A Morning at the Opera

My wife, Chris, and I went to see the Metropolitan Opera's HD live broadcast of La Fancuilla del West at the Jordan Landing theatre complex this morning. It is not one of Puccini's better known or widely produced operas even though he claimed it as his best work. It was based on the David Belasco play, Girl of the Golden West, who also wrote the play Madam Butterfly, which Puccini had also previously operatized. December of 2010 was the 100th anniversary of its world premier at the Met. I thoroughly enjoy these HD broadcasts of the Met because they show the stage hands changing the scenery during the intermissions as well as interesting interviews with the stars and other people involved with the productions. I have heard the complete "Fancuilla" and excerpted scenes from it before today, but have never seen a live or recorded production. There aren't really any arias except for the third act "Ch'ella mì creda libero..." (Let her believe I am far away and free). Most of the opera is "dialog" and chorus and a lot of dramatic music, but I like it. My favorite act is the second, where Minnie cheats in a game of poker with the sheriff, Jack Rance, to save the life of Dick Johnson, a.k.a. Ramirrez the bandit, with whom she is madly in love having only met him twice. This sounds rather stupid unless you have seen it and are a sucker for operatic melodrama like I am.

Scene from the world premier, act three, with Enrico Caruso, Emmy Destinn, and Pasquale Amato. (photo in public domain) Arturo Toscanini was the conductor, and Puccini was in the audience, 10 December 1910.

As an interesting note about the opera, every time I hear the end of act one where Johnson sings a climactic phrase,"Quello che tacete", I am reminded of the "Music of the Night", from Andrew Lloyd Webber's 1986 musical The Phantom of the Opera. I nudged my wife during the scene and whispered, "Always sounds like 'Music of the Night' to me." Apparently it has sounded like that to a few other people too. I looked up the opera on the internet when I returned home to gather some background and found out that after Phantom's big success, the Puccini estate filed suit against Webber accusing him of plagiarism. The suit was settled out of court and the details were not released to the public, so inquiring minds will never know. I think "borrowing" is a better term here than plagiarism. Borrowing was something that all the great composers of the past, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, et al., did without anyone getting upset and throwing a hissy fit over. You know, "plagiarism is the highest form of flattery." Of course, that was before copyright, "creative control" and profits. Anyway, Webber, I think must really love and admire Puccini's music. That operatic scene in Cats, "Growltiger's Last Stand," my favorite production number in the show, was totally Puccini-esque!

Another note, maybe not interesting to anyone but me, Jeanette MacDonald, and Nelson Eddy starred in a musical film version of Belasco's The Girl of the Golden West in 1938, which I have seen and like very much. I enjoy all the films they did together and have recordings of many of them. They were great together on screen, even though I have heard they had a very rocky love/hate romance off screen for thirty years. When I was in high school in the early '60s, a very good friend of mine introduced me to her aunt, the singer Gale Sherwood. She was Nelson Eddy's singing parner from 1953 until he collapsed on stage in 1967 with a cerebral hemorrage at age 65, two years after MacDonald had died of a heart attack. I met Miss Sherwood a couple of times in 1965, but, though I was promised, I never got to meet Nelson Eddy. Drat!