Baltimore Opera Company Promenade Lecture
Puccini's La Fanciulla del West

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. The last time I spoke here was to discuss last March’s production of Salome. This makes a convenient connection for me, because Fanciulla is really the first major work to show Salome’s influence on the operatic world. Puccini’s expressed admiration for Strauss when he first saw this opera goes a long way towards explaining the huge shifts in style between Fanciulla and Madama Butterfly, the opera immediately preceding it in Puccini’s output.

Giacomo Puccini didn’t fit at all into the image many people have of composers as workaholics obsessed with creating their masterpiece. He had no qualms about taking long periods off between operas to enjoy his earnings. He greatly enjoyed traveling and spending time with his family and friends, and his success as a composer allowed him to indulge in these pastimes. His love for travel also served him well in promoting his work; Ricordi, his publisher, would often send him on lengthy voyages to attend premieres and meet with audiences at major venues all over Europe and America.

It was on one of these trips that Puccini first encountered the impetus for the creation of La Fanciulla del West. After the premiere of Butterfly in 1904, Ricordi sent him on a series of tours promoting the work at different opera houses. At this point, he was actively searching for ideas for his next opera, but he had difficulty finding anything that would catch his interest. Around this time, he saw a production of Strauss’ Salome, with which he was greatly impressed. The through-composed form and free structure of the piece were features with which he had begun to dabble in previous operas, but to which he had never fully committed.

In 1907, he ended up in New York for the premiere of Butterfly at the Metropolitan Opera. While in New York, he decided to attend a performance of another play by David Belasco, the man who had written the play on which Madama Butterfly was based. Puccini was quite taken with the performance he saw of The Girl of the Golden West, and he immediately set out to find an Italian translation he could set.

The Girl of the Golden West tells the story of Minnie, who works as a barkeep in a small mining town in Gold Rush-era California. She soon finds herself in an awkward situation when the town sheriff, Jack Rance, expresses his love for her—a love she cannot return. The situation is further complicated when she finds herself falling in love with a handsome stranger named Dick Johnson. This love triangle, combined with the exotic setting of the American Wild West, seemed to Puccini to be the perfect foundation for a great opera.

On his return to Italy, Puccini immediately began work on the composition of this new piece. He encountered a number of obstacles on the way, though, including the suicide of a family maid driven to despair by the groundless jealousy of Puccini’s wife. Eventually, however, the work was completed, and it was premiered in December of 1910. The nearly seven years between Butterfly and Fanciulla was Puccini’s longest between operas to date. Appropriately enough, the world premiere of La Fanciulla del West was in New York; it was the first work the Metropolitan Opera ever premiered.

From the very first chords of Fanciulla, it becomes clear that Puccini is trying something different with this opera. Shades of Debussy and Strauss float from the orchestra, blended with the graceful Italianate melodies we’ve come to expect from Puccini. This blend, so striking and unusual to the Met audience at the premiere, will sound remarkably familiar to us, as it has been co-opted for years by Hollywood film scorers. In listening to the overture, it’s not at all difficult to imagine the opening credits of a 1950s Western.

Once the curtain goes up, we immediately encounter the most prominent feature with which Puccini was experimenting in this opera. Like Strauss, who took a literal translation of Wilde’s play and set it to music, Puccini has only minimally altered Belasco’s play, resulting in a smoothly flowing and unfolding drama of conversational speech. There’s no sign of the kind of poetic verse structures and metrical constructions so common to earlier opera libretti. In fact, several bars pass before we even encounter a genuinely Italian phrase. To evoke the exotic mood of America for his audience, Puccini has chosen to retain a number of English words. These miners greet each other with hearty “hello”s and enthusiastically order “whisky”. The organically unfolding conversation of the piece’s composition creates a vitality and energy and an air of spontaneity which would have been difficult to create using more traditional operatic devices.

In fact, if you sit around waiting for a standard aria in this show, you’re going to be disappointed. On the whole, these characters speak to each other, not the audience, and there’s never a point where the action halts to allow someone the opportunity to mull over their emotions for those of us seated in the darkness beyond the orchestra pit. Puccini has chosen to embrace an aesthetic of realism, and his singers declaim the ordinary language of the common man, not the carefully constructed couplets of a poet. His music embraces the fragmented banalities of common speech and draws from and highlights the beauty of its rhythms to create a constantly evolving tapestry of dramatic sound.

That said, there are plenty of moments in which the music develops into a lyric arioso—when Minnie describes her ideal of love, or when she describes her love for her home and friends, or when Dick Johnson pleads with the miners to make a decision for the good of Minnie, even though it still means his own demise. But these moments emerge organically from the drama and are addressed to characters standing on stage who hear them; these are not the dramatic asides and plot exposition of the nineteenth century monologue aria.

Puccini’s heroine, too, is different from her predecessors. Puccini’s ladies had always been young and beautiful, with great strength of character: Manon, Mimi, Tosca—even Lauretta and Turandot, created years after Minnie—were all portrayed and described as possessing a youthful beauty. Minnie retains the inner strength of character common to these other heroines, but we find in her something not particularly common in an operatic heroine. She is specifically described as having left the best years of her life behind her. She’s the only woman in town, and one of very few in the state (the population of California at this time was less than 12% female), so she has her pick of men, but she’s not willing to settle for just any man. She remains hopeful that someday she will find the kind of passionate love she has always dreamed of, and she’s willing to wait for it, even though she’s been waiting fruitlessly for some time. This combination of naïve optimism and a maturity stemming from years of experience adds an uncommon poignancy to Minnie and makes her one of opera’s most endearing heroines.

When she finally does encounter the man she loves, we get to watch her struggle with her beliefs. From the moment she allows Johnson to kiss her, she systematically discards each of the values she holds dear in order to hang on to him, as she cheats and lies to Jack Rance, in whom we see echoes of Scarpia. Finally, she even sacrifices her beloved home and risks a trip into the unknown in order to hold on to the love for which she has waited so long, literally riding off into the sunset with her newfound love.

In this opera, like his heroine, Puccini reexamines the aesthetics and techniques which brought him so much success to date, and the bittersweet ending reflects a certain feeling I’m sure the first audiences had in their heart regarding this shift as they witnessed the beloved composer venture into new and unfamiliar territory. In plunging headfirst into an embrace with new structures, harmonies, and techniques, he took a calculated risk and created a work unique in his output. In the process, he proved that the soul and beauty we all hold so dear in his music lie much deeper than the techniques and structures through which he expresses them. The result is a work which is as emotionally moving and touching as anything he ever wrote.