Fanciulla from Puccini: The Complete Operas

Posted by Sony BMG Masterworks

December 12, 2008

By Daniel Felsenfeld

How weird is Puccini’s opera La Fanciulla del West (which translates roughly as “Girl of the Golden West”). I mean, its an Italian’s Frenchfied approach to the Wild Wild West. It is hard for us Americans (or certainly for this American), whose cowboys and swinging saloon doors are part of our own mythology, to square a slightly-post-tonal verging-on-Debussy approach to this topic—we want our wide open spaces musically depicted by, say Aaron Copland or Roy Harris. But to Puccini, writing this piece when Copland was only ten (and decades before Oklahoma! or Annie Get Your Gun), and when the music world was taking in more experimental fare (leaving a number of composers of a so-called conservative stripe out in the proverbial cold), playwright David Belasco’s version of the California Gold Rush must have been as far-off and, pardon me, oriental as that same author’s Madame Butterfly.

So Puccini set this tale of love in a small California town to fulfill a commission he’d received from the Metropolitan Opera. What’s weirdest about this piece, it is probably his most musically “advanced” work in that he makes use of some of the developments composers in France were getting all the credit for: polychords (two chords layered atop one another), whole-tone scales, bitonality (music that is in two keys simultaneously). Weirder still, it is Puccini’s most Wagnerian approach to opera, fewer showstopping arias and more integrated motives. What worked for Wagner atop Valhalla also seemed apropos of the Wild West to Puccini.

Probably for these reasons, the show has never been a real hit in America (that and in Act II there is a tune that Sir Andrew so blatantly stole for his own opera about a man in a mask and a crashing chandelier that it is hard not to snigger, hard to hear past, though obviously this is no fault of Puccini’s). But it is worth hearing, and is, for my money, the Italian composer’s most compelling work. It may not make you swoon like Turandot or laugh like Gianni Schicchi, but it is a breathtakingly well-constructed and above-all intelligent work, a side-credit to a composer whose reputation for seriousness could use a little rehabilitating.

A little pause here to appreciate the composer himself. All through school I was an inveterate opera lover, but these were colors I could not often fly because it betrayed a lack of seriousness. Popularity, especially in the opera house, was the watchword of the sellout, and this relegated a number of brilliant composers like Verdi, Bellini, Wagner (even!), Britten, Glass and of course Puccini to the heap of people we were supposed to ignore. I always quietly disagreed. I mean, if one could write tunes like that, those lilting, ever-evolving endless streams of melody of which this composer seems to possess a limitless supply, weren’t you truly a great composer? This is not to mention the powerful fugue that opens Madame Butterfly, the masterful orchestration, and, yes, the motives that run through La Fanciulla like glue. This was no roar-of-the-greasepaint hack but a trained and above-all limitlessly talented composer of the authentic and curious variety.

I’ll get into the recording more in a later post, but honestly, as Dick Johnson (the role Puccini wrote for Enrico Caruso) it is hard to imagine better than Placido Domingo under the staunch and searching direction of conductor Lorin Maazel. A credit to this already-pretty-amazing Puccini The Complete Operas box.

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

In This Blog
PUCCINI: THE COMPLETE OPERAS (Box Set)