La fanciulla del West in Lyon
Article by Michael Milenski from Opera Today
Forget the West of San Francisco born David Belasco’s The Girl of the Golden West (the source of Puccini’s opera), not to be confused with Peter Sellers’ The Girls of the Golden West. Think Westphalia maybe, or more philosophically, West Berlin.
The first offering of the Opera de Lyon’s prestigious Winter Festival. This year the festival is entitled “Rebattre les Cartes” — the heroines of the Festival’s three operas all reshuffle the cards, here it is Minnie who bets the life of her lover in a poker game.
German stage director Tatjana Gürbaca is a disciple of legendary stage director Ruth Berghaus and a Wagner specialist to boot. Thus Puccini’s 49ers became her Nibelungen, her sheriff Jack Rance took on an uncanny resemblance to Walkűre’s Hunding (see lead photo). Minnie and her rather simple boyfriend Mike Johnson escaped a California Valhalla that we might have relished watching it go up in flames, save for the lusty miners whom we came to know and love as refugees straight from Bertold Brecht’s Mahagony.
Suffice to say that the artistically mature Puccini of 1911 was a man of the European world, well aware of theatrical currents emanating from beyond the Alps, rather more than he was the raconteur of stories from the Sierras of American Old West. The Grübaca Europeanization of this American story fit far more comfortably within Puccini’s newly sophisticated, mid-career operatic endeavor than would a staging that attempted to evoke quaint American atmospheres.
La fanciulla del West was not a success at its world premiere at the Metropolitan Opera because it was neither vintage Puccini nor was it American.
In Lyon just now the conductor was Daniele Rustioni who stepped onto the podium and immediately established his intention to tell an urgent story, not to linger on the emotive moments of its protagonists, or only very briefly. The pit was Straussian — quadruple woodwinds, two harps, expanded percussion joined the strings to create a maelstrom of sounds that melded Italian lyricism with constant, pithy stage action.
The maestro drove it unfalteringly to its shattering ending. Minnie and Dick had destroyed sheriff Jack and may have escaped California, but the miners were left trapped in their lust for gold and their nostalgia for everything they had left behind.
