The heroine in "Madama Butterfly"

I keep going to the opera, I keep running into world-class heroines.

Three years ago (well, how many operas have YOU been to in the last three years?), it was the Queen of the Night, in "The Magic Flute." The heroine wasn't the Queen of the Night, it was Cheryl Evans, who sang the Queen's role. I was damned impressed – floored, actually – and I blogged about it:

"Both of the night’s big moments belonged to the Queen of the Night. First, she floated earthward from the loft in a huge cradle of crescent moon and cascading bows of purple gossamer (color of eggplant, I thought), like a brooch you would see Zandra Rhodes wearing on an airplane.

"Later, she sang an aria into which Mozart had inserted a lightning series of notes placed sort of like tiny footstep leaps of faith across a yawning void. Hit them all, he is saying, live to sing another day. Miss just one, just slightly, and down you go, into the void, falling until the end of time. She hit them all. I don’t know how. Imagine a hockey goalie, stopping eight shots in three seconds, left, right, up, down, middle. And then doing it again, a couple of minutes later. At the end, she got the night’s loudest ovation."

Cheryl Evans read it and sent me a nice email. She is a Pittsburgh native and enjoyed being compared to a hockey goalie but really wanted to be compared to Pittsburgh hockey legend Mario Lemieux. She also said she was a big fan of the Steelers' Troy Polamalu, which made sense. He plays strong safety the way she sings Mozart.

This time – last night, in fact – it was "Madama Butterfly." The heroine wasn't Madama Butterfly, though she did leach out the total of my paternal instinct. The heroine was Patricia Racette, who sang and performed the Butterfly role. This opera was two hours and twenty-five minutes long, in TWO ACTS. The first act was an hour, then a divine intermission. The official program showed Act Two and Act Three coming after intermission, but that was propaganda. There was no break in the action until the final curtain. Opera aficionados talk about the demands "Madama Butterfly" makes on an audience, and the audience is SITTING DOWN.

Patricia Racette NEVER sat down. In the 2:25, she was offstage for about two minutes. The rest of the time she was singing, not like you or I would sing, but in a voice of beauty and power that causes critics to pull out all the superlative stops. She was also a hell of an actress. Anybody who can sing for 2:23 straight, and act, too, is not an opera star, she's a world-class athlete. I was thinking, during a slow part early on, about all the stories in the theater, the 3,000 in the audience, each with a story being lived in real time that perhaps included, at that moment, individual commitment associated with being at an opera. Not all the good stories, I gravely intuited, were onstage.

But Patricia Racette kept singing, and in time she eroded that point of view. There was no other individual story of commitment in the room to compare to hers. At the end – and I must say the finale, in this San Diego Opera production, is stunning – she has stabbed herself and is sprawled on the stage, dying. The boor Pinkerton appears, kneels next to her, takes her hand, tugs so her shoulder rises and her lifeless head lolls. At the last note, he lets go, she slumps heavily to the boards. After what she has been through, it is the night's easiest bit of acting for Patricia Racette. The personal stories reverse. The scene blasts away the audience's fatigue, which rises, recharged, while on the stage the heroine has time for a relaxed inhalation or two before receiving our applause. We should applaud for two hours, but we can't.