This Soprano Sings ‘the Sound of the Soul’

“Un bel dì,” the title character’s great aria in “Madama Butterfly,” begins with the soprano singing a hovering G flat. Puccini writes in the score that the note is to emerge not just pianissimo, or very soft, but also “come da lontano”: as if coming from far away.

The opera is about a young Japanese woman convinced that the American naval officer who abandoned her will return, and “Un bel dì” narrates her fantasy of seeing his ship sailing back into the harbor at Nagasaki.

At the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France, Ermonela Jaho condenses that desperate illusion into a haunting filament of tone. What’s more, she sings the note while lying on her back on the floor in this bracingly intimate new production of the beloved work.

“The attack on the G flat, it’s like hope is being suspended in midair, it’s a sound like the ship appearing on the horizon,” Daniele Rustioni, who conducts the Lyon Opera Orchestra in the production, said in an interview. “And Ermonela does it. You wait for that moment and she delivers.”

Jaho, left, and the tenor Adam Smith, as Pinkteron.Credit…Ruth Walz

Jaho, who turns 50 on July 18, delivers these time-stopping threads of sound again and again at moments like Butterfly’s ethereal entrance, marked even softer than pianissimo; during her love duet with Pinkerton, the callous American officer, when she says that the stars are like eyes, gazing at them; and later, when she insists that when Pinkerton returns, their son’s name will change from Sorrow to Joy.