The final chord of Madama Butterfly is just wrong. The melody crashes down onto the tonic on a perfect cadence, and sounds like it's finished. If anything, I expect a few closing chords based around the tonic - perhaps over a muffled drumroll, maybe with a diminuendo for good measure.
Instead, the orchestra hits a fourth, which sounds as though there MUST be another note coming up to enable it to resolve onto the third, but the resolution never comes.
Ah, I'm with Martin here - it's the
perfect chord on which that piece must end - how else could it end? It's interesting that everyone hears it differently, too! The music before has been in B-minor (Puccini's favourite death-associated key). So what's the final chord? I personally hear it as B-min-aug. However, I know people who believe it's a G-maj chord in first inversion, and Ruth's added a new one, too
The best staging of it I've seen was the old WNO production, in which Sharpless ran on in pursuit of Pinkerton, grabbed him, and forced his face into the dead face of Cio-Cio-San on the final chord, with a "look-what-you've-done-you-bastard" gesture.... because that's really what the chord "says". It's vicious, and vengeful... and in it I hear Butterfly's "revenge" on Pinkerton, an act that will ruin his life in return for ruining hers. The important there is that there's
no emotional closure, forcing us to project what happens after the "quick curtain" (Puccini's marking). Surely Kate Pinkerton is going to divorce him after this? She won't be able to bring up the child of a woman for whose death her husband bears the blame?
So I wouldn't change that chord! I would, however, pay money to Messrs Ricordi Edition to destroy the score and parts of "Addio, fiorito usil" so that this repulsive aria is never added to the opera again!
Now, back in the world of Russian opera... the key to ONEGIN is in Gremin's aria. Why does Tchaikovsky suddenly assign the most stunning number in the entire piece to a bit-part character whom we've never seen before and don't see afterwards? (It's a thankless part in this respect - you sit in the dressing-room all evening, and then you have to go on "cold" and knock their socks off when they're scrabbling in their programmes to work-out who you, errr, are?) He's the foil to Onegin, he's anti-Onegin. Evgeny accounts himself so "superior" to others with his "wit" and "persipcacity", but in fact he's a social misfit who can't make polite conversation with anyone (unless it's about the latest poetry from Germany, or any other topic in which he has an unfair advantage). In the entire opera Onegin never has a pleasant or friendly word with anyone, and opens his feelings and emotions only to himself. But Gremin, who is a relative stranger to Evgeny (he calls him "Onegin" and not "Evgeny" or "Zhenya"), is a man of warm emotions who isn't scared to express them... he tells Onegin безумно я люблю Татьяну -
I'm insanely in love with Tatiana... something Onegin himself couldn't even say to Tatiana, let alone to a stranger. So that's my favourite moment in ONEGIN... the moment when we realise that Onegin's a fake, and all his "superiority" is nothing but a sham to cover for his withdrawn and introvert character. (BTW, "untranslatable nuance" - Evgeny's surname means "Man From Onega". Lake Onega is in the next "county" to the Petersburg region (ie credibly where he might have an Estate) but is famous for being icy, wild and extremely uninviting).
even in a wheelchair Gremin's a more attractive personality than Evgeny -
meanwhile Onegin, society's outcast as ever, has worn black when
the other guests have all come in white....
