GOING WEST
by
Douglas Messerli
Guelfo
Civinni and Zangarini (libretto, based on the play, The Girl of the Golden West, by David Belasco), Giacomo Puccini
(composer) La funciulla del West /
1910, New York, The Metropolitan Opera / the production I saw was the MET
live-HD production of Saturday, October 27, 2018
Rather
oddly, given Howard’s and my adoration of opera, I had never previously seen a
production of Giacomo Puccini’s 1910 opera, commissioned by the New York
Metropolitan Opera (a production conducted by Arturo Toscanini, with Emmy
Destinn as Minnie and Enrico Caruso as Dick Johnson), La funciulla del West (The
Girl of the Golden West). I’d heard many of its pieces on disk and radio,
but never actually experienced the production itself.
Howard, who was to accompany me for this MET live-HD production at the theaters in Century City near Beverly Hills, discovered at the last moment that he had committed to a walk-through of the Merion Estes show he had curated (see below) at the Craft and Folk-Art Museum near us. So, Howard returned his ticket, which coincidentally was purchased by a local gallerist friend, Ruth Bochofner, who became, quite by accident and most pleasantly, a replacement friend.
I’d always through about this late-career
Puccini opera as a kind of last gasp, followed only by his La rondine and his series of three short operas, also first
performed at the Metropolitan in 1918; yet, I now realize this was a terrible misconception.
Supposedly Puccini thought that this David
Belasco-based opera was his very best, and almost all of the performers argued
for its difficulties with, in the case of Eva-Maria Westbroek, arguing that it
was one (if not the) very favorite of
works in which she had performed. The personable Italian conductor Marco
Armiliato, who directed the score from memory, seemed impassioned about its difficulties
and argued how more contemporary, given Puccini’s highly romantically-based
operas before this, it was.
I must agree that this work, given the remarkable vocalizations of Westbroek (as Minnie), Jonas Kaufmann (as Dick Johnson), and Željko Lučić (as the sheriff Jack Rance) is something I had never before imagined. And yes, this is definitely not the usual Puccini concoction of beautiful arias and character types as in La bohème, Tosca, or Madama Butterfly—even if, clearly, there is some of the last-named opera’s exoticism that creeps into his vision of Belasco’s wild west—with many quick references to Turnadot—wherein, like the proud queen of Peking, Minnie refuses her love to the minors from all over the world who have gathered in their mad desire for gold to offer her their treasures.
On the surface, in fact, they seem mostly
to be good friends, almost making up the foundation, sans wives, of a future civilized community. They gather in the
local bar to drink, gamble, and to release some of their aggressions, but their
trust in their mother/potential lover, owner of their bar, Minnie, is so very
touching that we quickly comprehend why they use the lower shelves of her bar,
overseen by the gentle bar-tender, in which to hide their life savings. The
local Wells Fargo rider tries to get them to bank their wealth in his company
(terribly ironic today given what we know of that institution’s 21st-century
actions), but the stagecoach has often been robbed by a local bandit, Ramerrez,
and they trust the virginal Minnie as the better banker.
Together they vie for her attentions,
Rance believing, just because of his position as a sort-of-law-and-order
ex-gambler and heavy drinker, he has the best chance of wooing her. While
Sonora (Michael Todd Simpson) believes he might be her favorite, given his
status as a kind of group representative of the goldminers. If the various
challengers for Minnie’s love sometimes break out in violent
confrontations—this is after all the violent West of Hollywood myth which still
suffers brawls and violent interchanges when a gambler is found to have been
cheating—they seem to be a rather affable group, with even an ability to help
out a fellow, very depressed miner, who is desperate to return home to England,
by taking up a collection to send him home. We might almost imagine that this
will soon be the “well-intentioned” Western town of Hadleyville if only some
women were to arrive. What might be the desire for immediate violence could
eventually turn into a refusal to get involved if you give these crude
believers enough time.
In the meantime, the gun-toting Annie
Oakley-like figure of Minnie has to serve as both the vision of law-and-order
and the mentor/educator of this rough community, calling them to order, serving
up their liquor, and then reading to them from the Bible about King David and
other major biblical figures. She’s a tough teacher, scolding them for their
lack of memory, but also a loving and caring being who, we later discover, has
served as nurse, confessor, and supporter of many of these toughs.
She also, herself, as she later puts it,
is a kind of gambler/capitalist, one of them really, who sees herself as a kind
of coarse, uneducated woman, who survives through her instincts—without even
realizing that it’s truly been her kindness and intellect that has allowed her continued
existence. For she is, surprisingly, a reader, having stashed away a complete
library in her mountain cabin, reading late into the night, mostly, she admits,
love stories—while still rejecting the advances of many of her would-be suitors
such as Rance’s with the angry and moving “Laggiù nel Soledad”) with her
expression of her attempt to find “true” love.
Minnie is a remarkable combination of a
tough Western survivor and a naïve innocent, who goes through her life saved simply
because of that impossible combination.
Given this rough-and-tumble world, and
Minnie’s and her community’s own mixed emotions, Puccini must have realized
that he had to create a different kind of opera. Here, for one of the first
times in his music, beautiful wrought musical passages are again and again
interrupted, as if almost suggesting a kind of modernist composition, as
characters cut across each other’s would-be spiritual expressions. It’s a bit
like an early intonation of jazz: the moment a phrase begins, another
instrument (in this case an intrusive voice) interrupts to express his or her
own viewpoint. People in this opera get in the way, constantly, of all the
others, shouting down the arias they may have sung, refusing to hear any of the
melodic sentiment of a standard Puccini opera.
So what you get here are wonderful
flourishes of romanticism—the wonderful theme of the golden girl herself, the
almost Rodgers and Hammerstein early greetings, so somewhat clumsily American-intonations
of the miner’s greetings of “hello,” the painful interludes between the past
and present when the bandit Dick Johnson and Minnie first meet, recounting
their early accidental meeting as almost kids—constantly interrupting one
another in their sweet memories, without truly being able to communicate what
they both feel is a sudden passion.
Minnie becomes immediately becomes so
girlish after inviting Dick to come to her isolated cabin in the sierras, that
she does truly remind one of the corny Doris Day film when Annie Oakley tries
to dress up for Wild Bill Hitchcock. It’s the trope: suddenly get out of your
slickers, put away your gun, and put on a dress (in this case with a rose
stuffed into your bosom) to attract the man of your dreams—even if, she quickly
discovers, he’s worse that you might even imagine yourself, a simple bandit who
has been consorting with a local Mexican whore.
As one of the commentators noted between
the acts of this marvelous production, this opera projects the sense of a kind
of early movie, with the music and events tumbling over upon one another so
quickly that sometimes you can hardly catch your breath. Musical phrases
literally pile up only to collapse into more profane chords of everyday
commentary. For what seems like hours, a tense three-hand poker game—during
which Minnie cheats Rance to escape his desired rape of her and her own attempt
to claim the man (just like he was a gold mine she has suddenly discovered and
determined to claim)—tamps down all music except for sort of percussional tempo—that
is unlike anything you’ve before encountered in Puccini’s previous scores.
Minnie’s final song of love in Act II,
after she illegally wins, might almost be perceived as a kind of mad scene out
of Strauss’s Elektra or Salome. And Puccini has suddenly moved away
from the late 19th century into new territory. Even Westbroek had to
admit, during an intermission chat, that she had completely “nailed” it.” It
was a moment of opera to remember forever. And the audience went wild.
And, finally, unlike almost any Puccini
opera before it, this is not a tragedy. Despite the attempt of the miner’s
community to get their revenge, the impossible strong woman at the center of
this work, returns, guns in hand, to righteously claim her man escape the local
noose, despite all the odds, releasing her lover from their actual
legalistically-justified arguments, by reminding these locals of all she has
done for them.
In the end, the freed couple walk off together
into the rising sun to never return, perhaps moving on to a new southern
paradise, I’d like to think, of Santa Barbara or the then-nascent Los Angeles.
No snow there, which is what almost got Dick killed in the second act.
I agree, this may be, as Puccini himself
believed, his very best opera. Not a work that displays his immense melodic
skills at music-making but expresses a kind of new Italian-Wagnerian notion of
what opera can become. Had he only lived long enough to continue that transformation!
No comments:
Post a Comment