Sadistic and repellent and thrilling: Mascagni’s Iris reviewed

If you’ve ever felt that poor Madama Butterfly had a bit of a raw deal, then you really, really don’t want to know what happens in Mascagni’s Iris. Take that as a spoiler alert: our Japanese heroine is so young that as the opera opens, she’s playing with a doll. She’s abducted, installed in a brothel and offered up for the delectation of a noble client, whose advances she is too innocent to comprehend. Disowned by her blind father, by the beginning of Act Three she’s literally lying in a sewer listening to disembodied voices telling her that nothing could have prevented this outcome. Obviously, it sounds exquisite.

You don’t have to be a social justice warrior to find Iris a bit much. Mascagni and his librettist Illica (who wrote Butterfly six years later) call their male leads Osaka and Kyoto — that’s about the level of their engagement with Japanese culture.