As both play and opera, Girl belongs in the category of drama of redemption. Through his love for The Girl, Johnson/Ramerrez is redeemed from his apparently predestined criminal ways. Through her love for him, her willingness to gamble all and if necessary sacrifice all for him, The Girl is lifted out of her lonely, perilous existence into a new and presumably more fulfilling life. As I always enjoy pointing out, Fanciulla also incorporates a variation—an inversion, in fact, which could be called sly if we thought the authors were knowingly playing with it—of the all-purpose E-19 plot, that of the roaming male outcast seeking his presumptively deserved place through alliance with a woman of secure, even dominant, position. And the great object of contention, as so often in the E-19 plot, is a patrilineal inheritance—except that in this instance (and this what I mean by “sly”), the inheritance is the “masnada di banditi da strada” bequeathed to Ramerrez/Johnson by his father, of which he must rid himself to qualify for his lady’s hand. That’s a switch.

So we have a drama of redemption, derived from a twist on the old metanarrative. The operas whose endings we’re most reminded of are La Gioconda (and really, G.P., this is almost plagiarism) and Porgy and Bess. And with redemption, we get a happy ending, just as in all those movie Westerns of which Belasco’s Girl can be credibly seen as the model. But in fact the ending is soaked in sadness, an overwhelming feeling of loss. For the sense of rough but close community and The Girl’s place in it, which the operawright Belasco/Puccini spends fully half of his first act developing, and upon which Minnie draws to win through to the new life she and Johnson will share, is sundered. We’re left with the miners, minus their Girl.

And we’re not just in The Wild West. We’re in California, hardly yet a part of the United States, in the earliest years of the Gold Rush. Pop-up towns, far enough apart to be isolated, are dotted along the creeks and opened veins of the Sierras, populated by poor, uneducated men of many ethnicities who have pushed in from the East, up from the South, even from San Francisco to the West via the voyage around The Horn, to pan and dig for gold. Some of these ’49ers are loners and some fugitives, but many have left families, wives, widowed mothers, to take a long-shot gamble in one of these tight-knit but desperately competitive little brotherhoods. Common law, vigilante law, prevails—in this particular town, the only signs of civic rule are a Sheriff, dispatched to establish some token of newly national authority, and an agent of Wells-Fargo, the stage-coach company and bank. The Girl maintains a degree of order in her saloon and “Home for the Boys” through a combination of moral suasion and toughness. Otherwise, Chance, the Winning Hand or the Lucky Strike, is the law of of the land. A minstrel roves the camps at dusk, when the miners come in from their day’s work, singing songs about the old folks back home.