Madama Butterfly was mentioned here and there on this site, while more recently we looked at opera trends in fashion and at skethes for opera costumes.
At the moment it's also cherry blossom season in major cities in Japan, such as Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka, while "grass sakura" covers the fields around Mt. Fuji in blankets of pink flowers.
I decided to merge the two things – opera and cherry blossoms – in my new necklace to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Giacomo Puccini's Madama Butterfly debuting at Milan's La Scala (17th February 1904; opera fans may remember that the debut was actually a bit of a disaster…).
The necklace is about Ciocio-san waiting for Pinkerton and singing "Un bel dì vedremo" (One fine day we will see), the opera's most famous aria in which she tells Suzuki her husband will come back.
For further inspirations I looked up at the colours for the opera posters by Adolfo Hohenstein (1904), Leopoldo Metlicovitz (1904), and Ercole Brini (1955; this was a film adaptation of the opera, directed by Carmine Gallone and with Kaoru Yachigusa and Nicola Filacuridi as Butterfly and Pinkerton), plus the original costume sketches by Giuseppe Palanti, especially for the violet shades in one of his drawings that I tried to replicate in the colour of the rope.
The main material I employed is driftwood that I found a while back. I polished and hand-painted it in a cherry blossom shade. I spent a few days mixing colours to get the right shade right to paint the wood and the grass sakura (made with a sponge…), but, judging from the final results, it was absolutely worth it.
While Puccini's "Madama Butterfly" ends in a tragic way, the necklace freezes the scene in a rather positively hopeful moment in which confidence and expectation prevail over despair.
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