“Ieri son salita tutta sola” (“Yesterday I went alone”) Madama Butterfly
Having enjoyed so much my flying visit to see Carmen at the Gothenburg Opera in August 2024, I decided to go again should the opportunity arise. As soon as tickets went on sale for Madama Butterfly, I acquired one. This latest trip was similar to my previous one, so I will not provide a blow-by-blow account, but just highlight some of the main features.
Wednesday 21st May – Friday 23rd May 2025 – London to Gothenburg to London
The performance of Madama Butterfly I was going to see was on a Thursday, compared with a Wednesday for Carmen, so the flight times were slightly different, which meant I arrived in, and departed from, Gothenburg earlier in the day. My journey to Gothenburg was uneventful, but I was amazed to be able to catch the bus departing at 2:10pm, despite only stepping off the plane at 2:05pm.
The earlier arrival, combined with Wednesday being its late opening evening, meant that I could pay a visit to the excellent Gothenburg City Museum, where I was able to top-up my Gothenburg Museums Card to be valid for 2025. Having come across the marmalade producing Keillers in Dundee’s McManus museum three weeks previously, I was fascinated to find a portrait of Alexander Keiller also from Dundee, who had settled in Gothenburg and founded a business producing mill machinery, which later moved on to shipbuilding.
After dinner that evening, as it was not late and still quite light, I found a traditional pub (which served no food), where I enjoyed a very reasonably priced pint of beer.
Gothenburg is a lovely city in which to walk, and on my previous two visits I had walked a lot through its many parks, along its rivers and canals and by its harbour. However, on the Thursday morning I woke to find it pouring with rain and, as I discovered when I went outside, freezing cold. I rapidly concluded that this was not a day for idly wandering, so I resorted to travelling between my destinations using Gothenburg’s numerous trams. (I soon discovered that Google Maps was not always entirely accurate about where tram stops were, nor the route that the trams took, so I learned to rely on the Gothenburg city transport app for my route planning.)
I revisited the three remaining museums that were covered by my Gothenburg Museums Card – the Maritime Museum, the Röhsska (applied art) Museum and the excellent City Art Gallery. All had new special exhibitions since my previous visits. I found it amusing that the City Art Gallery had sourced many of the older paintings for its Apocalypse special exhibition from a number of English provincial art galleries.
Gothenburg also has a World Cultures museum. This is not included in the City Museums Card, as it is part of Sweden’s National Museums. Normally the admission price for just the World Cultures Museum is more than the Museums Card costs for a year to visit the four city museums, but after 3pm on Thursday afternoons the World Cultures Museum is free to enter. The permanent exhibition on the top floor was quite small, and, probably because I am spoilt by the British Museum on my doorstep, I didn’t think it was very good. There were two special exhibitions: one on Native American fashion (which I did not find interesting) and one on games. Had I paid to enter, I would have felt short-changed.
After a quick pizza in the restaurant where I had eaten the year before, I walked to the Opera House. By acquiring my tickets for the opera on the day they went on sale, I had managed to get the centre seat on the front row of the dress circle. Madama Butterfly is an emotionally intense opera and compared to the previous Gothenburg productions I had seen (Nabucco and Carmen) does not use a large chorus. I thought Ida Falk Winland as Cio-Cio-San (Butterfly) was superb – getting the complete range of emotions just right: from innocence, excitement, love, expectation, doubt, disillusionment through to despair. Davide Guisti was a suitably caddish Pinkerton. At the half time interval, I had a drink from the bar while overlooking Gothenburg harbour, which was now bathed in glorious sunshine. After the opera finished at 10pm, I was able to walk back to my hotel when it was still just light.
The next morning the rain had returned, so I did not regret so much that I had to head straight to the airport after breakfast.
Europe Explored 