8 January 2011: Puccini, La Fanciulla del West (The Girl of the Golden West)
8 January 2011: Puccini, La Fanciulla del West (The Girl of the Golden West)
(Based on a play of the same title by David Belasco.) Metropolitan Opera HD live broadcast, seen in the West Springfield Cinemas. Conducted by Nicola Luisotti; production Giancarlo del Monaco. Cast: Minnie: Deborah Voigt; Dick Johnson: Marcelo Giordani; Jack Rance: Lucio Gallo. Plus five horses, unnamed. Performance time 4.5 hours.
Puccini is a celebrated practitioner of the verismo style of opera. A helpful definition of the term may be found in Wikipedia: “Internationally, the term is more widely understood to refer to a style of Italian opera that began in 1890 with the first performance of Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana, peaked in the early 1900s, and lingered into the 1920s. The style is distinguished by realistic – sometimes sordid or violent – depictions of everyday life, especially the life of the contemporary lower classes. It by and large rejects the historical subjects associated with Romanticism, or mythical ones.”
Del Monaco’s production, revived this year at the Met, can be seen to accord with this description, just as Puccini’s opera does. But if we consider the origins of the opera, in Belasco’s hit play of 1905, The Girl Of the Golden West, we would want to be careful to remember that Belasco is not to be confused with the French naturalists of the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Belasco is at heart a romanticist of the first order, and his heart is in the right place. The title character of his play, and of Puccini’s opera, is Minnie, a prostitute with a heart of gold, so golden that, where realism would dictate that she was a woman in a frontier situation where sexual purity was not possible, this character has been transformed by Belasco into a selfless sweetheart of a virgin, who explains that she has never been kissed. But this same sweetheart of a golden girl, in the course of Act Two, offers us a kind of “facts-of-the-matter” revelation: I, she says, am no one, a tavern keeper in a frontier outpost; you, she says to Dick Johnson, otherwise identified as the Mexican bandit Ramirrez, are nothing more than a robber; and the Sheriff, Jack Rance, is no more than a gambler. We are nobodies, she means to say, and the implication is that they are not worth anyone’s attention. And yet they are much more than nobodies. Belasco has romanticized their very undistinguished origin and social place into a quasi-mythical drama in which we are led to understand that these persons are fully representative of common humanity, with ambitions, feelings, doubts, and soul-felt needs that make them eminently worth our caring about. Notwithstanding their ordinariness, they are special, even unique persons, and we must want them to do well for themselves, to survive and, if luck will have it, thrive and love. If they can’t outlive fate and time, they can at least be true to one another.
So much for verismo. This was not the first time that Puccini had put his stamp of mus