Cowboys and Robbers

Here’s an odd one for you. Six years after he opened Madama Butterfly, and seven before we saw La Rondine, Giacomo Puccini wrote an opera for New York with a story about a gold mining town in California. (“Fanciulla” is pronounced in Italian, with just three syllables, and a “ch” sound in the middle, and it means “young woman”.)

The music of La Fanciulla del West is just standard Puccini, and so it isn’t very interesting to me. I suppose those complicated musical background sounds enhance something in the delivery of the lines, but for me, that is hard to appreciate. The libretto’s phrases – and musical passages – are longer than the clipped bits that characterize La Boheme, but (as always) Puccini is doing something very 20th-century here as he composes, and I can’t track.

But the plot is absolutely the best I’ve ever seen in an opera. It’s a genuine western/mystery story, with the saloon and bartender, the sheriff, the beautiful young single woman, all the young airhead cowboys trying to flirt with the girl, the high-stakes poker game, and the outlaw from out of town.

What a terrific story. Gripping action playing out on the stage, and that is not something we usually hear ourselves saying inside an opera house.

The story owes a lot to one David Belasco, who wrote and directed a large number of plays in the late 1800’s.  It seems that Belasco’s parents were themselves gold rush immigrants to California, so he knew what he was talking about.

Along the way, Belasco set the “Madame Butterfly” story up as a stage play, and then did the same for “Girl of the Golden West”, and Puccini (with librettists) ran with both, with huge success.

Multilingual Gold-Miners

Aside from the thrilling tale about the tropes of a small western town, La Fanciulla del West is also fun to watch because the cowboys and cowgirl are all singing/speaking mostly in Italian. I can imagine that there were quite a few languages in use in mid-1800’s California, but it’s jarring to hear a whole barroom of pistol-packing prospectors using Italian. Weirder, they are all singing.

What they are saying jumps out at you, if you are accustomed to Italian operas, because they speak a certain amount of English, too. An early song is “Hello! Hello! Alla ‘Polka’!” (Don’t worry; the professional opera singers don’t actually dance very much. The “Polka” is just the name of the saloon.)

There are a lot of “hellos” in the text, along with English names. Among the flow of Italian-language lyrics, we keep hearing everyone saying “Minnie!” as if they had never heard that name before, and are still practicing. They keep talking about “Jack Rance” and “Dick Johnson”, too. Kind of funny.

With the unusual location and story, Fanciulla has come in for criticism from purists who think that Italian operas should all be about old European royalty, I guess, but that seems absurd to me. I’m delighted that Puccini tried something new, and hit upon a killer story.

Now, if we could just make the music a little less puzzling.

Stories of America, and Asia

By the way, is there a trend here? Here’s an opera set in California, and Madama Butterfly happens in Japan. With Turandot, in China, it begins to look like Puccini may have dotted the world with locations for his operas. On inspection, we see that credit is due for these three far-flung settings, but Puccini’s other nine operas are all more standard, in that they take place in old Europe.

At least he mostly resisted the urge to cover royalty – only Turandot has a princess, and Tosca has a local authority of some sort. The rest of Puccini is about commoners, because Sheriff Rance doesn’t count.

One more question: Is this the only opera ever written about the American West? That would be a surprise. Because tales of the Wild West have driven a huge diversity of movies, books and plays for a couple of centuries now, so why not operas? And they don’t need to be in Italian.

But I’ve found just one. Look up Girls of the Golden West, an English-language opera by John Adams and Peter Sellars, which premiered in 2017. It is about the forty-niners, like Fanciulla, but Adams and Sellars got their material from some actual letters written by a woman who lived that life, and reported on her experiences.

I have never mustered the guts to pull up an Adams opera, but someday I might try Girls. I’m not expecting the sounds of “My Darling Clementine”, though, because, well, it’s John Adams (Nixon in China, Doctor Atomic), and no one has ever told me that Adams writes more accessible tunes than Puccini.