By Marie Pfeifer
The origins of two “Japanese” tunes in Puccini’s opera, Madama Butterfly, have always been a mystery.
But musicologist W. Anthony Sheppard thinks he may have solved the riddle after hearing melodies from a music box in the Murtogh D. Guinness Collection of mechanical musical instruments and automata at the Morris Museum in Morris Township.
Specifically, it was a harmoniphone containing six Chinese songs that caught Sheppard’s ear. He recognized some of the melodies from Giacomo Puccini’s opera, Turandot.
This discovery inspired Sheppard to embark on a bit of musicological sleuthing in the United States, China and Italy. Sheppard shared his findings in a multimedia presentation at the Morris Museum’s Bickford Theatre last week.
The presentation included a live demonstration of an 1877 harmoniphone, equipped with a reed organ that played the six Chinese tunes from a cylinder.
There also was a performance of the aria from Madama Butterfly by award-winning lyric soprano Zhanna Alkhazova and pianist Jody Schum of Opera New Jersey.
“Was it possible that Puccini had heard this very box in Italy and that it provided crucial inspiration for Madama Butterfly?” asked Sheppard, who teaches music history at Williams College and currently is at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
It is well known by scholars that Puccini used Chinese tunes in Turandot. Sheppard said there were surprising connections between the music on the music box and the music in the two operas. The opening measures of Turandot seem to pick up exactly where the final measures of Madama Butterfly leave off.
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“Indulging in some interpretive fantasy play, we might even ask whether Turandot in 1924 has the 1904 Butterfly in mind when Turandot justifies her ruthless riddles and decapitations of suitors by telling of a long-lost female relative who had been ruined by a foreign male,” said Sheppard.
From Shanghai to Rome to Great Britain.
The Guinness box possesses clues indicating an encounter with Puccini. The box may have been owned by the Fassini family in Italy and heard by Puccini in time to be of use as he drafted Act I of Madama Butterfly, according to unpublished letters supplied to Sheppard by a Fassini descendant.
The tune sheet on the Guinness box bears the name of a Shanghai department store that carried Swiss watches and music boxes in the late 19th century. The title list in Chinese corrects the transliterated order of the last two songs to match how they actually appear on the cylinder, with Shiba Mo as the last melody, indicating that someone in China inspected this box.
Finally, the name and address of a repair shop in Rome on the tune sheet reveal that, unlike most other Swiss-made music boxes exported to China, this one returned to Europe and was even owned in Italy. Guinness acquired the box in the early 1960s.
Over the past 30 years, the registrar of the Musical Box Society of Great Britain reports, only 13 of 10,000 music boxes were listed as playing Chinese melodies. This is an indication that few boxes returned to the West from China and fewer still had the combination of melodies that appeared in Puccini’s operas. Sheppard summed up his research with the comment, “So far only the Guinness box presents all the right clues suggesting an encounter with Puccini.”
While Sheppard’s research uncovered the musical connection between Madama Butterfly and Turandot, and identified the origin of the music in Madama Butterfly as Chinese rather than Japanese, he believes the well-traveled Guinness box still retains some mysteries.
“A recent exploration inside this box revealed fake Chinese writing beneath a caricature of a woman with European facial features. So far this boxed Mona Lisa has refused to give up all her secrets.”
Sheppard also is the author of Revealing Masks: Exotic Influences and Ritualized Performance in Modernist Music Theater.
