La Fanciulla del West

Right from the opening of the opera, we hear that Broadway flair, and as the miners and cowboys enter the scene Puccini draws an almost Coplandesque soundscape more than 30 years before Appalachian Spring was written. Sometimes the opera has an almost jazzy inflection, and we know that Puccini referenced traditional and Indigenous music from the United States as he was writing the score. I should note that it is also terribly difficult to conduct because there are so many tempo changes. Most people don’t believe me, but I find the first act of Fanciulla harder to conduct than Berg’s Wozzeck. It’s true!

Set in an isolated camp in California, a state that Puccini never visited, Fanciulla examines the corrosive nature of loneliness and contrasts it with the redemptive qualities of companionship and love. The second act is anchored by a soaring love duet—along the lines of what we expect from Puccini—but this music is so moving and so well-crafted that, in the 1950s, Dimitri Mitropoulos performed the entire second act in Florence without singers to prove just how great an orchestral composer Puccini was. Hearing The Cleveland Orchestra perform this music will be a great delight.