age of 15 with a North American naval officer with devastating consequences. The lieutenant abandons her pregnant in her little house in Nagasaki, she waits for him for years like Serrat’s Penelope waits for her lover on the platform, but he marries an American and then comes to claim her son to take him to the other side of the ocean. The beautiful Madam Butterfly, who had rejected several men to wait for her love, ends up with the dagger in her neck.

And that’s when that emotional carnage comes off the stage and passes through all of us who, even knowing how things end, let ourselves be dragged to the bottom of our minds and seats, clinging to a bunch of questions: Does she kill herself for love or for honor? Is it okay to applaud a work that conveys such a message of female submission? Is it a manifesto on machismo or a denunciation? And, the million dollar question: What would I have done in his place?

One cries out of emotion, out of joy, out of pain, out of sadness or because we put ourselves in the other’s shoes. We cry from the moment we are born until we die. “What a beautiful work Madame Butterfly,” Javier Milei tweeted last week after leaving Colón, where he received some applause and boos from the public. Will he have cried too?

Another Puccini ending that leaves no one with a dry handkerchief is that of Turandot. The last aria Nobody sleeps (no one sleeps) he just emotionally stripped Roger Federer before the world. It was when Andrea Bocceli, knowing that the former tennis player was present at her concert in Zurich, made him go on stage to dedicate to him one of the best-known victory anthems in opera.

The plot takes place in a legendary Beijing, where Princess Turandot challenges her suitors to solve three riddles. If they solve them they will get her heart. If not, they will die. The last candidate then launches his most shocking song I’ll win at dawn (At dawn I will win) and it is difficult not to start crying before his voice has faded. Let no one sleep, let no one sleep. At dawn I will win. You’ll make it? Another ending sung (and cried) a thousand times. Because every time you reach the last note you have the intuition of finding yourself on the verge of something new. After all, life is also an open work.