ABSTRACT
Is it possible to say anything not self-evident about the most familiar moment of Madama Butterfly, Cio-Cio-San’s seventy-measure, G-flat-major aria shortly into Act II, «Un bel dï, vedremo»? Perhaps not. But for the operatic world it persists as a defining Puccini signifier, and for that reason alone it might justify scrutiny. I start from the premise that the aria’s meaning is neither single nor unitary. It is not conceptually fixed, not a closed and stable thing to be uncovered once and for all through an act of empirical digging. Instead, the aria harbors a tangle of coexisting possibilities, clusters of potential meaning-effects: multiple, sometimes conflicting resonances that may be activated by the participating listener, scatterings of connotations not contained by the straightforward accounts offered in plot summaries and opera guides.
