“Girls of the Golden West,” titled to play on Puccini's opera, couldn't be more different. Here's a contrast that takes us not only to the rapid change in music and staging of operas over a century, but also to the changes in thinking about the purposes of the art. And predictably, it's much less pretty than Puccini's.
Peter Sellars and John Adams, the librettist/composer partnership, had already produced three operas, (Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer and Doctor Atomic). Like all those, Girls of the Golden West is based on real historical events and characters driven not by a love story but by strong humanist messages. 'Without question, the most highly anticipated new opera of the year — a year in which Adams turned 70 and Sellars, 60 — “Girls” has also been presented as the first opera of Trump times. The populist spirit of the 49ers, the lack of regard for the environment in pursuit of wealth, along with the rampant racism against Latinos, Chinese and black people has created the expectation of the kind of political opera that the lyric stage has historically been very adept at.' Marc Swed in LA Times.
The purpose of opera
This is a very different depiction of the Golden West, and unlike Puccini's, a historically researched one. It's about diversity and hardship, racism and violence. Sellars drew on original manuscripts, particularly on the letters from one woman ("Dame Shirley") to her sister, and other archived documents including memoirs of fugitive slaves, poems of Chinese immigrants. In this long workshop discussion, he points out that "people came from all over the worlds - it was the first multicultural society on the planet."
Did it work? The early reviews were critical. Tommassini in NY Times concluded that 'The opera’s story gets lost amid what comes across as a bold attempt to write the great California opera — a sweeping tale of the mad quest for fortune that was the mostly disastrous Gold Rush.'
But perhaps, unlike Puccini's opera and the play that preceded it, this one was not so much about one 'story' as about many, and and about location in place and time, a story created to display context - just that madness and disaster? (Sounds familiar?)
“We’d been kicking around various ideas. Peter had been thinking about Puccini’s La fanciulla del West” – based on David Belasco’s gold rush play, The Girl of the Golden West. “Peter got out the score and was appalled at how far from reality the story was. It’s a great tale but treated more like a Jack London novel, ignoring the desperate hopes of these people, all young, in their 20s and 30s – Mexicans, Chileans, European, black free slaves.” Adams compares the lure of California to Wagner’s Ring – a belief that you could go there and pick gold off the ground and make a fortune. “It wasn’t like that at all. It was fake news.”
The story and the purpose
The title was a play on Puccini's, and also a statement about the diversity - racial, demographic, class - of the ragged gatherings in goldrush towns. They were of course mainly men.
The few women "tended to be wives of important men, prostitutes, entertainers, Native Americans or Californios, the original Mexican settlers. They were always in danger.
One, Louise Clappe, was a young doctor’s new wife. Under the pen name Dame Shirley, she wrote a series of eloquent, richly detailed letters about the thoughtless mob rule, which she described with a clarity, calm and remarkable capacity to retain her sense of wonder... Dame Shirley is properly horrified by much of what she sees. An Easterner from New Jersey who was educated in New Hampshire, she has her own prejudices to confront. But her greatness is in her capacity for acceptance. Rather than allow herself to be ruled by hysteria, she lowers the temperature with a willingness to dig for, and stand up for, good — which is a lot harder to find than gold. Dig she and we must. The characters either are based on historical characters or are composites. There is a story, but it’s disjointed." More in this review.
It's not only about women. Or about the past social structure. Some stories are directly of the present. Here, the escaped slave, Ned, comments on July 4th.
For Sellars, the librettist for Adams' previous high profile operas, the drive is to 'comment'. "The world is moving in a direction that does require intervention and does require comment and does require a shift in direction. That’s the job description for artists. We’re the people who suggest a bunch of that stuff. Nobody needs to vote for an artist. You’ve got nothing to lose, you just put it out there. This is a very important time to be an artist." Read more in this profile.
Adams is often described as the greatest living composer. Popularity of his operas is founded in the music - his complicated weavings of modern and more recognisable traditional musical styles. But his reputation will perhaps be built on that drive to 'comment'. He has made opera, as the singer Gerald Finley has said, “a force for social commentary."
In this interview in the Sierras, Adams calls it " making poetry of history." History is on the surface. You need to stop, "in the way that Shakespeare stops, and say now hang on a minute, what really happened between these two people." So it's also about the personal story.
This not quite strange modern music
We don't have a full recording of this opera, and can judge it only from available clips. Those are mostly of the miners' songs that feature strongly in the plot and the score, lifted from real historical records and changed by his music. “Adams’ score [highlights] the profane humor and mawkish sentimentality of the Gold Rush songs that he incorporates throughout the opera, which rise to almost sublime heights in his high-octane and inventive settings of the songs. During the Gold Rush, these lyrics were sung to the tune of recycled melodies from Stephen Foster standbys like ‘Camptown Races’ or ‘Oh! Susanna.’ Now, set anew to music that is pure, unadulterated Adams, they release a static charge long dormant within them; the resulting sparks and flares contribute to the opera’s electric energy.”
“I set these raunchy and vivid song lyrics to my own music. Sung by the male chorus, they provide much of the gusto in the opera,” Adams says. “There are resonances with earlier works of mine like Nixon in China and Grand Pianola Music, but by now I also detect traces of the Brecht-Weill mix of theater, popular song, and opera."
But it's not a pastiche of old songs. There's fast sounds of stress and action, and lyrical music taking us to the characters' thoughts and feelings. Here's the opera's opening, and Dame Shirley's arrival. At the launch of the CD recording, Guardian reviewer commented:
"The musical world that the opera evokes, though, is a curious one. Adams describes Girls of the Golden West as “not exactly an opera, and … not exactly a musical”, conceiving it in terms of “songs rather than arias” and using the “most direct and simple” musical language of any of his works.
"And while the energy and urgency of the orchestral writing, with its Stravinskyan dislocations, instantly identifies the score’s composer, the vocal lines seem to veer between folk songs, sentimental ballads and something more high flown and conventionally “operatic”. This rich mixture just about hangs together musically and dramatically, with only a few loose ends."
More about Adams and the music next week, when we explore his earlier work, and more of these surprises in his epic Dr. Atomic.
Lyn 28/5/24
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