Big mistake No. 1: Another staged Prelude. Since the staging has no conceptual or emblematic  content (it just shows us the set for Act 1, the interior of the Polka saloon, with Nick beginning his setting-up activities), it seems harmless. But it contradicts the picture Puccini evokes. The eye, which willy-nilly follows the utterly neutral proceedings, inevitably subtracts from, even cancels out, the wild tale the ear is telling us. In the play (I do not know what he did in the opera), Belasco began, as does Puccini, with the outdoors, with rolling tableaux that showed the Sierra peaks and The Girl’s cabin up the mountain, and then brought us down to first the sight of the brightly lit Polka from the outside, and then its interior, occupying the acting space but still framed by the peaks and the sky. These transformations—sort of a Parsifal Verwandlung in the vertical—were accompanied by music, including a snatch of Camptown Races on barroom piano and rowdy noises from inside the saloon, before going to black and silence, with only the glow of Rance’s cigar, the saloon’s logo (“A Real Home for the Boys”), and the reward poster for Rammerez’s capture, lit by a kerosene lamp with reflector, visible.

This sequence is not followed literally in Puccini’s pre-curtain music, but all its elements are evoked in a great rush of motifs, beginning with those towering peaks. And after a prolonged silence, says the score, the curtain rises on an interior much the same as the play’s, with the specification that the outdoors—the valley with its trees and other growth, and in the distance the “snow mountains”—are commanded by the view through the window. (This standing reminder of the surrounding is missing from Scott’s set.) Puccini still writes in plenty of time for Nick with his duties, Larkens with his letter, Rance with his brooding presence, all with music to match, before the allegro vivo that brings in the miners. Taking the curtain up for the Prelude accomplishes nothing beyond telling us that what the music says isn’t what the action shows.

Big mistake No. 2: setting Act 3 on the street of the town (a rather more built-up town, I thought, than this was likely to have yet been) rather than in the giant colonnade of trees at “the extreme edge of the great Californian forest, where it gradually slopes down on a ridge of the Sierras.” We lose again the dominating, limitless feel of the country where the search for Johnson is going on, the remoteness of the place Minnie must ride to for the last-minute rescue of her man (no ride here, not even a dismount, and no indications of a desperate trip), and the chance for the Eastward panorama, the dawn of a new and unknown life into which she and Johnson will vanish at the close. (The couple just strolls off up the street, singing their Laura/Enzo goodbyes.) It also sticks Minnie up on a scaffold facing off right for a goodly stretch, where half her voice goes up into the flies or off into the wings.