Pastin had her Metropolitan Opera debut in 2011 as Masha in Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades, following that role with Frasquita in Carmen during the 2012-13 season. Pastin received a degree from the University of Maryland, but the majority of her training came through young artist programs, including the apprentice program at Santa Fe Opera, later landing at Central City Opera, and finishing in 2010 with the two-year Resident Artist Program at Pittsburgh Opera. The text is set almost as if you are not singing.” “For me, it is really an honor to sing the role because it is almost like a rite of passage for my voice type… Puccini was a master of writing for the voice, he just wrote it perfectly as it should be expressed. “The music is beyond beautiful and it’s beyond moving,” claims Pastin. For Knoxville Opera’s Cio-Cio San, soprano Danielle Pastin, it is one supremely emotional journey. Instead, Puccini’s opera paints Cio-Cio San as an innocent victim of both an ethically bankrupt social system and a pleasure-seeking westerner.Īnd, then, there is Puccini’s magnificently beautiful score, which when juxtaposed with the dark tragedy of innocence victimized, is made even more powerful. However, Puccini and his librettists-Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica-created an original Act I which made alterations in the character presentations that have surely saved the work from what would have been an ignominious fate in the 21st Century. Pinkerton, who recklessly weds a young geisha, Cio-Cio San, in Nagasaki, only to abandon her-presented Japan not as it really was, but in simplified terms and aesthetics that turn-of-the-century western audiences imagined it to be. However, both the play and the 1904 opera-the story of an American naval officer, Lt. Puccini’s own theatrical talent, though, lay in manipulating the heartstrings of the audience through his music-a talent he inarguably demonstrates in Madama Butterfly, which opens Knoxville Opera’s 2019-20 season this weekend. Puccini was a huge admirer of Belasco, the American playwright, director, and producer, notably for his style of naturalism that reached into all corners of the theatre, from acting styles to staging to lighting. G iacomo Puccini, opera’s master of melodrama, was inspired to write his Madama Butterfly after seeing a London production of David Belasco’s play, itself based on the short story Madame Butterfly by John Luther Long.

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