Un Bel Dì

Un Bel Dì
libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa
music by Giacomo Puccini

This will all come to pass as I tell you
Banish your idle fears, for he will return
I know it
– Butterfly, in Madama Butterfly

The next couple of posts may be a little sparse, so I apologize in advance. Today, though, let’s look briefly at the beautiful aria “One Fine Day” (Un Bel Dì) from Giacomo Puccini’s opera Madama Butterfly. Mr Puccini, an Italian, wrote one of the classics of all operadom, set in Japan and sung in Italian, about a US Naval officer and a beautiful, naïve, Japanese girl. In Act One, Butterfly and Lieutenant Pinkerton are married in an arranged ceremony. He returns to the United States and Butterfly spends all of Act Two and most of Act Three waiting for his return. We learn in the Second Act that the Lieutenant seems to think that the Japanese wedding “didn’t count”, and tragedy ensues in Act Three after Pinkerton returns to Japan with his American wife and child. In the middle of Act Two, though, Butterfly sings hopefully to her friend Suzuki about “un bel dì” in the by and by:

One fine day we’ll notice
A thread of smoke arising on the sea
In the far horizon
And then the ship appearing

The descending melodic line, vaguely pentatonic in nature, is as serene and beautiful as a cherry blossom floating earthward, or maybe a butterfly alighting. It captures Butterfly’s wistfulness and her knowledge that the outcome is not in her control. It also reminds me of a verse from that beautiful and powerful love story in the Bible:

What is that coming up from the wilderness,
Like a column of smoke,
Perfumed with myrrh and frankincense,
With all the fragrant powders of the merchant?
- Song of Solomon 3:6

We Christians, on this side of Easter, recognize the Song of Solomon as a sensuous and sensual depiction of Christ and His bride. Here is Butterfly singing again:

There is coming a man,
A little speck in the distance,
Climbing the hillock.
Can you guess who it is?
And when he’s reached the summit,
Can you guess what he’ll say?
He will call “Butterfly” from the distance.

And again from Solomon’s song (2:10-13):

My beloved speaks and says to me:
‘Arise my love, my fair one, and come away;
For now the winter in past,
The rain is over and gone.
The flowers appear on the earth:
The time of singing has come,
And the voice of the turtle-dove
Is heard in our land.
The fig tree puts forth its figs,
And the vines are in blossom;
They give forth fragrance.
Arise, my love, my fair one,
And come away.’

Butterfly looks forward to hearing again the affection inherent in the nicknames given her by her beloved:

He will call, he will call:
“Dear little wife of mine,
Dear little orange blossom!”
The names he used to call me when he came here.

As my friend Jim says, “the Lord knows you by your nickname.” We also learn of lovely names in chapter two of the Song of Songs:

Rose of Sharon

Lily of the Valley

Well, we know that Madama Butterfly ends in tragedy. But, thanks be to God, we have “a future and a hope” in the Lord. The story of His love for us is writ large on every page of the Bible, from the first chapter of Genesis to the final chapter of Revelation. Let’s close with this beautiful verse (22:17) from that last chapter:

The Spirit and the bride say, ‘Come.’
And let everyone who hears say, ‘Come.’
And let everyone who is thirsty come.
Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift.

And, in this context, Butterfly got it exactly right:

This will all come to pass as I tell you
Banish your idle fears, for he will return
I know it