I allow myself to steal the title of this Saturday's Punyalada from an important article by the philosopher and professor of Aesthetics Magda Polo published last Wednesday in the Diari Ara in which, after attending the premiere of the Puccini opera at the Liceu. Polo wondered if the genre of sung theater "does not need new content or if it would be necessary, before starting an opera of this musical and dramatic magnitude, to make the public reflect on the condition of women today." Far from advocating a cancellation policy and without intending to send Giacomo Puccini to the dustbin of history, the writer recalled the archetype of Cio-Cio-San as a woman existentially cloistered, also castrated by an orientalist vision of the submissive female and whose suicide "can be interpreted as a glorification of extreme sacrifice for love and honor, a narrative that has often been used to limit women's freedom and justify their subjugation."
I would say that the (legitimate and reasoned) concerns expressed by Dr. Polo have a reassuring answer within the very evolution of opera as a changing genre. Indeed, female characters transit through different paradigms over time, not always in line with a purely progressive evolution; this is how, in Mozart's operas, women are usually dignified as paradigms of wisdom and emotional empathy (even in a piece as poorly read by Yankee feminist theorists as Cosí fan tutte). Later, it is true that the romantic canon ---which morbidly monopolizes the programming of most theaters in the world--- often portrays femininity as a scapegoat for male heroism and its usual violence. However, 20th-century opera moves towards heroines like Lulu or Marie of Berg, women who suffer equally, but are in full struggle to impose their subjective criteria.
In this sense, establishing a new canon of femininity in romantic opera would not only involve better contextualizing the repertoire (something that directors and stage managers and a large part of contemporary musicology have been doing for decades, as Professor Polo should know), but also endowing the operas of the last century and of our strict contemporaneity with the most sacred aura of tradition, something that would naturally lead us to attend many more operas set to music and written by women. Changes are always imposed with much more parsimony than we would like and any critical contextualization of opera will be welcome, but I would say that today's audience is intelligent enough not to need a moral babysitter whispering in their ear that Pinkerton is a objectifying asshole of a post-adolescent geisha.
In this sense, it is paradigmatic that music lovers are treated in such an uncritical way as Polo does: according to her position, before music like Puccini's, "oriented to amplify the emotional truth of the characters," one is led to connect with the sentimental realm and such a transition ---following the thread of the argument--- can lead us to buy its subliminal message: "And what is that subliminal message? That this vision of women can no longer be allowed, because this way of representing them no longer fits into current society." We would have to talk at length about this alarmingly dangerous verb, "allow," because the politics of cultural cancellation not only lies in prohibition, but also in a particular type of presentism that allows itself to evaluate past moral conceptions and uses with the warmth of knowing itself ethically superior and with a certain impulse to perform the task of judge.
As always happens, the best way to bracket a work from the Western cultural tradition is to perform it. Is it necessary to contextualize Puccini's pieces in light of our present (also imperfect)? Yes and absolutely yes, but always remembering that the universe of aesthetics and that of morals have spaces of coincidence, but they are two absolutely distant realms in the ocean of knowledge. In turn, it should be remembered that sentimental involvement does not necessarily entail acquiescence in the moral sphere: we can mourn the death of Cio-Cio-San, ultimately, without this implying happily accepting being in favor of the abandonment and vexation of Japanese ladies. I know this is a very basic notion, practically a first-year thought course, but lately we have university professors who wouldn't even pass a minimum MOT. In short: programming Butterfly today and a century from now will make all the sense in the world.