Enrico Caruso and La Fanciulla Del West
(Or Smile When You Sing That, Pardner!)
Enrico
"Dick Johnson"
Caruso
- [La fanciulla del West] has come out, in my opinion, the best opera I have written.
- Giacomo Puccini, 1910
- For generations “Fanciulla” has been patronized as an unlikely melodrama, a prototype for the spaghetti western films from Italy, a pulsing Puccini opera plopped into an implausible California setting where miners sing “doo-dah day” refrains when not spouting Italian.
- Review, 2010
Everyone has heard of the operas by Giacomo Puccini. La bohème, Tosca, Madame Butterfly - three of the most popular and enduring operas ever written.
But then you have La fanciulla del West1. And whatever the Curmudgeonly Critics may spout, we have to admit that once seen it's never forgotten. As Mozart said to Salieri in the play Amadeus, "I never knew that music like that was possible."
Footnote
Fanciulla - which is pronounced "fahn-CHOO-lah" - is the feminine form of fanciullo. Fanciullo in turn is the diminiutive for fante, which goes back to Latin infans, infantes.
Strictly speaking the Latin infans refers to a child who is too young to speak. On the other hand, fanciulla just means a girl in the sense of a non-adult female. There is, though, the connotation of "maiden". But just as today "maiden" isn't used in everyday conversation, fanciulla is also old hat and rarely heard. The commonly used word is ragazza (pronounced "rah-GAHTZ-ah").
But we really can't picture an opera titled "La ragazza del West".
La fanciulla del West was commissioned by the New York Metropolitan Opera and first performed on December 10, 1910. Arturo Toscanini, then the Met director, conducted. And Enrico Caruso sang the male lead of Dick Johnson, an Outlaw with a Heart of Gold.
Today people - if they've even heard of the opera at all - wonder what the hey put the idea of a - literally - horse opera2 into Giacomo's mind in the first place? Some historians point out that in 1910, the Old West was still extant.
Footnote
In one of the more recent performances, there were indeed live horses on the stage.
Arturo Toscanini
He conducted.
Well, remember the Old West was cranking out its mythology almost as soon as it began. William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody was performing in his "Wild West Show" in the 1880's and his dime novels were selling like hoecakes. The term "Old West" was commonly used early in the first decade of the 20th century even as Tom Edison was producing the first Western film The Great Train Robbery in 1903. Soon Hollywood was cranking them out.
The point is that by 1910 the Western with its ten-gallon hatted and cowboy booted good guys and bad guys had long gelled into the World's collective consciousness. So if Americans were writing about the Western mythology, we can't be too critical for Gicaomo following suit.
Giacomo certainly made an effort and he seems to have taken an inventory of every Wild West cliché and was determined not to leave a single one out. You have a saloon (called the "Polka"), gold miners, a group of poker players (and one of the players cheats), a bandit with a misspelled name, Ramerrez (who is really Dick Johnson in disguise), the sheriff (named John Rance), Native Americans (then called Indians), and a session of vigilante justice during which the intended victim - Dick - sings an aria.
And of course there's Minnie. No, not Minnie the Moocher, but Minnie the Fanciulla who was played by Emmy Destinn. Minnie owns the Polka Saloon where the action begins. There we learn that Sheriff Rance (Pasquale Amato in the first performance) has a hankering for Minnie but she takes a shine to Dick (Enrico) when he walks in the saloon. Eventually the miners learn that Dick is really Ramerrez and plan to take the law into their own hands. Minnie, though, steps in and succeeds in softening their hearts to where they let Dick go. So Dick and Minnie head off into the sunset.
The title of the opera is often translated as The Girl of the Golden West. As to where the adjective comes from, the opera is based on a play of that name written in 1905 by playwright and impressario David Belasco. Although he's largely forgotten today, David had also written the play that Giacomo used when he composed Madame Butterfly, itself originally a short story by John Luther Long. The Girl of the Golden West was also re-written as a novel.
And no, Giacomo did not write the words to La fancuiulla del West. A composer doing double duty as the librettist was (and is) quite rare3. In this case, the worsdsmiths were Guelfo Civinini and Carlo Zangarini.
Footnote
One composer who did write both lyrics and the music for his operas was Richard Wagner.
Arturo Toscanini
He conducted.
The opera was a hit. Crowds flocked to the Met. Critics raved. Giacomo wrote to his friend Sybil Seligman " 'The Girl' has come out, in my opinion, the best opera I have written." Even if he did say so himself.
Alas, today if you read about Giacomo's operas you'll scarcely see a hint of Fanciulla and it's rarely staged. However, those recent performances - 2010 marked its 100th anniversary - have generally gotten decent reviews. After all, Old West characters singing Italian arias are, if nothing else, unique.
References
"Caruso", Stanley Jackson, Stein and Day, 1972.
"Caruso on the San Francisco Earthquake Specially Contributed to 'The Sketch' by the Great Singer/How I fared in San Francisco, Written and Illustrated by Enrico Caruso", The Sketch, May 16, 1, 1906, Reprinted in The Theater Magazine, Vol. VI., No. 65, July 1, 1906 and The Museum of the City of San Francisco Museum.
Puccini: His Life and Works, Julian Budden, Oxford University Press, 2002.
"Puccini’s Western, In Search of Lyrical Gold", Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, December 7, 2010.
"Enrico Caruso (1873-1921)", Mahler Foundation.
Toscanini, George Marek, Atheneum, 1975.
"Puccini: La Fanciulla del West Premiered Today in 1910", Georg Predota, Interlude, December 10th, 2018.
"Puccini’s Misunderstood, Musically Masterful Western Opera", Ellise Pierce, Cowboys and Indians, October 1, 2018.
"La Fanciulla del West at the Met", The Opera Tattler, December 16, 2010.
"Puccini's Wild West Opera Returns, with Horses", Brian Wise, WQXR, December 3, 2010.
"The Girl of the Golden West", David Finkle, Theater Mania, December 7, 2010.
"Adventures of Buffalo Bill from Boyhood to Manhood", Dime Novels and Penny Dreadfuls, Stanford University.
"Birth of the Hollywood Cowboy, 1911", Eyewitness to Hisory.
"In Your Opinion, When Did the Old West Come to an End?", Marshall Trimble, True West, September 1, 2004.
"Were Stagecoach Holdups Common?", Marshall Trimble, True West, December 2018.
"Earthquake and Fire", Arnold Genthe, Virtual Museum of the City of San Francisco from As I Remember, Reynal and Hitchcock, 1936.
American Album: How We Looked and How We Lived in a Vanished U.S.A, Oliver Jensen, Joan Paterson Kerr and Murray Belsky, American Heritage, 1968.
"Old West", Ngram Viewer.