Classic “Butterfly,” Another Quad-Cities Opera, Postponed Until 2022
The premiere of opera at Moline’s Bartlett Performing Arts Center again will be delayed, as Opera Quad Cities plans to postpone the tragic Puccini opera “Madame Butterfly” from this June to June 2022.
Opera Quad Cities is having to postpone its planned June 2021 production of “Madame Butterfly” until June 2022.
“I think it’s just tough to foresee audiences. I mean, we don’t know what the vaccination rates are gonna be in the Quad-Cities. We don’t know if audiences are gonna feel fully comfortable,” opera conductor Nathan Windt said this week.
“There’s just too many unknowns. The idea is that the main performance will happen next June,” he said of the need to postpone a full production again. Last April, the nonprofit opera company announced it was postponing the already cast “Madame Butterfly” from its original June 2020 performances to this June, because of the Covid pandemic.
The $12-million Bartlett Performing Arts Center at Moline High School was unveiled two years
Windt conducted the orchestra for the previous two Opera Quad Cities productions in 2018 and 2019 at SAU.
ago this week, and was decades in the making, inspired by one family’s love for the arts.
Insurance executive Robert E. Bartlett (1927-1998), whose father was a founder of Quad-City Music Guild, loved Moline and financially supported the regional arts scene during his life.
The Robert E. Bartlett Foundation funded two-thirds of the new center at 3600 Avenue of the Cities. The project involved completely rebuilding the 60-year-old auditorium and adding a 14,000-square-foot expansion, which includes a much larger lobby, new choir room, band room, scene shop, dressing rooms and multi-purpose room.
“Madame Butterfly” is a 1904 opera by Italian master Giacomo Puccini, about a U.S. naval officer named Pinkerton, who rents a house in Nagasaki, Japan, for himself and his soon-to-be wife, Butterfly. Her real name is Cio-Cio-san (from the Japanese word for “butterfly”) — a 15-year-old Japanese girl whom he is marrying for convenience, and he intends to leave her once he finds a proper American wife.
The last live opera presented by Opera Quad Cities was Gilbert & Sullivan’s “Pirates of Penzance,” performed in June 2019 at St. Ambrose University’s Galvin Fine Arts Center, in partnership with the opera program at Augustana College and Genesius Guild. Windt, SAU assistant
A scene from “Pirates of Penzance” in June 2019 at St. Ambrose University’s Galvin Fine Arts Center.
professor of music and director of choral activities, conducted the Opera Quad Cities orchestra.
In June 2018, the Q-C company presented the Mozart classic “The Marriage of Figaro,” in Allaert Auditorium at Galvin. At the time, it represented the first partnership of the nonprofit opera company formed in late 2001 — with Genesius Guild, Opera@Augustana and the SAU music department — pooling resources to mount a full production with sets, costumes and orchestra.
Opera Quad Cities partnered with the SAU music department, Augustana’s opera program and Genesius Guild to present “Pirates” in 2019.
For many years, summer opera productions sponsored by Genesius Guild and Opera@Augustana were in Rock Island’s Lincoln Park. In recent years, before 2018, they presented Strauss’s “Die Fledermaus,” Puccini’s “Gianni Schicchi,” Copland’s “The Tender Land” and selections from Gian Carlo Menotti.
The move to an indoor, climate-controlled environment aimed to provide productions with better acoustics, lighting and parking.
Windt said this week that they hope to have some kind of outdoor operatic performance outdoors in the warm months this year.
Nathan Windt is director of choral activities at St. Ambrose University.
“One of the things we could do is we have enough local artists that could potentially, like, set up a tent. You know, do a school do a school event in May or in September where we kind of like have outreach opportunities to the community about opera,” he said.
“That’s what we’re trying to do, is make sure we keep the community engaged,”
Windt said. “I mean, like all arts organizations, we’re persevering. There’s not much we can do right now. We care about the health of our patrons, but we also want them to know that we’re very much still planning on performances again when we can safely meet again.”
He said that while “Butterfly” was cast in late 2019, it may have to be recast for 2022, depending on performers’ schedules.
Jacob Bancks, who teaches composition at Augustana College, has written a new opera, “Karkinos,” to be done in February 2022 with the Quad City Symphony.
The long-planned premiere of the commissioned opera “Karkinos” – a collaboration between the Quad City Symphony Orchestra and Living Proof Exhibit – also was again delayed last fall, until February 2022 at the Bartlett Performing Arts Center.
The opera, penned by Jacob Bancks (an Augustana College associate professor of music), was first scheduled to be done May 10, 2020 at the Bartlett Performing Arts Center.
Due to the coronavirus pandemic, it was moved to Feb. 12, 2021, but QCSO executive director Brian Baxter said because of the surge of Covid cases in the fall, the number of people to perform in and attend the opera, it made sense to postpone again.
“Covid is really bad right now; it wasn’t really going to work well, given the tight quarters this performance needs to be done in,” Baxter said in November. “For the safety of our musicians, guest artists, we didn’t feel like we could provide a safe enough environment in the next couple months to make that happen.”
In addition to three main vocal soloists, “Karkinos” calls for a chorus of 16 and orchestra of 15, and the premiere is meant to draw in many cancer patients and survivors in the audience. Moline-based Living Proof is a nonprofit that offers free programs that show the therapeutic benefits of the arts for those affected by cancer.
Augustana is actually going to perform “Pirates of Penzance” (in a wacky 1960s reimagining) this next month, outdoors at the Ruth and Lefty Anderson Pavilion, April 8-11.
