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.