Program booklet »La fanciulla del West«

GIACOMO PUCCINI

LA FANCIULLA

DEL WEST

CONTENTS

P.

4

SYNOPSIS P.

6

THE QUESTION MARK BEHIND THE SUNSET SIMONE YOUNG IN AN INTERVIEW P.

12

AN INNOVATIVE OPERA MARCO ARTURO MARELLI IN AN INTERVIEW P.

16

DAVID BELASCO ANDREAS LÁNG P.

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NOT A WESTERN OPERA ANDREAS LÁNG

P.

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ATMOSPHERE AND SOCIAL IDENTITY VOLKER MERTENS P.

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AND JERITZA FAINTED ANDREAS LÁNG P.

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MINNIE STARTED OUT ON BROADWAY KARL LÖBL P.

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NOTHING BUT BANDITS AND GAMBLERS KONRAD PAUL LIESSMANN P.

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IMPRINT

GIACOMO PUCCINI

LA FANCIULLA DEL WEST OPERA in three acts Libretto GUELFO CIVININI & CARLO ZANGARINI Based on THE GIRL OF THE GOLDEN WEST, PLAY IN FOUR ACTS by DAVID BELASCO

ORCHESTRA

STAGE ORCHESTRA

3 flutes / 1 piccolo 3 oboes / 1 cor anglais 3 clarinets / 3 bassoons 1 bass clarinet / 3 bassoons 4 horns / 3 trumpets 3 trombones / 1 bass trombone percussion / 1 celesta / 2 harps violin I / violin II / viola cello / double bass tubular bells / wind machine harp / fonica or vibraphone

AUTOGRAPH Ricordi archives WORLD PREMIÈRE 10 DECEMBER 1910 Old Metropolitan Opera, New York AUSTRIAN PREMIÈRE 24 OCTOBER 1913 Vienna Court Opera DURATION

2 H 45 MIN

INCL. 1 INTERMISSION

L A FA NCI U LL A DEL W E ST

SYNOPSIS ACT 1 Evening in an American miners’ camp. Nick the barkeeper opens the bar. The workers return from the mines and wait for Minnie, who runs the bar and is also the only woman in the camp. They pass the time playing cards and brawling.

To distract them, Nick has a song from their distant home played. Larkens is overcome by homesickness, and his friends collect money to pay for his journey home.

The self-appointed sheriff Jack Rance, who is after Minnie, brags in front of the assembled company that Minnie will soon be his wife. He gets into a fight with Sonora, who is also madly in love with Minnie. In the middle of the fight, Minnie enters and puts them all in their place. She not only runs the inn but also tries to give the rough men some schooling in winter, and she makes them stop and think with a Bible lesson.

Ashby, an agent for a transport company, visits the camp. He is on the trail of a bandit called Ramerrez, who has been making the region unsafe for some time. The post arrives; a message from a dubious woman provides Ashby with information about the supposed whereabouts of Ramerrez.

Jack promises Minnie a thousand dollars for a kiss and tries to win her love with money. She abruptly rejects his advances and tells him of the poor but happy life and love of her parents. A stranger arrives at the heavily-guarded camp; Jack becomes suspicious and calls the workers together, inciting them against the stranger. However, Minnie vouches for the stranger, who has introduced himself as Mister Johnson from Sacramento. Minnie remembers him from a previous encounter. A waltz begins, and the stranger is accepted into the community. An alarm sounds, and the workers drag in Castro, a member of Ramerrez’s band.

He has come to lure the workers out of the camp with erroneous information about Ramerrez’s hiding place, giving his leader the opportunity to rob the camp (for the stranger Dick Johnson is actually Ramerrez). The entire camp sets out to hunt for Ramerrez, while Minnie remains alone with Dick. Dick’s growing feelings for Minnie make it impossible for him to overpower her and rob the woman who has stayed behind to defend the hidden stocks of gold with her life. The two agree to meet in her cabin up the mountain later that evening.

Previous pages: SCENE

4

SYNOPSIS

ACT 2 Minnie is preparing for Dick’s visit to her cabin. When he arrives, she confides in him and tells him about her life, but he conceals his true identity from her. They declare their love for each other, but their idyll is abruptly interrupted by Jack and some of the workers. They reveal Johnson’s true identity to Minnie and warn her about him, as he is a criminal. Disappointed, Minnie confronts Dick, and he tries to defend himself. He did not become a bandit by choice; after his father’s death, he had to take over his father’s band of robbers. But meeting Minnie has shown him the path to a new life. When he notices how deeply Minnie is affected by this breach of trust, he tries to leave, but hardly has he set foot outside when he is hit by a bullet from Jack’s gun, who has been lying in wait for him. Minnie’s love is rekindled, she takes him back into her cabin and hides her wounded lover. However, a few drops of blood reveal his hid­ ing place to the sheriff, who has returned to have his way with Minnie. Minnie is determined to fight for Dick’s life. A game of poker will determine both her fate and that of Johnson’s. If he wins, she will give herself to him and hand Johnson over to him; if she wins, her lover will be hers alone. After Jack has given her his word of honour, she wins the game with trick cards.

ACT 3 Jack has broken his word to Minnie and is intent on capturing Dick. At dawn, he sets out in pursuit of Dick, but at first Dick seems to evade him. Finally, Ashby manages to capture him.

Jack wants to make short work of his rival; he incites a mob, and before long they have a noose around Dick’s neck. But the lynching stops when Minnie is heard calling. She takes advantage of the general element of surprise and stands protectively in front of her lover. She gradually manages to subdue the hate and murderous intent in the men and persuades them to forgive her lover.

Minnie and Dick set off to start a new life elsewhere.

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CONDUCTOR SIMONE YOUNG IN AN INTERVIEW WITH ANDREAS LÁNG

THE QUESTION MARK BEHIND THE SUNSET PUCCINI’S MASTERFUL SCORE LA FANCIULLA DEL WEST MAKES A COMEBACK Puccini’s œuvre can be divided into two groups: on the one hand the imperishable popular works – Bohème, Butterfly, Tosca, Turandot – and on the other the unjustifiably rather neglected pieces such as Manon Lescaut, Trittico and Fan­ ciulla del West, all of which are in the repertoire at the Wiener Staatsoper. Despite the fact that renowned personages such as Anton Webern and Heinrich Mann spoke up on its behalf, Fanciulla del West faced an uphill battle. Internationally acclaimed conductor Simone Young is also a great admirer of this late Puccini opus which has been part of her career from the start. On the occasion of the revival of the highly praised Marelli production in January, she spoke with Andreas Láng about this “Western opera” set in an American gold mining camp. al Puccini was proud of his Fanciulla del West and even regarded it as his most successful opera until then. Nevertheless, the work is still rarely performed.

Why is that?

sy Puccini was absolutely right, in my opinion Fanciulla comes second only to Bohème! The problem is that the piece is difficult to cast. To start with, you need three well-matched top-class singers for the extremely demanding lead roles of Minnie, the bandit Dick Johnson and the sheriff Jack Rance.

However, the many smaller roles, which must be cast from the ensemble, are also challenging, as are the men’s chorus and the extremely complex orchestral score. In short, unlike Bohème, which I mentioned earlier, and which can be put on in smaller theatres at the level of a good municipal theatre, Fanciulla remains a project for the very best theatres. Furthermore, the story is difficult for directors. It starts with a spaghetti Western atmosphere, which one should not indulge in too greatly, and ends with niceties such as the two Native American characters Billy Jackrabbit and Wowkle, who in the present day and age should absolutely not be portrayed as cheap stereo­ types. I conducted my first Fanciulla in

6

THE QUESTION MARK BEHIND THE SUNSET

Los Angeles with a cast that included Plácido Domingo, Catherine Malfitano and Wolfgang Brendel. It was quite the production, with cowboy extras from Hollywood riding real horses and toppling to great effect out of the boxes or showing off as accomplished marksmen. Pure Wild West! That kind of thing comes across today as unintentionally funny and shifts our focus away from the true, important themes that should be presented here. In the current Staatsoper production, director Marco Arturo Marelli managed the balancing act of telling a story on the one hand and on the other bringing out the key elements. Audiences here are not the passive watchers of a John Wayne film, but feel they are being directly addressed, not least because of the action being shifted to a more modern setting. al What is it that accounts for the special nature of this opera? sy One of Puccini’s great strengths lies in his ability to conjure up a certain atmosphere on the stage in just a few bars of music. Many people are familiar with the beginning of Act 3 of La bohème: flute, harp and a little pizzicato in the strings – seemingly nothing exciting, and yet at that moment everyone in the audience feels and smells the falling snow that they see on the stage.

We find something similar here in Fan­ ciulla. The effect that Puccini achieves at the beginning of Act 3 with the simple, yet illustrative double bass phrase is simply brilliant. We do not find anything comparable until Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Or the poker scene in Act 2 which strongly anticipates modern cinematic dramaturgy – with this passage alone Puccini wrote musical theatre history. The

orchestral setting in general is phenomenal. Here a diaphanous chamber music quality with the subtlest entrances by various solo instruments, reminiscent of late Strauss or Korngold, there a full, rich sound, surging in the positive sense, but which must nevertheless be played pianissimo, and then again the whole impressive power of the orchestral format. And suddenly it is reminiscent of Impressionism inspired by Debussy and Ravel.

It is the work of a mature genius which is carried over into Tabarro and Suor Angelica. In addition, there is al­ most Shakespearean characterization.

Nothing is black-and-white, every character has flaws and merits. One character is corrupt, the other treats his benefactor Minnie like unfeeling merchandise. They can all be selflessly helpful to one person and at the same time unbelievably ruthless towards another. Rance is certainly a good sheriff who maintains order, but his brutality, his thirst for vengeance is more than frightening. The tenor hero Dick Johnson on the other hand is, despite everything, just a bandit; it is anyone’s guess as to whether he has really killed someone, as he claims. Even Minnie, everyone’s role model, proves to be a cunning cardsharp in the poker scene.

All this complexity, this ambivalence, is wonderfully reflected in the dark colours of the score, in the constantly shifting figures and phrases, the rubati, the incessant stop-and-go in the music which ensures that a single tempo is seldom maintained for more than twelve bars. In other words: the action on the stage and the music are so closely interwoven that I simply cannot imagine a concert performance of Fanciulla.

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THE QUESTION MARK BEHIND THE SUNSET

al The tenor aria in Act 3 “Ch’ella mi creda” was more or less a later addition made by Puccini.

Does this “interpolation” not seem out of place? sy I don’t think so at all. Puccini was not just a brilliant composer; he was also a brilliant dramatist. The aria is well placed – after the hectic search for Dick and before Minnie’s dramatic reappearance – and gives the audience two and a half minutes of respite, and it also works well as a hit song. al Fanciulla del West is not the typical Puccini tragedy, but also not a comedy like Gianni Schicchi or a fairytale like Turandot. What is it then? At all events we have a happy ending. sy But a happy ending with a very big question mark. To be sure, Dick Johnson and Minnie ride off – or here in Vienna they float – after a fashion into the sunset. So far, so good. However, no one knows what happens to them after that, if they perhaps perish a short while later. And all the others, the entire community of gold miners including the sheriff who was unhappily in love, lose their shining light in Minnie, who has held everything together and given each of them hope.

It is not for no reason that we hear the chorus singing “mai più, mai più” at the end, because Minnie will not return. Incidentally, I think it very impressive that Puccini dared in that day and age to put a young girl on the stage as the heroine. That was definitely not typical!

al How American is Fanciulla del West? In an interview on this opera, Puccini felt that he had captured the spirit of the American people. sy What is American? How American can a European be? He can at best be a European American. To be sure, the seemingly endless horizons of the prairie that do not exist here have preoccupied many artists: painters, authors, composers – we need only think of Dvořák’s Symphony “From the New World”. But it was always the vision of a European processing the unfamiliar country and its secrets, its unusual light, its unknown peoples. In Australia too we spend a lot of time dealing with the subject of imported European culture. I work there with artists who are descended from Australian original inhabitants, and we make sure that we do not paint one culture in the colours of the other. Naturally these options were not available to Puccini in his day. One thing that Fanciulla del West is through and through is genuine Puccini. A Puccini that anticipates various attributes that we encounter again one or two generations later as the American sound in countless Western film music scores at a lower level.

And here it should perhaps also be mentioned that Andrew Lloyd Webber clearly borrowed from Fanciulla del West for his musical Phantom of the Opera. This means that many people who are familiar with this musical have no idea that they have just heard a key melody from a Puccini opera...

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KS JOSÉ CURA as DICK JOHNSON Next pages:

KS NINA STEMME as MINNIE

KS JONAS KAUFMANN as DICK JOHNSON

DIRECTOR MARCO ARTURO MARELLI IN AN INTERVIEW WITH ANDREAS LÁNG

AN INNOVATIVE OPERA al What was the appeal of taking on a piece like Fanciulla?

What people here generally know about the piece – and particularly its Wild West background – doesn’t exactly fit in with the usual subtle, intellectual, complex Marelli staging? mam I must admit that I hardly knew the piece, but on my first encounter with it I was immediately fascinated and deeply impressed by the grittiness of the music. It’s an unusual work in every respect, full of new orchestral colours, grippingly dramatic, but without ever being kitschy – or, as Heinrich Mann put it, with Fanciulla Puccini began “to be rough and dis­agreeable.”

And then I was attracted by the social setting, the sheer difference of the subject compared with the earlier works, and the musical language Puccini developed for this work. It exactly reflects the social world of these destitute miners, who in the struggle to make a living have never lost a certain longing for happiness. I’ve never produced a verismo piece before, so this commission was new and doubly appealing for me. al Is moving the action to the present day necessary to free

the piece from its unfortunate Western associations? mam Yes, I think it is. The title, particularly in translation, leads people to expect a Western film, a piece from a genre which for the most part doesn’t have a particularly high artistic stan­ dard, and which the American film industry later exploited with great success, long after this opera was written.

But the piece has nothing to do with Karl May or Bonanza or other Westerns, there are no intrepid cowboys on the stage, and there’s little of that about the two Native Americans. In the period around 1850, which is where the authors tell us the piece is set, there were thousands of destitute people in Europe who followed the gold rush to California. It was the desperation and poverty in their home countries, also a result of the increasing mechanisation and industrialisation of agriculture, which forced them to set off to a foreign country. But this historical remoteness also introduces an unnecessary and confusing romance into the piece, which is why I decided to move the action to the present day. While the reasons have changed for the modern flows of migrants and the modern versions of gold fever, the situation is the same, with the uprooting and loss of a sense of home.

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A N I N N OVAT I V E OP E R A

al

How much should the set reflect the rough atmosphere of the Fanciulla music? mam The characters in the opera are as rough as the mood of the music, and the set should be the same. Men in a camp, cut off, far from civilisation, people in a container settlement, in a state of isolation and withdrawal. In short, not the sort of people you’d expect in a ”Western”. Impoverished miners who toil under extreme conditions during the day and dream of a bit of happiness and prosperity at night. The opera begins with a man weeping, Larkens, who can’t bear the homesickness in this bleak encampment, and it ends with a lot of men weeping. This again doesn’t fit the cliché of tough guys in Westerns – in fact, it breaches the taboo. al As Puccini didn’t speak a word of English, what got him interested in the Belasco play that he took as the basis for the opera? mam Puccini was criticised for his libretti by the highly-educated critics, who claimed he was unable to set serious literary texts to music, and not only in Italy. He was often contrasted un­ favourably with his rival Alberto Franchetti, a much performed composer who preferred heroic and historical themes.

After the exotic Madama Butterfly, Puccini looked at around 30 libretti, with literary works by Oscar Wilde and Gabriele D’Annunzio, including a Marie Antoinette, but finally he picked this rather trashy piece by Belasco which he’d seen in New York, and which – since, as you say, he didn’t speak English – he could have hardly have understood at all. He was fascinated by the different nature of the material. In Paris, Debussy’s Pelléas

et Mélisande had made a deep impression on Puccini. ”I’ve had enough of Bohème, Butterfly and co. – even I’m bored by them!” he wrote to his publisher, Tito Ricordi. He was looking for a piece where he could follow new paths in his musical language, and Fan­ ciulla is the result of this development.

Anton Webern praised it to Schoenberg: ”A score of entirely original sonorities, brilliant, every bar a surprise … not a trace of kitsch … I must say, I was greatly pleased by it.” al How would you categorise the opera? Is it a happy ending, or not? mam It’s certainly an opera, but it’s a very innovative one. Puccini was definitely aware of the emotional impact of his music, ”moving to tears” was his goal, and he subordinated a lot to this. In this respect he was a typical composer in the Italian tradition, as Bellini had commented earlier, ”In music drama, the song must move people to tears, to terror, to death.” But this opera is lacking the great crowd-pleasing arias. Another striking feature is the occasionally impressionistic instrumentation; the orchestra’s autonomy from the voice has evolved further, vocal style has developed with the most precise psychological nuances. This is a work of intensity and compression, full of raw contrasts. Then there are the places where the vocal boundaries are stretched, another innovation. A characteristic feature is Puccini’s numerous and extremely precise markings, such as ”half spoken” to ”screamed” or ”raw” and ”allegro brutale”, markings which you don’t find in his earlier scores.

What better way to express Jack Rance’s declaration of love to Minnie than in this stumbling, pathetic arioso? There

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MARCO ARTURO MARELLI IN AN INTERVIEW

are no great, sweeping melodies, the musical line never really takes off, and keeps breaking off; Puccini’s deep insight into the inner life of the man shows that Jack is incapable of feeling, and he brings this out in the character’s inability to find his own melody.

A quick word on the happy ending: it’s very easy to approach the end ironically. But Puccini didn’t pull out the emotional stops, and carefully wrote a very restrained, tender and soft ending, almost utopian, everything seems remote, the air is thinner… I’ve tried to express this music in a poetic image. al Did Puccini come up with realistic figures at all for the three main characters? Minnie, the demi-saint, Dick, the noble bandit who never killed anyone, surely they are prettified characters? mam You’re certainly right, particularly in the case of Minnie in the first scene. But there’s a great change in her from the middle of the second act. In her growing love for Dick Johnson, she abandons her moralistic, religious self, forgets the pietism of the bible scene.

The masks come off before the poker game, and the struggle for a new exis­ tence begins. Minnie clears the air with Jack: ”Let’s not fool ourselves! Dick’s a crook, and you’re a lousy sheriff, a cheat, I pour whisky in a bar and live off gold and cards, what kind of life is that…” She’s no longer interested in playing the saint in a male community.

Her longing for a new life and a real love with one man – something she couldn’t have in a community of male miners, for the sake of social cohesion – is stronger. al Some conductors say that this is one of the most difficult

pieces to conduct in the Italian repertoire. What about directing it? mam It’s a tricky piece for the director as well. First of all, you have to organise the numerous small genre scenes in the first act believably (there are often cuts made here), and then there’s this piece with its brutal contrasts and abrupt turns, and the psychological developments are only suggested – it’s like a woodcut, there are no slowly evolving developments. al A lot of important things in Fanciulla happen in the orchestra – how do you deal with this as a director? mam By trying to listen to the music as closely as possible. al There are a lot of piano and pianissimo passages in the score, what is ”soft” staging, that is, staging which matches the dynamic markings in the music? mam The quiet and restrained scenes only work in contrast to the volcanic outbreaks in the score, this is what gives the piece its gripping dynamism.

Puccini expects Minnie to come up with both girlish lyricism and high drama, this role is one of the most difficult of all. al Fanciulla clearly isn’t written to please – does this mean that the other Puccini operas are “cheaper”? mam No, not at all, they’re simply different, Puccini was setting off in a new direction in Fanciulla. al Why didn’t Puccini compose a fourth act, with Minnie and Dick together away from all that? mam He simply implied this in the finale to his third act, and that’s quite

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A N I N N OVAT I V E OP E R A

sufficient. The fourth Act in Belasco’s play completely lacks drama and peters out into a banal idyll, and I don’t think Puccini believed it. Fortunately, he spared us this scene. al What does Marco Arturo Marelli see as the central high points in the piece? mam There are many of these, extremely modern and pioneering, particularly for film music there’s the poker scene, the soft, faltering music, the eerie sounds of the woodwind, then the threatening demisemiquavers in the basses, the irregular pauses, just a few scraps of melody above them, and some of the dialogue is spoken – even today, this creates a weird, breath-taking tension at every rehearsal. al Does Minnie really love Dick, or is she simply projecting love into this relationship because she finally wants to change her life? mam I think she does both, and there are certainly some tough trials ahead. al Which is more important in Fanciulla, love or hope?

mam Both, undoubtedly, the terms ”love and hope” lead directly to Turan­ dot, Puccini’s last work, a piece where he intended to give ultimate expression to the theme that runs through his life, the insatiable longing for love, presented in a sort of parable. There, ”hope” is the answer to Turandot’s first riddle, and ”love” is Liù’s answer to Turandot’s question, which gives her such strength under torture. The unity of love and death is characteristic of Puccini’s picture of humanity in his works. In all the composer’s other operas, love is seen almost exclusively as a tragic entanglement which in­ evitably ends in death. From the start, Puccini as a contemporary of Freud was seized by the psyche of the female, this enigmatic, admired and despised creature. Almost all his female characters are described by the words of the ballad-seller in a scene in Il tabarro, ”Chi ha vissuto per amore, per amore si morì” (”Who lives for love, dies for love”). But this isn’t the case in Fan­ ciulla, which brings us back to ”hope” again.

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ANDREAS LÁNG

DAVID BELASCO In terms of instinct for the theatre, spirit of adventure and bravado, David Belasco could have been the younger brother of Da Ponte or Beaumarchais. A hard-working jack of all trades, he was also the typical example of the American self-made man. The oldest son of two emigrants from London (the family was descended from an old Jewish family that fled from Portugal and was originally called Valasco), he succeeded in becoming one of the great names in American theatre in his own right. When he first saw the light of day on 25 July 1853 in San Francisco, his parents’ financial situation was anything but rosy. His father, formerly a touring actor, had changed trades and was making his way, not very well, as a businessman.

His clearly better educated, more liberal and free-spirited mother, with whom David Belasco always maintained a close relationship, most probably exercised a far greater influence on her son, in terms of his intellectual background. She brought him up to be an extremely disciplined, self-assured young man who always attached great importance to expanding his knowledge. It became clear when he was still a young boy that David Belasco, who loved books, would pursue a career in the theatre. Wherever he went, he would attend theatre performances and establish contact with actors, whom on occasion he helped learn their roles.

He wrote his first plays at the young age of twelve. His restless, somewhat nomadic nature was an excellent fit for the varied and shifting existence of someone in the the­a­ tre. He ran away from the monastery school to which his parents had sent him to join a travelling circus for six weeks and enter service as a clown, before he was brought home by his parents. He drew much of the material for his later plays from reports he had

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DAV I D B E L A S C O

sent in to various newspapers in his youth on murders, accidents, brawls and other sensations he had experienced himself. As soon as he left school, he was an onlooker in numerous underworld pubs, police stations, hospitals. There was hardly a breed of men whom he did not know from close acquaintance. He helped his starving parents in part around the house, in part financially. Apart from his work as a journalist, he also worked in a tobacco shop and a book store.

In addition to that, he soon set up his own household, marrying his beloved Cecilia Loverich (who gave him two daughters) and battling his way through in the world of theatre until he was finally given his first roles at various theatres. Thanks to his talent for the stage, his characterisation skills and his charisma he was soon able to work his way up to being one of the leading actors, with a stylistically wide repertoire. However, David Belasco did not rest on his laurels and started to churn out his own enormously successful plays.

Two of these, namely Madama Butterfly and The Girl of the Golden West were, as we know, transformed by Puccini into operas. As a director, Belasco was far ahead of his craft; the lighting effects he used outshone everything that had been attempted before him.

At his suggestion, the stage machinery at several theatres was modernised, allowing special effects to be achieved that theatres elsewhere could only dream of. It was therefore only a matter of time before David Belasco would run his own theatre. Audiences knew that if the name Belasco was on a play, they were sure to have an exceptional evening of theatre. For many years, it was impossible to imagine Broadway without him; he produced around 100 plays there. Great actors like Sarah Bernhardt were in close contact with him. The gradually emerging film industry absolutely pounced on his plays. We would mention in passing the fact that Belasco – who was sometimes referred to as the American Max Reinhardt – also undertook tours in Europe and translated the works of other playwrights into English. Honoured by all, he finally died on 14 May 1931 in New York.

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ANDREAS LÁNG

NOT A WESTERN OPERA If Viennese opera goers think of Puccini, they mostly think of Bohème, Butterfly, Tosca or Turandot, followed by Manon Lescaut and Gianni Schicchi, and possibly Il tabarro. But do they think of Fanciulla del West?

Most of them have come across the piece once or twice, perhaps even here at the Wiener Staatsoper in the late 70s and late 80s, with Carol Neblett or Mara Zampieri, Franco Bonisolli, Plácido Domingo or Giuseppe Giacomini. But there will still be many even in the opera-loving Vienna public who know Puccini’s “most successful opera” (as he himself described it) only by hearsay. In casual conversation you’ll hear platitudes like Wild West opera, happy ending, evolving Puccini style, difficult to stage today.

But more specifically who can put their hand on their heart and relate the story in as much detail and with the same accuracy as they could the story of Tosca? Who knows what Puccini’s evolving style is really all about?

And who can tell you just what it is that gives the piece its alleged Wild West character?

There are several different reasons for the widespread lack of knowledge of the piece associated with its lack of popularity – Puccini, incidentally, always talked about the Girl, never about Fanciulla. First, the opera has to struggle against a stereotype

that emerged in the decades after its cre­ ation, a trivialisation of the Wild West with warring cowboys and Native Americans galloping around. Fanciulla del West is miles removed from such six-gun fiction. Basically, Puccini followed the same pattern in his choice of subject as with Butterfly or Turan­ dot, looking for a setting which was remote (as seen from Europe), a story set in the past with alien elements that give it a touch of the exotic – in this case, melodic quotations from original American music.

However, the subsequent Wild West films soon robbed 19th century America of every vestige of exoticism. An opera set in the Wild West inevitably suffers today from the stigma of revolver smoke, even if its subject matter is really entirely different. Fan­ ciulla is not about bold and romantically dashing heroes, but about uprooted and stranded characters, driven by need, who have left their homes, caught up in the gold rush, leading a hard and grim life as miners. This fact is, however, easily lost sight of under the Wild West label eagerly hung on this piece.

Musically, Fanciulla is clearly different from previous Puccini operas. For example, the composer deliberately avoids extended arias, and there are long passages where the melody is in the orchestra rather than on

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NOT A WESTERN OPERA

the stage, so that the demanding vocal lines generally get less applause than – for example – in Tosca.

Heinrich Mann captured this in his comment that Puccini had begun in Fan­ ciulla to be “rough and disagreeable,” and Puccini’s Austrian composer colleague Anton Webern was even more effusive: “A score of entirely original sonorities, brilliant, every bar a surprise … not a trace of kitsch … I must say, I was greatly pleased by it.” Puccini authority Volker Mertens wrote: “Puccini took over the achievements in harmony and instrumentation of Debussy, Stra­ vinsky and Richard Strauss, and used the refined and demanding sounds to psychologically illustrate characters and situations.”

Puccini’s own judgment (cited above) that Fanciulla was his most successful opera is generally accepted among connoisseurs. In fact, Puccini took a step backward in his later Tu­randot, compared with Fanciulla, as of all his works only the Trittico (and particularly Gianni Schicchi) can match Fanciulla in terms of modernity.

How far the complexity and diversity of the Fanciulla score have ultimately hindered the rapid spread of the

work has been and remains a frequent matter of debate. However, the fact remains that the première at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 1910 was a public triumph, with only the conservative critics wrinkling their noses. It is occasionally argued that many professional critics were offended by the character of Minnie in Fanciulla, overpious but insufficiently fragile, an unusual type of woman for Puccini – but this theory does not hold up to closer scrutiny, as Liù is hardly less pietistic, and Tosca hardly more fragile.

Ultimately, therefore we can say with confidence that the relative lack of popularity is due to the misplaced Western stereotype that dogs Fan­ ciulla and to the major challenge in staging that every director who tackles the work faces. Several directors in the past have made the mistake of compensating for the lack of kitsch in the score by kitschy scenery, so there is good reason for Marco Arturo Marelli, the director of the current new production of Fanciulla, to put such effort into matching the world on the stage to the score itself.

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Next pages:

SCENE

VOLKER MERTENS

ATMOSPHERE

AND SOCIAL IDENTITY AMERICAN MUSIC IN FANCIULLA ATMOSPHERE New York, January 1907: Constantly on the lookout for subject matter for his next libretto, Puccini attended David Belasco’s new hit on Broadway The Girl of the Golden West. Seven years earlier, Belasco’s play Madam Butterfly had provided the material for his successful opera about the Japanese geisha Cio-Cio-San. His hope of finding clear inspiration now was initially dashed.

He was disappointed in the play: “Nothing coherent, solid, complete.

I liked the atmosphere, but I only saw one or two suitable scenes in everything I saw. No straightforward lines, it’s all a hotchpotch, sometimes in very poor taste and with old jokes,” he wrote to his publisher Tito Ricordi.

All that appealed to him in Belasco’s play was the figure of the travelling camp minstrel Jake Wallace in the gold miners’ camp, who sings the sentimental song ‘Echoes from Home’ at the very beginning of the play. That fascinated him – in particular the uncivilised/primitive “atmosphere” surrounding the gold seekers of 1849, the “forty-niners”, created not least by this song and about a dozen other songs.

They were performed by the actors in

some cases, in others from the orchestra pit in several parts or as instrumental music. Although Puccini’s English was rudimentary at best, the dramatic weaknesses, the inadequate motivations in the play did not escape him.

It was the evocative music alone that made the society credible for him, that appealed to him. He therefore had a group of black musicians come to his hotel suite and sing spirituals and secular songs to him. Then, back in Italy in July, he wrote to his soul mate Sibyl Seligman, asking her to send him “early American music”, as well as contemporary music. She sent him “Native American songs,” and he ordered more music from America. His aim was to document and broaden his impression of the music of the black singers, to understand a specific musical “atmosphere”. He therefore familiarised himself with American music, just as he had done with Japanese music when writing Madama Butterfly.

It was some time before he discarded the other projects he had been working on: Maria Antoinetta, the libretto for which was already fairly well advanced, but which would have required dull ancien-régime overtones; further, La femme et le pantin after Pierre

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ATMOSPHERE AND SOCIAL IDENTITY

Louys, another musically hackneyed “Spanish” theme. The story of the Girl promised something unfamiliar, and so he opted for it. It took some time for the libretto to be moulded to his concept; the librettists had the most work to do on Act 3, which was particularly weak in Belasco’s play.

RAW MUSICAL MATERIAL Puccini used the “American” melodies and the harmonic and rhythmic characteristics he had noted when listening to and studying the music in two ways: firstly, as raw musical material that he used time and again to give the score a foreign flair. Secondly, he used an original Native American melody as a kind of leitmotif. He used only artistically refined fragments of songs such as those in Belasco’s play, because he expressly did not want to write an “American” opera. Rather, his aim was to use the distinctive features of music from the New World to characterise a community of “simple” people. For Europeans at that time and for the rich educated classes of East Coast Americans, that society was almost as exotic as the Japan of Madama Butterfly. It depicts an ancient society of white “noble savages” who have “simple” sentiments, who take the law into their own hands, who take revenge and punish, but also forgive others; they do not pay much heed to institutions such as the one that sheriff Jack Rance represents. This milieu, which ensures the social truth of both the characters and the plot, assumes acoustic form in the Americanisms in the music.

The prelude begins with an exposition of the conflicts, in “Euro-

pean” style with Debussy-like chords (“redemption theme”), followed by a sentimental (love) theme. But then the composer adds “American” colour, a cakewalk in the the brass and percussion. This refers to the American hero and his Hispanic identity, his brash cockiness, and his contempt for death.

The curtain opens, revealing the Polka Saloon, with large letters above its windows, reading: “A real home for the boys”. Act 1 opens with selections from American songs. Fortissimo violins and woodwinds play the rhythmically accented head motif and parts of the refrain from “Belle of the Barber’s Ball” by George Michael Cohan; for Joe and Bello’s dance an 1850 song ‘Camptown Races (Camptown Ladies)’

by Stephen Foster provides the refrain “Dooda dooda day” and a short (unrelated) melodic phrase.

With a few vigorous strokes of the brush, Puccini captures the atmosphere. Strains of ragtime frequently characterise the miners, but the composer refrains from quoting other melodies. Puccini’s Californian boys, by contrast, have a distinctly American identity, created with the help of specific musical devices that are anything but trivial quotes. Even the music for the two Native Americans, Billy Jackrabbit and Wowkle, that paints the picture of a foreign society at the beginning of Act 2, was not discovered but devised, with the typical Native American markers: pentatonic motifs in a narrow range, accompanied by open fifths. The low range of the lullaby, written using only four pitches (“Il mio bimbo è grande e piccino”), is intended to make it seem exotic (in the Belasco play, Wowkle sings in a very high nasal voice to por-

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VOLKER MERTENS

tray her “childishly simple” nature in “My days are as grass”).

SONG OF THE HEART The only song included in its entirety is the song sung by Jake Wallace. At the very beginning of the opera, we hear a “baritone voice in the distance”. However, this is not the gold miners’ song that Puccini had heard in the production of Belasco’s Girl, but the “festive sun dance of the Zuni Natives” that the composer borrowed from sheet music (1904 arrangements by Carl Troyer) probably sent by Sibyl Seligman. With this choice, he not only avoids adhering too closely to the Broadway production, but also imbues the scene with a particular foreignness for the ears of American audiences, because it is not in fact the “right” melody for a wandering minstrel. Opera impresario Jack Savage made this criticism, declaring that only ragtime would have been suitable. But the composer wanted to avoid precisely this kind of dull realism, preferring to create symbolic strangeness.

Over the course of the opera, Jake Wallace’s nostalgic song plays a significant and structuring role, similar to the leitmotif in Wagner’s operas: it represents the “soft heart” of the unruly company, portraying in music their general longing for a fulfilling and better life. It marks the conclusion of the key scene of the Bible lesson (integrated at Puccini’s insistence), anticipating Johnson’s crime being forgiven by the miners at the end of the opera; a variation of it follows the big love duet between Minnie and Johnson in Act 2. But above all it sets the tone for the conciliatory, happy ending.

When the travelling minstrel with a banjo (the sound of which is imitated by a harp played with paper strips between the strings) enters the “Polka”, he sings his song “Che faranno i vecchi miei a lontano” (“My old folks, what will they do?”) to the Zuni melody. The boys join in, they become emotional and are seized by such homesickness that in their homelessness they long for the shelter and warmth of their parents’ home. Bourgeois desires lie latent in them, but they turn just as quickly to violence against Sid, who cheats at cards. At the end of the opera, Minnie appeals to this “soft spot” in their hearts, singing a melody full of longing, charming the men determined to lynch Johnson, bringing Harry to tears as she reminds him of his sister Maud, and finally begging all her “brothers” for forgiveness for her lover.

At the end of his operas, Puccini liked to remind his audience of significant musical phrases; for example in Tosca when the orchestra reprises the memorable theme of Cavaradossi’s farewell aria to life. In Fanciulla, it is the Zuni melody that lingers in the air. As Minnie and Johnson ride off to seek new happiness to the strains of their exuberant love theme from Act 2 (“Ch’io non ti lascio più”, which was derived earlier from that theme), it can be heard as the boys lament the final departure of their “mother” Minnie: “You will never return!” But a slight shadow has also fallen across their future, because she has left her home and her social life, and the couple will always be as lonely as the miners; never again can the “Polka” be “A real home for the boys.”

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ATMOSPHERE AND SOCIAL IDENTITY

AMERICAN? ITALIAN? Puccini could rightly claim that he had very successfully created the atmosphere without having used popular “black” melodies. Their quality, their atmosphere was nevertheless important to him for distinguishing accents. Americanisms in melodies and harmonies were not yet well established, at least not in old Europe; they could credibly convey foreignness.

Accordingly, the reviewer of the Berlin première in 1913 found the characters to be “as incomprehensible as Martians”.

He had sensed precisely this foreignness and was unable to make any sense of it. The social determinants of char-

acters like “iron maiden” Minnie and the brutal yet sensitive boys and their actions governed by their situation are made plausible by the foreign flavour in the music.

The Californian setting however ultimately remains a peripheral tool to achieve the real goal: the portrayal of human emotions. La fanciulla del West is, as Puccini insisted, not an American opera, but a purely Italian opera. As he said: an opera that speaks directly to the emotions and in which the foreign shading merely sanctions the non-everyday acts and individuals.

But the latter are true to humans in their involvements, their passions and their longings.

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ANDREAS LÁNG

AND JERITZA FAINTED In 1909, a letter was sent by the Vienna Court Opera to publisher Albert Ahn in Cologne in which then opera director Felix von Weingartner enquired – in the most general terms – about “a new opera” by Puccini. “I would be most obliged to you if you pass on to him that if at all possible Vienna should have the right of first performance, and the Court Opera the performing rights for the German première.”

The opera was to be Fanciulla del West – and although Vienna did not have performing rights for the “German première”, theirs was the Austrian première. But as so often happens, another harvested the seed that had been sown. It was not Weingartner, but his successor, Hans Gregor, who staged the opera at the opera house on the Ring.

Initially he bided his time, because he did not really believe in the opera and wanted to wait and see what would happen, but finally he drew up the performance contracts.

The Austrian censors gave their approval on 25 June 1913, requiring no changes; the general directors of the imperial and royal Court Theatre also gave their approval the following day. A cost estimate had been prepared a week earlier: the sum of 21,950 crowns was allocated to scenery and costumes; another 5,500 crowns was added later for various technical expenses such as a wind ma-

chine. This equates in today's terms to a little over 125,000 euros.

Max Kalbeck picked out Italian elements even in this “American” work.

“Despite all the effort to which Puccini sometimes goes to write rough music using primitive raw materials to make it as ‘true to nature’ as possible, he has once again given us a new sweet ballad like the ones we are familiar with from his Manon Lescaut.”

On this occasion as well, Puccini was in Vienna, as he had been for the Court Opera première of Butterfly. He attended rehearsals with great dedication, which definitely created some tension in the ensemble. “The opera was staged by director Gregor, and rehearsals were already far advanced by the time Puccini arrived in Vienna. You should be aware that Puccini was an outstanding director whom no one could satisfy.

As a result, he sometimes upset the apple cart and as it were started re­ hearsals anew. This irritated the leads: “Maria Jeritza, who had by this time risen to international fame, and our magnificent tenor Alfred Piccaver. They were both so furious that they threatened to go on strike”, Richard Specht remembers of preparations for the première in his biography of Puccini. And Jeritza said: “He went through the music step by step, bar by bar with me, moulding me.

Sometimes he made me so furious that I

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A N D J ER I TZA FA IN T ED

could have cried. ‘Jeritza,’ he would say, ‘if I wake you up at three in the morning and ask you to sing a high C, then you will sing a high C.’” Finally, as the Frem­ denblatt newspaper reported, she fainted from exhaustion and tension at the dress rehearsal. However, all the conflicts were resolved – and on 24 October 1913 the acclaimed première finally took place.

The production was kept in the schedule until 1933 and was performed a total of 54 times – a number that gave the lie to the often heard prejudice that Fanciulla would not be able to hold its own in the repertoire. And after only three years with no Fanciulla, the second Staatsoper première of the work took place on 18 May 1936. In a production by Lothar Wallerstein and with Hans Duhans directing, the performances given were once again highly praised: “Using delicate and bright blends of colour, Wallerstein has created sets that look real and exotic... Vera Schwarz portrays innocence, warmth and passion most convincingly... With the role of Johnson, Alfred Piccaver is to a certain extent stepping into home territory. He is exactly the right singer for ‘American’ Puccini... Sheriff Alfred Jergers cuts a magnificent figure: cold and superior, a demon with red hair and black instincts,” wrote the Neue Freie Presse.

After the Second World War the management did not even wait for the reopening of the Wiener Staatsoper, but put on another production of Fanciulla at its temporary quarters at the Volks­ oper in 1952. In the title role was no less a performer than Ljuba Welitsch, who achieved a real personal triumph with her singing and acting. What praise could be more impressive than the observation in the Neues Öster­ reich newspaper that “Ljuba Welitsch’s

performance as Minnie was in no way inferior to that of the historic Maria Jeritza (who incidentally was heard as the Girl from the Golden West again in two performances)”? And the last sentence in this review testifies in a few words to the overall success of the production (with Josef Gostič as Dick Johnson and Karl Kamann as the sheriff): “Numerous curtain calls and tumultuous applause confirm that the Golden West now also includes Vienna.”

Lofti Mansouri’s Karl May-style production at the Staatsoper in May 1976 did the opera a great disservice and was partially responsible for Puccini’s Fanciulla being dismissed as a Wild West opera.

Carol Neblett performing Minnie in less than good health and Franco Bonisolli struggling with the role of Dick Johnson added to the reasons why this production was not successful. Franz Endler came to the following conclusion: “The men’s chorus and several horses were very good.” When the production was retrieved from the archives on 12 April 1988 with Plácido Domingo and Mara Zampieri in the lead roles, the opera was vocally excellent, but the new casting did not change anything in the direction. And so it was 25 years before the work found its way onto the stage at the Wiener Staatsoper again. This time, in the current production, in Marco Arturo Marelli’s staging, the scenic kitsch was eliminated, making way for a new look, showing “men in a remote camp, far from civilisation, people in a container settlement, similar to a modern day camp.” At the première on 5 October 2013, with music direction by Franz Welser-Möst, the cast included Nina Stemme (Minnie), Jonas Kauf­ mann (Dick Johnson), and Tomasz Konieczny (Jack Rance).

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KARL LÖBL

MINNIE STARTED OUT ON BROADWAY Let us turn the clock back to 1910. Pucci­ni had just completed the score of La fanciulla del West when the first big article appeared in the New York Times in June. It reported that in December American audiences would be the first to hear the latest work by the leading Italian opera composer. And there was no lack of details. “The action,” readers were informed, “includes a realistic lynching scene in a wood” and the chorus “consists of auxiliary policemen, cowboys and villains, and they all sing in Italian. Most probably”, the New York Times was so bold as to predict six months before the première, “all of them are just as romantic as the Roma, bandits, Druids, farmers, Egyptians and Nubians in previous operas”.

The author had evidently confused the characters from Bellini’s, Verdi’s and Puccini’s operas.

On 7 December, Puccini who had himself witnessed Arturo Toscanini’s intense rehearsals in the auditorium of the Metropolitan Opera, wrote to his wife Elvira, who had not come with him to New York: “The opera will be magnificent. Act 1 is a little long, but Act 2 is splendid and Act 3 sublime.

Caruso is outstanding in his role (Dick Johnson), Destinn (Minnie) is not bad, but she needs to be more fiery. I am satisfied with my work and hope for

the best – but it is all terribly difficult, this music and this production!”

Puccini had given numerous inter­ views during the rehearsal period. In them, he made some very revealing remarks about the new work. In one interview, the composer said: “For this drama, I have composed music that I believe reflects the spirit of the American people – in particular the strong, vigorous nature of the West. Although I have never been to the West, I have read so much about the country that I know it well, and I have experienced the sentiments of my characters so intensely that I believe I have created a true musical portrait. With a few exceptions, I have not incorporated any American motifs. It is nevertheless American music, while at the same time being my creation, in other words, genuine Puccini.”

The “Wild West” was about to be discovered by films, but it had already found its place in literature. Numerous novels, not all equally good, described people and conflicts, the lives and loves of adventurers, gold-diggers, individuals on the periphery of society, looking above all to make a quick buck. One of these books (by Bret Harte) had been reworked by David Belasco into a successful stage play. It was this play that Puccini had seen on Broadway when

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visiting America. The opera libretto was based on the play.

Interest in the new opera was significant, and ticket speculators threatened to disrupt the Met’s systems. Two dress rehearsals were given for invited audiences, both of which were a huge success. The première on 10 December 1910 proved to be equally successful.

Between Act 2 and Act 3, Met Director Gatti-Casazza brought the composer on stage to take a bow. At the end of the opera, the applause lasted 15 minutes.

Of the reviews, which were by no means all positive, the one in the New York Times was the most interesting. There Richard Aldrich wrote: “It is not easy to determine what place music should have in a drama like this.

In setting this drama to music, Mr Puccini undertook a task that not so many years ago would have been deemed impossible, almost a contradiction in terms of all the conceptions of what the lyric drama could or should be... He has now gone still further into this field of augmented intervals and chorus of the higher dissonances... In a word, there is a marked predilection for the idiom that is coupled particularly with the name of Debussy.”

Puccini paid little attention to the critics. He was accustomed to being judged either with diffidence or negatively by them. The enthusiasm of audiences was more important to him. On 28 December he set off for home; in his luggage was the silver wreath that Gatti-Casazza had presented him with on stage at the première. He had to have another souvenir sent on. He had found a motorboat in a marine shop and paid $ 3,000 for it. He had become a rich composer.

After the New York première, La fan­ ciulla del West was performed in eleven cities over the next two years – also in Polish, French, English and Hungarian. The piece was not performed in German translation until 1913 – initially in Berlin, Riga, Prague and Vienna (where it was not included in the repertoire between 1915 and 1925).

Maria Jeritza was most frequently seen in the title role in Vienna and even sang Minnie here twice after 1945, but by then Ljuba Welitsch was considered her undisputed successor.

The first studio recording of Fan­ ciulla was not made until much later: in 1950 at RAI in Milan. An exciting live recording from Florence (then as an LP on Cetra, now on CD on several labels) with Mitropoulos as a conductor came out four years later. On CD (EMI) you can also hear how Birgit Nilsson transformed Minnie into a Wild West heroine with vocal power in Milan in 1958. The same year, a Roman recording with Renata Tebaldi and Mario del Monaco came out on Decca.

The London recording (1978, CD on Deutsche Grammophon) with Carol Neblett and Plácido Domingo is faithful to the play, because conductor Zubin Mehta unobtrusively but distinctly brings out the Americanisms in the music.

Looking through the lists of old and new recordings of Fanciulla, it quickly becomes apparent that Domingo was most in demand as Dick Johnson for two decades. (He sang this role seven times at the Wiener Staatsoper too.) If one compares the interpretations of the tenor aria by Aragall, Björling, Corelli and Zambon on the internet, it is obvious that Domingo’s ability to establish a dramatic situation

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vocally in just two or three minutes justified this demand.

You can see him on DVD in several productions. Giancarlo del Monaco’s production was at the New York Met in 1992 with Barbara Daniels and Domingo (Deutsche Grammophon). We also encounter Domingo in London, once again with Carol Neblett as Minnie, and this time with Nello Santi conducting. Piero Faggioni was the director (on Warner Classics). And Domingo once again on Opus Arte from La Scala in Milan, with Mara Zampieri as Min-

nie and Lorin Maazel on the rostrum.

Those willing to give up the Jonathan Miller production can hear this cast on a Sony CD. Nikolaus Lehnhoff’s Amsterdam production is – as is almost always the case with this director – true to the work and pleasantly restrained in some details. Eva-Maria Westbroek and Zoran Todorovich are good singing actors. This performance on Opus Arte DVD dates back to 2009; it will without doubt not be the last video recording of this dramatically sensational opera.

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KS JONAS KAUFMANN as DICK JOHNSON Next pages: SCENE

KOPFZEILE

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KON R A D PAU L LIE S SM A N N

NOTHING

BUT BANDITS AND GAMBLERS ABOUT POKER PARTIES, DICE,

BETS AND QUESTIONS FOR FATE The scene can hardly be surpassed for its sheer drama: “It is terrible to think that a human life will be determined by the game of poker”. In the finale of Act 2 of Giacomo Puccini’s opera La fanciulla del West, Minnie plays poker with sheriff Jack Rance for the life of her beloved, the bandit Dick Johnson.

The situation is clear from the the outset: If the sheriff wins, Johnson’s fate is in his hands; in addition he also wins Minnie, whom he passionately desires. If Minnie wins, then Johnson is hers “forever.” What is it that drives the people in this Wild West opera to entrust their fate and the fate of others to a game?

For Minnie, it is her last chance to save the life of the badly wounded bandit whom she loves. For Rance, it is the temptation not only to get his hands on the wanted criminal, but also to satisfy his lust for Minnie, with whom he otherwise has no chance. Above all, Minnie knows that it is the thrill of the game itself that he is addicted to. She knows these people: they are all equally bad, they are without exception bandits and gamblers. This gives her the moral

right to gamble with the life of a thief, thereby possibly allowing him to evade justice.

Naturally, Minnie knows that she could easily lose to the hard-nosed sheriff. She must give fate a helping hand. She does exactly what another gold miner was nearly lynched for at the beginning of the opera: she cheats.

She cheats to keep her chance of life and love. At the same time, she is banking on the sheriff she despises being the gentleman (“Signore”) he claims to be when it comes to playing cards. Indeed, Rance accepts his defeat in the game, at least initially, and spares Minnie and her lover.

It is part of the image that we have of this era and the people in the Wild West that they play poker, as they do in Puccini’s Fanciulla. The myths about the Wild West that are done to death, especially in films, also gave birth to classic gambling characters, such as Doc Holliday, sheriff Wyatt Earp’s legendary companion who suffered from lung disease. This kind of gambler symbolizes the combination of a willingness to take risks and a coldness and skill that

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suggests something akin to post-heroic, amoral bravery: as fast with the cards as with the revolver. But in these games it is always money that is at stake. So what do you do when you have no more money but want to continue the game and perhaps still have a chance of winning?

The strikingly beautiful actress Angela Rossini, a member of a rather dubious touring company trying their luck in the Wild West, is faced with exactly this problem in the 1960 George Cukor film classic Heller in Pink Tights.

The stunning beauty, ravishingly played by Sophia Loren, is sitting at a poker table across from a cynically grinning, but nonetheless attractive hitman (Steve Forrest). She has lost everything, but wants to win back what she has lost and continue playing. She can see only one possibility, albeit a slightly frivolous one: she offers herself, in other words her body, as the stake. The cards are dealt, the lady loses, and only a happy twist of fate saves her from having to pay the price, with all its consequences. In the end, the killer does not win her; the somewhat unadventurous but thoroughly decent theatre director does (Anthony Quinn).

Is it justifiable to play with lives, either our own or those of others? It is justifiable to put a life at stake by using it as the stake? “Man only plays when, in the full meaning of the word, he is a man, and he is only completely a man when he plays.” This emphatic sentence written by Friedrich Schiller celebrating gambling as an expression of the freedom of man, of his imagination and powers of fantasy immediately loses its power when one regards gambling as a passion that can drive people to entrust their life to chance or fate in a game of cards. In literature and in opera, the

gambler became a character who symbolized not freedom but dependence, not sovereignty but subjugation.

Naturally, especially with gambling the goal of winning big money quickly and getting out into the big world is a defining theme, and the casino as a place that is both glamorous and fateful has found a firm place in the arts.

Literally sacrificing one’s life and love to a game of chance lends certain pathological and destructive traits to the player. Hermann, the officer addicted to cards in Alexander Pushkin’s story The Queen of Spades that Tchai­ kovsky used as the basis of his opera by the same name, can also be mentioned as an example, as can Alexei, who in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s somewhat autobiographical novel The Gambler bankrupts himself in the casino of a German spa town.

But what happens when the players are playing not for money but for life’s chances and decisions? What does it mean when an existential question is determined not by deliberation or emotions, but by the outcome of a game?

The game then becomes a question put to fate, which becomes evasion, a last recourse or as the opportunity of divest oneself of one’s responsibilities. Those who play with fate are at least indulging in the illusion that they can overcome it and turn their life in a different direction.

It is not very surprising that it is above all the dark powers that are challenged in this kind of game and that are only to happy to play along: death and the devil. In Igor Stravinsky’s The Sol­ dier’s Tale, composed in 1917, a drunk devil gets involved in a card game that, however, ends dubiously for his human counterpart. Nevertheless, a

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good card player may think he has a certain chance against a devil who is not in full control of his faculties; after all, unlike roulette, cards take a combination of chance and skill.

It is even better if one can tempt the consummate opponent to join you in a game of chess, because this regal game is completely lacking in the element of chance and gives the player the opportunity of forcing fate’s hand by virtue of strategic abilities alone. In Ingmar Bergman’s famous 1957 film The Seventh Seal, which takes place during the Crusades, the knight Antonius Block, impressively portrayed by Max von Sydow, persuades Death to spare him for the duration of a game of chess. Naturally, the knight, who is a superb chess player, cannot escape Death, but the latter must resort to a dirty trick to checkmate his human opponent. Death too can cheat.

We know from the Bible that the devil also likes to gamble. The original form of these games with the corporeal is played by God the Father himself, and it is a bet. In the Book of Job, God lets Satan persuade him to bet on the strength of Job’s faith. Goethe was inspired by this to include a double bet in his tragedy Faust. Firstly, God enters into a bet with Mephistopheles about the corruptibility of Dr Faust, then Faust bets with Mephisto that there is not a single moment in life that would make it worth being restrained forever. Agreed, the bet is on. Betting on a person can also be found in Mozart’s opera Così fan tutte. Here it is the equally jaded and cynical philosopher who bets with the young inexperienced men on how easily their beloveds can be seduced. It is a safe bet, because this one (almost) always wins. Nevertheless, it is not harmless. After all, betting is a

particular kind of game: it anticipates the future and tries to make a profit based on a prognosis.

The more unlikely the occurrence, the greater the profit. This is harmless in sports betting, but anyone who bets on how easily someone can be seduced and therefore on someone’s potential misfortune or on rising food prices, their profit then depends on more people going hungry and starving. In this case, they have has fallen into the moral pitfalls of existential games.

Gambling with your life is something that can be done not only with Russian roulette, in which you suddenly either lose your life or win a great deal of money. It can also be done by deliberately leaving decisions that must be made to chance. Aleatory not as aesthetic but as social practice! No one has developed this model and its consequences as intensively as the American author George Cockcroft. Using the pseudonym Luke Rhinehart, in 1971 Cockcroft published the novel The Dice Man, which became a cult book overnight. The narrator, who tells the story in the first person and is a very successful psychoanalyst, hits upon a terrifying thought after an evening of poker in good company. He suspects that there is a die under a heedlessly laid card, incidentally a queen of spades. If the die shows a one, the idea hits him, he will rape the wife of his best friend. He removes the card. One! The die is cast.

He does what the die requires of him.

This experience causes the analyst to completely reorganise his life.

He now leaves all decisions, even the most banal and terrible, to the dice. In a particular twist, he even develops a dice therapy, with which he enjoys considerable success, until, following this

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NOTHING BUT BANDITS AND GAMBLERS

strategy, he plays himself into a corner with no way out. This novel shows abruptly what it means to entrust your life to a game in which chance plays the lead role. It is all about delegating decisions, and thereby disposing of all moral responsibility. Instead of freedom to act, the principle of chance takes over, instead of considered, conscious desire there is pure arbitrariness, and instead of emotions and motives there is naked calculation. Neither subjective reasons nor social norms determine one’s actions; all that matters is the rules of the game, which make a mockery of all the humanity that characterises the game described by Schiller.

But it is precisely this radical interpretation that shows what happens when the game as a game becomes serious.

Sometimes it is therefore better to end this kind of game before it is too late. In Arthur Schnitzler’s Anatol, a series of seven acts, the protagonist has the opportunity to participate in an amusing parlour game. His lover allows herself to be hypnotised, and Anatol can finally ask her what he has been burning to ask her for as long as he has known her: whether she loves him, whether she is faithful to him or

whether there are other men in her life.

He hesitates for a long time, but then decides that he would prefer not to put this question to fate. Being able to play the game also means knowing when to end the game.

These few examples are meant to show that challenging fate in a game can be as fascinating as it can abhorrent. Fascinating, because the seriousness of life is counteracted by this playful moment, specifically because it is put at stake. After all, it is only a game.

Abhorrent, because this kind of game robs the individual – as a moral subject who is responsible for his actions – of his dignity, because his actions can be ascribed to considerations and rationale. He becomes nothing more than an object, a chip. Puccini’s Minnie is familiar with the frivolity of this game. She takes advantage of the sheriff’s passion for gambling so as to have to entrust the life of her lover and their mutual happiness to chance. She cheats. She cheats in the game in the hope of helping her love to become a reality. Naturally, this is breaking the rules of the game; but it preserves Minnie, her beloved bandit and us from a worse fate. There is a noble objective behind her cheating game.

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IMPRINT GIACOMO PUCCINI

LA FANCIULLA DEL WEST SEASON 2023/24 PREMIÈRE OF THE PRODUCTION 5.10.2013 Publisher WIENER STAATSOPER GMBH, Opernring 2, 1010 Wien Director DR. BOGDAN ROŠČIĆ Music Director PHILIPPE JORDAN Administrative Director DR. PETRA BOHUSLAV General Editors SERGIO MORABITO, ANDREAS LÁNG, OLIVER LÁNG Design & concept EXEX Layout & typesetting MIWA MEUSBURGER Image concept: MARTIN CONRADS, BERLIN (Cover) All performance photos MICHAEL PÖHN Printed by PRINT ALLIANCE HAV PRODUKTIONS GMBH, BAD VÖSLAU TEXT REFERENCES All texts - with the exeption of the interview with Simone Young - were taken from the première programme of the Vienna State Opera 2013. The interview with Simone Young took place 2023. ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS Andrew Smith.

Reproduction only with approval of Wiener Staatsoper GmbH / Dramaturgy. Abbreviations are not marked. Holders of rights who were unavailable regarding retrospect compensation are requested to make contact.

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