Madama Butterfly at Den Norske Opera & Ballett

The performance was magisterial in every way” - wrote Norwegian daily Dagbladet when Madama Butterfly had its premiere in autumn 2012. Director Stephen Langridge sets Puccini’s opera in Japan in the years immediately following World War Two. American soldiers are occupying the country and there is desperate poverty and mass prostitution. Against this scenario, Butterfly and Pinkerton meet – she with a dream of the freedom that America represents, he with a longing for the exotic Far East, and both of them on a collision course with reality.