Puccini and the Girl: History and Reception of The Girl of the Golden West

Notes, Sept, 2006 by Mary Simonson

Puccini and the Girl: History and Reception of The Girl of the Golden West. By Annie J. Randall and Rosalind Gray Davis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. [xv, 241 p. ISBN 0226703894. $35.] Music examples, bibliography, discography, filmography, illustrations, index.

Annie Randall and Rosalind Gray Davis open their monograph Puccini and the Girl: History and Reception of The Girl of the Golden West by tracing their paths to their topic: in the early 1960s, Davis's father, journalist Marvin Gray purchased a set of twenty-nine letters from Puccini to Carlo Zangarini, La fanciulla del West's librettist, written during the opera's composition. Gray never realized his plans to publish a "small volume" featuring the letters in their original Italian and English translation, and a history of the opera's creation, however, and it is here that Davis and Randall enter the scene. Inheriting the letters after her father's death, Davis, a former journalist turned independent scholar, also inherited his dreams; in 1996, she met Randall, a musicologist, and revived his project, generating a "detailed account of the events" surrounding La fanciulla's conception, composition, and popular and critical conception (p. 8).

Though the scope of Puccini and the Girl is far wider than the twenty-nine letters Davis's father purchased some fifty years ago, at the center of Randall and Davis's "detailed account" are a wide array of original documents: newspaper articles, items from the Metropolitan Opera archives concerning La fanciulla's 1910 premiere, programs, and related ephemera, as well as the Puccini-Zangarini correspondence. After a comprehensive account of La fanciulla which simultaneously offers blow-by-blow descriptions of musical and narrative themes and their interplay, and positions Puccini's compositional strategies in relation to his contemporaries within the genre more broadly (chapter 2), the authors devote the middle section of the book (curiously split into chapters 3 and 4 despite their shared material and narrative trajectory) to these painstakingly gathered, translated, annotated, and--perhaps most importantly--"decoded" documents. The narrative that emerges, a compelling miseen-scene of Puccini's character and personal life during the composition of La fanciulla, is of interest to a broad audience of Puccini scholars and fans alike. Not only do the letters--featured in their entirety even when short and seemingly inconsequential--offer valuable insights into Puccini's relationship with Zangarini and his opera, but we get a glimpse of his personality and sense of humor: his occasional "letter-poems" to Zangarini are simultaneously charming, manipulative, and wacky. " 'I am on the sea / dancing a lot, / and what are you up to? / Do you think of The Girl?' " he writes, and later in closing, "Many greetings / From the high seas--/ If you want to play, / Cover up well / Ciao" (pp. 69-70). The book's appendices, too, are a treasure trove, packed with well-organized and above all, readily accessible materials including the original Italian texts of the letters and a variety of other archival materials, a list of Zangarini's libretti and other works, the Metropolitan Opera's performance history of La fanciulla, and a filmography and discography of the opera.

In their introduction, Randall and Davis promise a book that "weaves together the letters with other material into a detailed account of the opera's creation." (p. 8) Yet the resultant narrative is less a smoothly woven piece of cloth than a series of dense knots of information loosely strung together. Throughout, it is difficult to gain a sense of how each chapter connects to those surrounding it; with the exception of their reappearance in a chapter devoted to La fanciulla's "redemption" theme, for example, the Puccini letters disappear in the chapters that follow the middle section of the book. Moreover, it is difficult to gain a sense of the authors' agenda, critical perspectives, or personal connection to the opera. In their discussion of La fanciulla's "redemption" theme, for example, a significant section is devoted to a reexamination of various "received appraisals" of the opera "in light of newly available documents or alternate interpretations" (p. 156). Proceeding through a series of issues including La fanciulla's weak libretto and ridiculous premise, Minnie's "beautification, and the lack of tuneful melodies, the authors provide a detailed review of each criticism, and repeatedly demonstrate that despite the importance of such issues in scholarly readings, they were of little consequence to audiences in 1910. Yet while Randall and Davis effectively debunk most of these critiques, and offer a comprehensive review of scholarly literature on La fanciulla, they offer few, if any "alternate interpretations" of their own, concluding merely that "a plurality of positions regarding Puccini have emerged to dislodge and supplant in the twenty-first century" those of earlier moments in history (p. 169).