The ANNOTICO Report
The cross-pollination of Italian opera and American cowboy
myths is both
puzzling and never-ending. Although we should not overlook
the
Buteri, the cowboys of Italy's Maremma region, and the
substantially
Italian Gauchos of the Argentine, and "Spaghetti Westerns".
:)
This critic gives an insightful, witty and complimentary
review of this
current performance at the New York City Opera.
Puccini's "Fanciulla del West" is much more than a contest
between guys in
black and white hats. It's a grand story of the redemptive
power of love,
of mercy conquering vengeance. In many ways--including
its disguised
Wagnerian musical quotes, its seamless flow of music,
its prose-like phrase
lengths, and its inventive orchestration--the mythic
target of Puccini's
sights was closer to Tristan und Isolde. And surely,
in Fanciulla del West,
he hit his mark.
HOME, HOME, ON THE 'CATENA'
Playbill
By Deborah Burton
01 Apr 2005
Puccini’s The Girl of the Golden West, opening April 3
at New York City
Opera, proves there’s nothing so strange about cowboys
singing in Italian.
Igor Stravinsky famously called Puccini's Fanciulla del
West (The Girl of
the Golden West) "a horse opera," by which he meant an
"oater," or a
Western. But, wait a minute--doesn't that imply that
typical Westerns are
like operas with horses, not the other way around? So
which came first, the
operatic Western, the Western opera or the "Spaghetti
Western"? And do any
of them have anything to do with the real West?
The cross-pollination of Italian opera and American cowboy
myths is both
puzzling and never-ending. Only a few years ago, while
I was living in
Italy, one day, after a few hours of analyzing and researching
Fanciulla,
the idea of cowboys and Indians singing in Italian began
to try my
patience--after all, only we Americans know what Westerns
are really about,
right? So I took a break to do some errands at the local
shopping center.
But when I got there, it turned out to be "Cowboy Day"
at the mall, and
everyone there was dressed in Wild West gear and speaking
Italian! And then
there are the Buteri, the cowboys of Italy's Maremma
region, who still hold
rodeos every summer.
And why should singing cowboys seem strange to us? After
all, there really
were singing cowboys like Gene Autry and Roy Rogers.
Even the most macho of
Hollywood cowboys, John Wayne, tried his hand at it:
He had been cast as
"Singing Sandy" in a series of low-budget Westerns. The
problem was that he
couldn't sing--his songs had to be dubbed. "Git yourself
another singin'
cowboy," he told his boss, "I ain't gonna do it no more!"
Perhaps we should also ask ourselves why, as Americans,
Puccini's Fanciulla
seems odder than the Jeanette MacDonald-Nelson Eddy version
of The Girl of
the Golden West, in which MacDonald (as the simple saloon
owner, now named
Mary Robbins) warbles in her stratospheric operetta voice
to the polite
applause of a drunken crowd. And seeing Walter Pidgeon
as Sheriff Jack
Rance and Buddy Ebsen as Alabama might give us further
pause.
Maybe Puccini's Fanciulla seems outlandish because it's
not a conventional
Western as we have come to know the genre. In our mythic
American West, the
heroes are upright and never flinch, and every act of
tenderness must be
paid for in blood. The women are supportive but dependent,
and usually in
need of a rescue. The villains are usually ethnic (normally
Native American
or Mexican) and have little sense of fair play. At the
end of the Western,
the hero and heroine ride off into the sunset, having
solved all their
problems.
Puccini's Fanciulla, though, turns these stereotypes on
their heads. The
"hero" Ramerrez (alias Dick Johnson) is not white and
not honest. The
miners, far from being tight-lipped stoics, weep for
their distant mothers
and even their dogs. Rance, the white villain, has enough
honor to respect
his poker bet with Minnie and let her lover live (even
though Ramerrez is
apprehended later). And Minnie herself is no defenseless
victim but a
gun-wielding, card-cheating, hard-lovin' heroine who
rescues her man all by
her lonesome. And just to make the reversal complete,
Minnie and Johnson
ride off together into the sunrise--symbolic of the theme
of redemption
that Puccini instilled in this opera. The cognitive dissonance
we
experience with Fanciulla may be that of our dearly held
clichés rubbing up
against a perhaps more realistic image of how the West
was won.
None of the creators of Fanciulla had any connection to
the American West
except for the author of the play on which it is based,
the American David
Belasco, who had been raised in California by gold-seeking
immigrants. His
stated theatrical goal was to bring Art closer to Nature,
and his Girl of
the Golden West certainly did give Broadway babies a
taste of the
wilderness west of Weehawken. But how realistic could
it truly be,
especially as an opera? And isn't it really Hollywood's
version of the West
that most of us use as a yardstick?
Puccini, his librettists, his publisher and the Italian
performers
(including the conductor Arturo Toscanini and the tenor
Enrico Caruso) had
all been attracted by the exotic Wild West, mostly through
the
theatricalities of William Cody (Buffalo Bill). In 1890,
as a student in
Milan, Puccini saw Buffalo Bill and wrote to his brother
Michele: "Buffalo
Bill was here and I liked it. Buffalo Bill is a company
of North Americans
with a quantity of Indians, redskins, and buffalos that
do splendid tricks
and reproduce for real the scenes that happen on the
frontier."
Buffalo Bill, a consummate showman, made several trips
to Europe and
brought a huge retinue of "authentic" Westerners with
him, including
Indians (many of whom had been imprisoned for having
fought against the
American army). Just before Puccini saw the troupe, they
had traveled to
Florence, where one Sigabetta, editor of the Florentine
paper La Nazione,
filed this report:
"Several men and women got off the first class wagon,
among whom was the
famous shooter, Annie Oakley. The Mexicans got out, some
in their costumes,
and then all the Indians in their picturesque fashions,
wrapped in colorful
blankets (carpets), with their faces almost covered.
They come from all
types of races--Sioux, Arapahoe, Blackfeet, and Ogallala.
Little by little
they opened the blankets and one could see the color
of their
faces--copper, gold, chocolate. Some were of an orange
color, others
reddish.... Many of the Americans who are part of the
company have gone to
lodge at various hotels. The savages and the others are
camping on the
fields of the Mint. They sleep by their horses." [Yes,
Indians camping on
the banks of the Arno!]
"The savage Indians are five or six to a tent, as if in
the mountains or
the prairie of their country. The tents of the chiefs
are painted with
horses and people--pictures like children draw--and above
the door is a
tail-like hat made of many colored bird feathers and
the skins of other
animals. The hat is worn whenever they leave the tent.
They sleep inside
the tent on a type of divan. In each tent is a fireplace
with burning
coals, and it is warmer there than in our rooms, even
when well heated....
In one tent was the celebrated Miss Oakley. She is from
Ohio. She is very
polite. She is one of the greatest shots ever known--a
prodigy. She says
that one of her tricks is this: to throw two balls with
one hand and hit
them with all the bullets in the rifle that she is shooting
with the other
hand."
Obviously, the cultural divide ran wide and deep. The
clear condescension,
even in noting Miss Oakley's politeness, seems to dehumanize
the Americans.
Yet that aura of exoticism sold tickets, and Buffalo Bill
certainly knew
how to "buffalo" the press to increase his publicity.
Arranging a meeting
with Sigabetta, he sent as emissaries two Indians "among
whom was the
famous Bear of the Rockies, 'Rocky', two cowboys, and
one 'trap man' , who
came to announce that the colonel would receive him "at
the 'camp' in his
tent." Cody, quite aware of his Italian audience's cultural
and religious
predilections, even told the editor that the Indians
were almost all
Catholic: "Buffalo Bill told me 'their priests had spoken
to them about the
Pope, and of the magnificence of the Vatican. The Pope
received them, and
they were enthusiastic.' "
Of course, the myth of the Wild West continued to grow.
It was helped not
only by Puccini's "horse opera", but by the films of
Thomas Edison (his
first experiments were very brief films of Buffalo Bill's
specialty acts)
and countless others.
Yet these were not quite the myths Puccini had in mind.
His Fanciulla del
West is much more than a contest between guys in black
and white hats. It's
a grand story of the redemptive power of love, of mercy
conquering
vengeance. In many ways--including its disguised Wagnerian
musical quotes,
its seamless flow of music, its prose-like phrase lengths,
and its
inventive orchestration--the mythic target of Puccini's
sights was closer
to Tristan und Isolde. And surely, in Fanciulla del West,
he hit his mark.