The Met season now underway is giving us a good dose of late Puccini, which means two things, among others: the Puccini works that are less often performed than his perennial repertoire masterpieces, and the ones that had their world premieres here in New York, by the Met company in its old diggings down on the Southern edge of Times Square. First up has been La Fanciulla del West; Il Trittico is coming soon.

Musicians, critics, and singers of its principal roles admire and love Fanciulla, and in the 108 years since its premiere, particularly from the 1950s onward, it has found enough of a place to be considered “in the repertoire,” globally speaking, though never in a given company’s lineup for many seasons at a stretch. The current revival (of the 1991 Giancarlo Del Monaco/Michael Scott production) has Eva-Maria Westbroek, Jonas Kaufmann (at my performance) and Zelko Lucic in the leading roles, and Marco Armiliato on the podium. I’ll discuss it below, but since it is relatively uneventful—good enough to remind us of the piece’s strengths without being able to consistently compensate for its difficulties—it presents  a sensible opportunity first for consideration of some of the elements that can make Fanciulla go, or, somehow, not.

I think we need to start with David Belasco and theatrical realism. Many of Fanciulla‘s unusual—and, in performance, often problematic—aspects spring from Puccini’s engagement with them and their American milieu. Perhaps you don’t think of Belasco (if you think of him at all) as a representative of realism. Most of the plays he wrote and/or directed, and the kind of theatricalization he strove for, seem to us to belong to a world of extravagant melodramatic romanticization, and the exoticism of Puccini’s earlier Belasco adaptation, Madama Butterfly, often makes it seem like a part of that world. But seen in the light of his own theatrical time, Belasco was a fanatical realist, and like the smartest such, knew that the more extravagant or exotic the material, the more crucial a verisimilitude of detail is to a suspension of disbelief.^(I) And Puccini, as the presiding genius of the verismo era (if not always a verist himself, strictly speaking), was a realist, too, though an operatic one. In Belasco’s The Girl of the Golden West, Puccini met up with material that pushed him farther than ever before or after in search of something that could be defined as operatic realism.

Three short bulletins on “Opera as Opera”: 1) Owing to a logjam at the printer, the shipping date for the second printing has been postponed to December 4. My apologies for the delay, but that’s still in good time for Christmas. The first printing’s quick sale blindsided my most optimistic calculations. 

2) The distribution center has “discovered” a very few copies of the first printing still in stock, so if you hurry you may be able to get an order filled without the irksome wait.

3) The November issue of Opera brings us another wonderful, substantial review of the book, this one by Stephen Hastings, a critic of high standing and long experience. Give it a look. To the subject of the day: 

My high school years were spent at a traditional New England prep school, a little world unto itself. The ways of that world were already changing—the study of Latin or Greek, for instance, had just been nudged from required-course status to that of recommended language option. But the curriculum was still of pre-Ivy League classical design, and its Protestant evangelical origins (the school was founded by one of the late 19th century’s revivalist stars, D. L. Moody) were still alive as matters of daily practice. Boys and girls had dedicated campuses, with the Connecticut River and a few extra miles between them. The school had an immense dining hall, plausibly reputed to be the largest unsupported indoor space in the Northeast. The noonday meal was Announcement Time. A chime would be struck, the hall would fall silent, and a designated student or faculty spokesman would step forward on a platform with the news of the day: extracurricular club meeting times, school sports team results, social event schedules, academic competition results (the Debating Forum, the Declamation Contest, The Time Current Events Contest, etc.), the occasional disciplinary crackdown. And these announcements, of course, were launched into the room from 16- and 17-year-old throats in unassisted oratorical tone, as was all such speech, whether in the classroom, the chapel, the assembly hall, or auditorium.

A few years ago, I returned to the campus for my class’s 60th reunion. Strolling one of the paths overlooking the City on a Hill greensward, I ran into a classmate who asked what I’d planned for the day’s 5:00 p.m. time slot. When I answered in the neutral, he urged me to attend a concert by the current a cappella group. “They’re really good!”, he said. So at the appointed hour, my wife and I made our way down the hill to the new performing arts building. It stood roughly in place of the two former main classroom buildings, red-brick piles from the time of the school’s founding, one a sciences lab, the other called (à propos) Recitation Hall. In my student days, “a cappella” meant a select group of guys with nice voices and good intonation within the choir, ready for an unaccompanied early church-music selection or the occasional solo turn in an anthem. For these kids, though, it meant close harmony in selections drawn mostly from pop and folk genres. They sang with pleasing tone, good balance, and an ingenuous sincerity. They stayed on pitch.Their presentation was impeccably democratic: at the end of each selection, a different member of the group would announce the next one. Everyone got a turn.