A hybrid in the garden of melody, with passionate Italian sentiment tingling the formal and fragile grace of the Japanese setting, the title role seemed as well adapted to Occidental singers as to any other. But Henry Savage had the inspiration or the lack to find a Japanese singer for it. Thus began the glorious but transitory career of Tamaki Miura, who fluttered like a butterfly across the operatic scene, played for several seasons with the San Carlo Opera Company, and then with all a butterfly's casual and unexpected grace fluttered away again into obscurity.

"East is East and West is West," says the frequently quoted proverb. That the twain can never meet is, of course, the theme of the drama. But a more remarkable phase of this gateless barrier is the fate of the operatic butterflies who sing it. While the part of Cho-Cho-San proved itself more appropriate to a Japanese singer than to any Westerner, it is also practically the only role in opera which a Japanese girl is allowed to sing.

And so there is a tragedy of frustration in the artistic life of the Cho-Cho-Sans of opera not unlike the love tragedy of the heroine they depict.

In case the story is unfamiliar to the new generation of playgoers, it is briefly thus: A young American Naval lieutenant named Pinkerton fell in love with the dainty little Japanese girl in Nagasaki, and decided to marry her. At a party in the house he chose for the honeymoon, the American consul warned him that the union was unwise and could only bring unhappiness. But the lieutenant was too recklessly in love to listen.

Cho-Cho-San promised to renounce her religion for her husband's, vowing like Naomi that his people would be her people and his God her God. To the horror of her relatives who deplored her change of faith, a marriage contract was signed between them. Her family deserted her, and her life centered itself wholly in love for the husband and in the child later born of the romance.

The lieutenant was recalled to sea suddenly with the man-of-war, but promised to return. Three years later, with the child and a faithful maid, Cho-Cho-San was still patiently watching for the ship, unshaken in her faith that the lieutenant would come back to her and deaf to the tactfully conveyed doubts of the maid and of the consul.

The consul then received a letter from the lieutenant announcing that he had married an American girl and was coming to Nagasaki on a visit. Compassionately the consul brought the letter to Cho-Cho-San's house, intending to break the news to her that she had been deserted. But her joyful exclamations at the first hint that Pinkerton was returning checked him, and he could not find it in his heart to tell her the truth.

Cho-Cho-San ordered her maid to strew the room with flowers. All night she kept a vigil at the window, with the child, watching for the ship. At daybreak the maid at last prevailed on her to take some rest, promising to call her when the lieutenant appeared.

 

 

The consul and the lieutenant entered the house together and met the maid. She saw a lady in the garden, and learned from the consul that this was Pinkerton's American wife. Weeping, she went to awaken her mistress and break the tragic news to her.

When Cho-Cho-San was finally brought to understand that she had been abandoned, she chose to die. She blindfolded her child and then stabbed herself with a dagger her father has used to commit suicide, at the Emperor's command.

Entering the room to ask for her forgiveness, Lieutenant Pinkerton found her dying.

 

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Role Makes Searching Demand on Talents

 

Among the poignant songs in the opera is one in which the little Japanese mother sings to her child, "Sal cos' ebbe cuore--" (Do you know sweet one) a pitiful appeal to little "Trouble" not to listen to the bad man (the consul) when he suggested that her husband had forgotten her. Another is the famous flower duet, in which, greatly excited at the sound of the cannon announcing the entry of the man-of-war into the harbor, she bids her maid scatter the room with blossoms.

The role makes a searching demand on the singer's powers of emotional acting as well as on her sense of beauty and grace. Tamaki Miura, the first Japanese diva to attempt it, left something to be desired, the critics agreed. Her intonation had at times a nasal sing-song effect and some tinny timbres that did not consort well with the emotional flow of Puccini's music.

Then came one of the windfalls of destiny which occasionally match the predestined artist to the proper role. Hizi Koyke arrived in America unheralded from the Far East. Born in Tokyo of Christianized Japanese parents, she is said to have arrived in Canada as foster-child of an American doctor and his wife. At 15 she was brought to the United States to study, and completed her education in New York, at Columbia.

In manner, speech and dress, she is thoroughly American. She has a sparkling sense of humor, can tell amusing stories, and "wise-crack" with the sophisticates. With her bright eyes and tinkling laugh, she is an ornament to any company. As an artist, no human grace is alien to her, and in art there are supposed to be no racial boundaries.

One distinguished musical critic says of her performance, "She is to all purposes an Occidental artist with a thorough understanding of our stage effects. She enacts the embarrassed delight, the ingenuous passion, the patient vigil and the final catastrophe in 'Madame Butterfly' with the utmost sureness. Her histrionic success comes paradoxically from the fact that she is not too Japanese . . . She has established a unique command of the role by splendid singing, acting of gripping intensity and incidentally by the fact that she looks Cho-Cho-San as only a Japanese girl can."

And yet in opera she is an isolated and almost tragically lonely figure. Her ambition is to sing Manon, Mimi or Juliette--Western parts for which she will probably never be cast owing to the physical barrier that she is beautifully of the Orient.

Her voice, while small, is bright and well rounded; her talents are admittedly equal to the roles she would like to sing; she is admired and loved by her fellow artists.

But East is East and West is West, say the wise me, even in the realms of art, where, if ever, they might be expected to meet. Hizi Koyke does not rebel or complain at the restriction. She believes the greatest art in the world is simply, "to be a woman," and her only expressed regret is that she did not return to Japan to teach, after studying at Columbia.

However there is one rendezvous where the West will always be glad to have met her--among the cherry blossoms of the beautiful and moving drama she so perfectly adorns.