The delineation of the camp life, and of Minnie’s place in it, occupies the first 30-35 minutes of Fanciulla, depending on tempi and inclusiveness. (Two episodes, the expulsion of Sid from the camp for cheating at cards, and a brief passage of reactions to news brought by the post-boy, are sometimes cut.) It can all go by in a blur of generalized forced liveliness and rather unappetizing little tableaux of tough guys blubbering over the people and pets they abandoned when they succumbed to gold fever. Two major sequences—of the collection taken up for the lachrymose Larkens, and of Minnie’s Sunday-School “academy” about the promise of redemption for the boys—threaten bathos with every note and move. And it’s important to make this longish genre scene register, both for the sake of avoiding audience impatience and for the payoff (also in peril of sentimentalization) in Act 3. But how?

Even on my two favorite live Fanciulla recordings (Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, 1954, and La Scala, 1956), the problem isn’t entirely resolved, despite the fact that both benefit from the presence of important voices for the minstrel, Jake Wallace (Giorgio Tozzi on the former, Nicola Zaccaria on the latter). In Florence, Dmitri Mitropoulos, eloquent in later scenes, pushes through all the allegro sections of the act at high intensity, sending anonymous comprimarii tumbling left and right. In Milan, Antonino Votto is less headlong, but has not disciplined his own complement of character singers, who, in search of their brief moments of prominence and of the generalized liveliness cited above, whack every downbeat and yelp more of their lines than they sing. In both cases, one is very tempted to sample Wallace’s song and Rance’s “Minnie, dalla mia casa,” then skip to Johnson’s entrance. In the current Met performance, as it all passed by I thought in one moment that Marco Armiliato’s perfectly sensible tempi needed more in the way of profiling and characterizing of the individual episodes, and in the next that the difficulty lay more with the lack of individuality among the singers.

Afterward, I realized that I hadn’t had this problem, at least to the same extent, at the first Fanciulla performances I saw back in the early 1960s. ^(I) So I looked back at their casts, which remained pretty constant in the supporting roles through the first couple of seasons of that production, and while I was at it, sneaked a look at the widely spaced earlier Met productions (the 1910 premiere with Destinn, Caruso, and Amato, Toscanini, cond., and the 1929 version, with Jeritza, Martinelli, and Tibbett, under Vincenzo Bellezza..)