Julius Rudel conducts a classic rendition of Puccini’s tragic exploration of sex, love and otherness, in which a 15-year-old geisha falls in love with a US naval officer, who marries and impregnates her before sailing home to find an American bride. An outcast in Japan, she waits for ‘la Yankee vagabondo’ to return, but when he comes back with his new wife and lays claim to the child he has fathered, she kills herself. It’s a classic operatic melodrama transposed with themes of coloniality and conquest, driven by one of the composer’s finest musical achievements.
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