going west
by Douglas Messerli
Giacomo Puccini (composer), Guelfo Civinni and
Carlo Zangarini (libretto, based on the play by David Belasco) La funciulla del West (The Girl of the Golden West) / New
York, The Metropolitan Opera / the production I saw was the MET live-HD
production of Saturday, October 27, 2018
Howard, who was to have accompanied 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 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 thought 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.
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 his later 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.
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.
If
we sense this mix of a lesbian-like woman facing off with a gang of randy, isolated
males might become a kind of tinder-box of pent-up emotional and sexual
feelings we wouldn’t be far from wrong.
But
if Minnie, herself, as she later puts it, is a kind of gambler/capitalist, one
of the boys so to speak, a woman who even sees herself as a kind of coarse,
uneducated woman surviving through her instincts—without even realizing it, it
is her true 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 (with the angry and moving “Laggiù nel Soledad,” her expression of an
attempt to find “true” love.
Minnie, accordingly, is a remarkable combination of a tough Western
survivor and a naïve innocent, who goes through her life protected simply
because of the armor of those contradictions.
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.
We
are presented with wonderful flourishes of romanticism—the whooshing theme of
the golden girl, the almost Rodgers and Hammerstein-like, somewhat clumsy
American-intonations of the miner’s greetings of “hello,” the painful
interludes between the past and present when the bandit Dick Johnson and Minnie
recount their early accidental meeting as almost kids—constantly interrupted
with musical expressions of the forceful, often physical and violent
interactions between the miners and outsiders.
Minnie becomes almost so girlish after inviting Dick to come to her
isolated cabin in the sierras, that she truly does remind us 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 imagined
him to be, a simple bandit who has been consorting with a local Mexican whore.
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. Puccini has suddenly
moved away from the late 19th century into new territory, made even more
remarkable by the performance I witnessed. 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 clearly appreciated it.
Finally,
unlike almost any Puccini opera before it, this is not a tragedy. Despite the
attempt of the miners’ community to get their revenge, the impossible strong
woman at the center of this work, returns, guns in hand, to righteously claim
her man and help him escape the local noose, despite all the odds releasing her
lover from their actual legalistically-justified arguments by reminding these
locals bumpkins 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, after all,
is what almost got Dick killed in the second act.
I now
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!
Los Angeles, October 28, 2018
Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (October 2018).
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