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So there I was, sitting in the local Bijou, sold out for this hi-def Metropolitan Opera production of Madama Butterfly. And this time, unlike last time with Lucia di Lammermoor, the opera is really grabbing me. My eyes are filling with tears as poor Cio-Cio-San waits for Pinkerton's return. (Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton, indeed! This must be the Ben Franklin of "Advice to a young Man on the Choice of a Mistress.") I feel real, indignant anger at Pinkerton's casual use of this fifteen-year-old girl, his male chauvinism, and his imperialist attitudes (all too much like the foreign policies of the Bush administration). And, at the end, when Butterfly commits suicide, I feel both the shame and guilt that will overwhelm Pinkerton and a lot of vindictive glee at his pain.
I had, in short, a big emotional response. In my earlier blog on opera as music plus drama (Feb. 24, 2009), I noted that people praise opera as a genre because it combines music and story. But I suggested that opera fails to engage us emotionally on both those levels simultaneously, story and music, because two different time scales are involved. The music gives us patterns of expectation and fulfillment that take place in seconds. The story, however, gives us patterns of expectation and fulfillment that take place over an hour or even longer. The two don't combine. This production of Butterfly ran for more than three hours.
Yet, to the contrary, I have my powerful response to Madama Butterfly. You could explain the difference by simply saying Madama Butterfly is a better opera than Lucia di Lammermoor. I'd agree, but what do we mean by "better" here? And what cause and effect would you trace from that "better" to explain the difference in response?
I'll suggest a different way of thinking about opera, one that came to me as I thought about my disparate responses to these two operas.
The neuroscientists tell us that we humans, when we perceive a situation that, in normal primate experience, would arouse an emotion, we feel that emotion ourselves. When I see Cio-Cio-San's longing and grief and love, I will feel those emotions myself. Psychiatrist Leslie Brothers, who has specialized in studying primate social cognition, identified a path through the amygdala for this empathic reaction. She writes, "When we see facial displays, we register them in evolutionarily old brain networks that include structures such as the amygdala. . . . these networks are set to trigger behavioral dispositions appropriate to the social situations in which primates have commonly found themselves throughout their history." We need, she says, to think of our brains not as though they were isolated inside each one of us but rather as interconnected with the person we are relating to. In effect, our brains are porous to that other person's feelings, even in so artificial a situation as a soprano (Patricia Racette) twice Cio-Cio-San's age, singing arias in the beautiful but very stylized production by Anthony Minghella, Carolyn Choa, Han Feng, and Michael Levine that even included bunraku puppetry for Cio-Cio-San's little son. Yet, when she embraces that son (a puppet!) for the last time, I feel her terrible pain.
In general, Brothers claims, at mere representations of human (or primate) situations, we feel the emotions we would feel if we were actually in the situations and the situations were real. We feel grief, I feel grief, anyway, at Cio-Cio-San's love and death.
Brothers was writing in the mid-90s, and brain science changes fast. Nowadays some brain scientists explain this empathic reaction another way, by mirror neurons. Just about everybody has heard by now of the discovery that some motor neurons in a monkey's brain would fire while watching another monkey grasp a peanut, neurons in the region for the observing monkey's grasping actions. As Giocomo Iacoboni details in his recent book, this discovery has ramified and ramified. Mirror neurons fire when the monkey sees the experimenter grab a peanut. Mirror neurons enable the monkey to determine the intention behind the grasper's act. Mirror neurons fire when we hear sentences about actions. Ultimately, and this is crucial, Iacoboni writes, "Why do we give ourselves over to emotion during the carefully crafted, heartrending scenes in certain movies? Because mirror neurons in our brains re-create for us the distress we see on the screen. We have empathy for the fictional characters--we know how they're feeling--because we literally experience the same feelings ourselves."
In sum, we respond to the sight (and sound) of social situations by mirroring in ourselves the actions we witness and the characters' feelings about those actions. That response gives us an evolutionary advantage in understanding and dealing with our fellow hominins in life. In opera, then, what we respond to is not so much the story, but the situations. The stories in opera are, most people agree, banal, trite, and certainly too drawn out in time to sustain dramatic interest over the duration of an opera. But the situations! They are emotionally intense and relatively short-lived. They last about as long as an aria.
Listening to the music of an opera, then, we respond to the music plus the emotional situations associated by the story with that music. We truly do have music drama, but rather situation by situation rather than, as in a non-musical drama, over a complex and unfolding story line.
This is hypothesis, of course, but you can test it for yourself. Consider your response to a given aria, say, the famous Un bel di that Cio-Cio-San sings as she promises herself and her maid that Pinkerton really, really will return. Ask yourself how you respond to that aria in the opera and to the same aria when it is sung at a recital where we don't have Cio-Cio-San in her painful situation. For me, at least, the response is far more intense when I hear the aria in its opera, and I'll bet it is for you, too.
The situations in Lucia di Lammermoor, however, were far less intense. Falling in love despite family opposition doesn't arouse as much emotion as falling in love with someone who doesn't understand you and who is cruelly indifferent to your feelings. A brother's intercepting letters doesn't tug at the heartstrings like a deeply-loved man ignoring the feelings of his adoring wife.
In short, I think we can understand our responses to different operas and different productions of the same opera by considering our own and others' feelings and what they tell us about the situations in the operas.
There is, I think, yet another element that comes into my more intense response to Madama Butterfly: irony. But that will have to wait for another blog.
Psychological items I referred to:
Brothers, Leslie. Friday's Footprint: How Society Shapes the Human Mind. New York: Oxford UP, 1997. 98-99.
Iacoboni, Marco. Mirroring People. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2008. 4.
