Yesterday we watched and heard Puccini's La Fanciulla del West imported digitally from the big apple's Metropolitan Opera. It was shown on the enormous screen at our local Century Theater. I was overwhelmed. I usually watch opera from the nosebleed seats, which are expensive enough. With the new technology, and with the telescopic close-ups, I could look right up Deborah Voight's nostrils and into her mouth. I swear I saw her well-trained uvula vibrating.
The Girl of the Golden West is a fascinating cultural stew. t's set in the gold-rush California of the dime novels. The play on which it's based was written by David Belasco, a London-born Sephardic Jew. The "West" is not real but mythological -- replete with gunslingers, a big-time bar room brawl, poker cheats, a cringe-making Indian squaw and papoose, a tough, mustachioed sheriff and a Calamity Jane-style heroine. Yet it's sung (sung!) in Italian. "Dick Johnson," the romantic lead, was performed by Marcello Giordani, a chubby tenor from Augusta, Sicily. Interviewed during one of the far-too-long intermissions, Giordani was asked if he had any trouble playing a last-century horseback westerner. "Not at all. I grew up watching John Wayne movies." I admit to giggling at his answer, even though giggling is always inappropriate in Grand Opera. Giordani also claimed that he tried to walk like Wayne. He didn't -- he sashayed.
John Wayne himself didn't walk the John Wayne walk until Raoul Walsh and John Ford transformed him from Marion Morrison, a furniture mover from Winterset, Iowa, into a mythological figure.
Nothing in La Fanciulla del West actually touches ground. Or touches any ground that I recognize.
Except that there are people who don't know it's a myth. Witness the recent events in Tombstone -- I mean Tucson -- Arizona. At this very moment, the Utah legislature is about to select its state weapon. The 1911 Browning pistol seems to be the gun of choice. In neighboring Arizona, it would probably be the Glock 9mm 30-round semi-automatic.
You're being unfair to Tombstone. At the time of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, Tombstone had stricter gun-control laws than Tucson has today.
Posted by: Otis J. Brown | January 28, 2011 at 11:14 AM