Lebanon, Puccini

I'm just back from Lebanon (that would be Lebanon, New Hampshire) where I heard a performance of Puccini's Madame Butterfly.  If you pay no mind to the ridiculous racist orientalist anti-American story, it's a pretty good opera.  The orchestra, though small, was excellent and the singers top-notch.  The music is a little on the overwrought side, and the garish emotional display makes Dostoevsky seem in comparison like drawing-room comedy.  It's a sad, dated story.  While Emma Bovary found the solution to her problem in arsenic, Anna Karenina in the locomotive and Edna Pontellier in the water, Cio-cio-san elects the knife -- more evidence, if more is needed, for women's paucity of choices in the grand old days.  But great melodies, no question.  The opera crowd was, as usual, a little on the geriatric side -- and as a consequence I felt quite youthful bounding up to the balcony.  At breakfast the next day, a friend admitted to being moved by Cio-cio-san's suffering.  "Did you cry," I asked.  His reply:  "I'm not saying."