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Puccini, La fanciulla del West: Soloists, Chorus and Orchestra of the Royal Opera House. Conductor: Antonio Pappano. Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London. 16.9.2008 (JPr)

The Act I Set

Real Gold in Them Thaar Hills!

1907 was a good year for  fans of horse operas – Western films – and for real opera  too as it was the year in which John Wayne was born and when Puccini found an American subject for his next opera after visiting  the United States. David Belasco’s play (The Girl of the Golden West) gave him an ideal scenario: ‘an open space in the great California forest, with colossal trees’.

The opera seemed to succeed with the public on its première at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, 1910 but critics were generally unenthusiastic. The music was considered too modern and it was neither American enough for American critics or sufficiently Italian for those in Puccini's home country. Yet for Anton Webern in 1919, it was ‘Splendid. Every bar astonishing. Very special sounds. Not a shade of kitsch!’

Puccini tries to fuse tightly constructed uninterrupted drama with continuously expressive music and the impressionism of Debussy in La fanciulla. Critics felt that it lacked the pure lyricism of La bohème or Madama Butterfly and was also too melodramatic to be fully credible;  and so La fanciulla del West has never ranked as high with Puccini lovers as La bohème, Tosca or Turandot. Much of it does seem  unlikely - a bunch of weeping, childlike gold miners singing in Italian or Minnie’s Act I bible class - or even downright offensive now, like the Native Americans given pidgin vocabulary including frequent ‘Ugh!’s and the stereotyping of them for their love of whisky.

José Cura as Dick Johnson

One reason why La fanciulla del West is worth its occasional revival though is because of its rich, dense score where hints of chromaticism and dissonance are wedded to music from La bohème and the  yet to be composed Turandot. Puccini ends up with a great outpouring of music with recurring fragments of motifs related to characters and events. A further  reason for its relative unpopularity however, is the lack of show-stopping moments, even though the work turned out to have lasting effects on the popular musicals of the twentieth century. Without Puccini there would surely be little Andrew Lloyd Webber and La fanciulla in particular lives on as Dick Johnson's Act I ‘Quello che tacete’ is central to Lloyd Webber’s Phantom’s ‘Music of the Night’.

La fanciulla contains some of Puccini’s most strikingly human characters. Minnies exist today: as tough, heart-of-gold, Bible-toting (and quoting) American prudes. Insecure, naïve and painfully aware of her lack of education,  Puccini's Minnie naturally falls for the bad boy, Dick Johnson who is really Ramirez, the  leader of a gang of bandits. Their exchanges, far from being almost wholly romantic as in La bohème arewonderfully natural, awkward, even embarrassing, and their burgeoning romance does not go smoothly. Minnie's idea of a ‘first date’ involves a single kiss before chastely bedding down Johnson/Ramirez in her bunk while she rests by the fire. There is also Sheriff Jack Rance’s  lust and jealousy to contend with.

Eva-Maria Westbroek as Minnie

Neither too ‘over the top’ or too dated, the romance that La fanciulla depicts is in fact very real and its flawed characters all too familiar to us,  despite the American setting and characters matched against Puccini’s accrued ‘local colour’. This is why I have come back to it time and again in this particular production by Piero Faggioni ever since I first saw it in 1980; and this revival was a good opportunity to reappraise the work during the low-key 150^th anniversary of Puccini’s  birth.

As part of my  reappraisal,  I was inspired by George Hall’s reflection in his programme notes on how much Puccini ‘revered’ Wagner and I began to see the leading characters in Minnie’s Act II cabin as Siegmund (Johnson), Sieglinde (Minnie) and Rance (Hunding). Writing about Minnie and Johnson’s kiss, George Hall says that ‘The idea of eruptive nature bursting through the door and initiating a love scene inescapably recalls a similar moment in Act I of Die Walküre’. I would also add that  if you listen to your CD or the BBC Radio 3 broadcast on 27 December, it’s useful to think about  how much Minnie’s exultation over the wounded Johnson sounds very like Sieglinde’s Act II delirium. It happens too that the story is also built on a familiar Wagnerian theme: the ‘redemption’ of the sinner (Johnson) by ‘das Ewig-Weibliche’ (the eternal feminine) - Minnie.

Overall then, this was as satisfying an evening as I have recently spent at Covent Garden  - which is not to say that it was faultless, but the plusses did outweigh the negatives. Kenneth Adam’s sets remain a three-dimensional cinematic wonder, although still a bit too solid to be manageable and requiring intervals of up to 40 minutes to change them. These are the wonderful Act I Polka saloon, Minnie’s mammoth cabin with smoking chimney for Act II and the gold-mine for Act III. Costumes (also by Piero Faggioni) are certainly of the Spaghetti-Western variety but authentic enough. Having been previously  in a more cheap and cheerful seat I was not able to appreciate the stage in its entirety fully, but from the stalls I basked in the sets’ Cinerama-style glories.

The miners were more reticent and less rowdy than they should be at the start of Act I and lost a bit of coordination between pit and stage in Act III but both the chorus and the miners with small individual roles remained a potent part of the evening’s success. Bonaventura Bottone as Nick, the limping and conniving barman, and Eric Halfvarson as the drink-swigging, thuggish Wells Fargo agent, Ashby, were acutely characterised and firmly sung. As Jack Wallace, the minstrel, there was another mellifluous and eye-catching performance from Vuyani Mlinde, a Jette Parker Young Artist, singing his wonderfully nostalgic song.

The veteran Italian baritone, Silvano Carroli, returned to the part of Jack Rance which he created in this production back in 1978 and who I saw both in 1980 and 1982. Regrettably,  he only has the remnants now of a once great voice and he was more menacing when speaking during the card game in Act II than in his blustery singing. He is now something of a pantomime villain; top-hatted and straight out of Chaplin’s Gold Rush. The 30-year old photograph of a young Carroli as Rance in the programme oozed more Scarpia-like evil than sadly he can muster now during an entire evening.

José Cura (Dick Johnson) returned to the  role he had previously sung in 2005 at Covent Garden in wonderful vocal health. His was a much understated, subtly emotional, performance throughout Act I in the playful delicate blossoming of love between him and Minnie and which continued through their duet (of sorts) in Act II. After that he doesn’t get much chance for further passion because he is soon shot and seemingly fatally wounded. Of course,  Johnson/Ramirez recovers and Cura  was exaltedly impassioned when singing Ch’ella mi creda libera in Act III. There was an ease and command to  his  performance throughout the whole evening allied to a burnished baritonal timbre and effortless, ringing, high notes.

He was matched by Eva-Maria Westbroek’s wonderfully gauche Minnie, whose love and religious fervour wins over the miners to release Johnson/Ramirez so they can start a new life together. Her voice has all the heft required for the role and she has a glorious, if a little steely and Wagnerian, top to her voice. She never once stepped out of character from the moment of her dramatic entrance right through to her emotional farewell with and Ramirez:  a too rare achievement on the operatic stage.

This music is in Pappano’s blood and with his reliable orchestra he creates an almost symphonic miasma of swelling sound with refulgent climaxes that occasionally drown out the singers on stage. Over-sentimentalised maybe, indulgent (to his venerable Jack Rance) definitely, but Pappano’s reading was emotionally nuanced and compelling. Terrific stuff for fans of Westerns or verismo opera alike!

Jim Pritchard

Pictures © Catherine Ashmore

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