The man who sheds light on the music

David Belasco was a pioneer in the field of stage lighting, passionate about creating realistic effects, the most famous of which occurred in his one-act play Madame Butterfly, during which the action slowed to an almost total halt for a 14-minute, lovingly rendered dawn sequence. Puccini saw the play in London in 1900 and rushed backstage afterwards to find Belasco and make an immediate bid for the rights so as to turn it into an opera. Being a man much impressed by technical innovation, Puccini was especially struck by the dawn lighting and went on to incorporate the episode in his opera, as the culmination of Butterfly’s night-long vigil, waiting for the return of the faithless Pinkerton.

The lighting designer Peter Mumford has lit a number of productions of Madama Butterfly in his time and will be tackling the dawn sequence again for Opera North this autumn. He is unusual in a profession in which many people tend to move constantly between opera, dance and drama, alongside forays into film and television.