Coco was thinking about Cio-cio-san the other day and noticed a striking similarity between Madama Butterfly and the young Shulamitess in the stage play by Solomon. Madama Butterfly will be no stranger to you, and perhaps the story familiar. Some would say that Puccini spent forty years trying to write this opera and the last twenty years of his life trying to write it again, it containing the epitome of operatic drama outside Bayreuth however could not be reproduced.
If you compare photographs of the two gentlemen you may see a striking similarity between the differences between their music and that which is between their temples.
Leaving that aside, as it is not a discussion into which we would wish to enter today, both the stage play (the Song) and the stage opera (Butterfly) contain all of the necessary elements for the success of what is known today as a soap. It is a strange use of the word, derived from the long form usage in soap opera which acknowledges the frivolous largesse of the manufacturers of epidermal cleansing products. The infatuation of a young lady with the promise of elevation in social status occasioned by the presence of an older eligible man, intrigue, infidelity, adultery, bigamy and dare I mention child abuse are all to be found by those who look even only on the surface. Puccini’s music goes some way towards sanitising the outstandingly flawed characters of the individuals employed in the action of the legend of Butterfly, but one cannot escape that the captain is no better, perhaps even worse, than that which is reputed to be true of every mariner. The sanitisation perhaps even earns the opera the grand accolade of soap opera extraordinaire even though it does not contain the multiple story lines and cliff-hanger ending of the later soaps. It remains nothing more than a tragedy, but nevertheless when you listen to it, in a language you do not understand, you can understand why it took Puccini forty years of practice before he wrote it and spent the rest of his life trying to imitate it.
You know the story, in brief it is of a young geiko, or perhaps even only a maiko, who catches the eye of a sailor and in it sees a way out of her poverty. A weak superior to the sailor permits him to marry her, knowing full well that he intends to abandon her, which he does when he returns to his homeland, where he bigamously marries a local lass. Returning to Japan a few years later he discovers that she has waited for him and that he has a son. He cannot face the consequences of his actions. She commits suicide. The only redeeming feature in the story being that the lass whom he deceived and married is willing to bring up the young child as her own.
In the story of the Shulamite, we have a young country girl, who though she is not exactly living in poverty as we discover towards the end of the play for her father is quite a wealthy man, also sees an opportunity for elevation in her social status when the king is caught by her eye on a royal visitation to the area in which she lived. It is not stated so clearly, but it would not be out of place to think that it was her father who hosted the king during that visitation. The prospective rise in status from country lady to queen somewhat outstrips that of a poor maiko to foreign ship’s captain’s wife. Her age however is similar to that of the maiko. The encounter leads to marriage, but not quite in the same way as the maiko’s, for the king makes her entrance into the royal household a very public matter as she is taken up to Jerusalem in a royal palanquin, a carriage festooned with all of the comforts that befit a future queen, in a grand parade that would shame even those military parades of our contemporary world’s most despotic of leaders. All seems to be idyllic.
We then find that she is not the first. There are already sixty other queens and to add trouble to trouble there are eighty concubines as well. She was number sixty-one or one hundred and forty-one however you may wish to count it. We know, but not from the play, that another eight hundred and fifty-nine would follow her. This king seems to be lower even than the captain of Puccini’s Butterfly, and it is true: his wives did turn away the heart of the king. There is a tragedy here, but it is not the tragedy about which Puccini sang.
The Song of Songs which Solomon wrote is a story of a love far greater than the love of a captain for a maiko, though it is written in such terms. The presence of the other queens and concubines in the play is not to demean or shame the new queen, but rather to exalt her, and in exalting her to exalt the others also. It is impossible for us to devote ourselves in marriage to more than one individual in the way that marriage requires, but this little play points us to the one who does so love each one of his people in such a way that each one of them can hear him say: ‘O my love, you are as beautiful as Tirzah, lovely as Jerusalem, awesome as an army with banners! Turn your eyes away from me, for they have overcome me. My dove, my perfect one, Is the only one, the only one of her mother, the favourite of the one who bore her. The daughters saw her and called her blessed; the queens and the concubines, and they praised her. ‘
John records for us that ‘before the feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that his hour had come that he should depart from this world to the Father, having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end’. John was speaking about the death of the Lord on the Roman cross, where he by paying, in a very public event, the price for our sins, so clearly shown in both Puccini and the Song as they reflect the world in which we live, became able to welcome us into the royal household.
Before he left his disciples he promised that he would not leave them: ‘I will not leave you orphans; I will come to you’. Later that evening he told them ‘I tell you the truth. It is to your advantage that I go away; for if I do not go away, the helper, the Holy Spirit, will not come to you; but if I depart, I will send him to you‘. Now we are granted entrance into the royal household of King Jesus, where we may hear, together with the multitude of other believers, far more in number than Solomon collected, his voice speaking to each one of us individually as Solomon in his play spoke to his queen – though perhaps not with quite the same words.
Despite the tragedy of Solomon’s life, the play speaks, as it speaks of a love far greater than we could ever know, of the love of Jesus for his people. Do you know his love for you? He does not keep it hidden. Speak to him: Remember me Lord, when you come into your kingdom.