Royal Opera

19th September

Puccini is one of those composers even non-opera people know about. When I heard Madam Butterfly, Turandot, and Gianni Schicchi and for the first time, I recognised some of the songs. La boheme is just like the musical Rent so I knew what was going to happen. La fanciulla del West was one I didn’t recognise at all. The only thing I was sure of was that either Minnie or Dick would end up dead and when Dick started dripping blood all over the place I decided it was probably him. When he was sentenced to death it seemed even more likely. But I got it completely wrong.

There didn’t seem to be many tunes in this one, maybe one stand-out aria but I can’t remember how it went now. Antonio Pappano was the conductor, he’s usually good at finding tunes. The singing wasn’t great either. So I’m surprised I liked it really. But it went from a dull first act to a really quite funny second act with a gripping ending to a third act that ended up being a lot more moving than I’d have expected.

Act 1 was mostly about every man in the village fancying Minnie. I thought Eva-Maria Westbroek’s singing voice was a bit hard and not very beautiful but she could deal with all the men in a really spirited way, she was nice to them but she wasn’t letting it go to her head. So if you take that into account and also the fact she seems to be the only woman around except for her Red Indian servant who can barely speak English (or maybe I should say Italian, I’m not sure, as it’s set in America they probably are speaking English really) the way all the men adore her really seems more than reasonable.

I’m not sure if I liked Minnie though. I believed she liked Dick and cared about the others but despite all her talk about the Bible, she is prepared to cheat at cards. Maybe I’d have thought better of her if she’d got the better of Jack Rance (the Sheriff, who also fancies her) by actual skill rather than deceit. But considering Dick is a criminal maybe they deserve each other. At any rate, Minnie can take care of herself and at least she doesn’t murder people or arrange for them to be murdered like Tosca and Turandot.

Dick was sung by José Cura, who the others say is very famous and has lots of fans. I didn’t really warm to him, either his character or his voice, but Violetta loves him and she’s probably the Puccini expert of the Primi Divi so he’s probably great. I thought his acting was good after he’d been shot. Rance was sung by Silvano Carroli, I think Barry said he was in the original production in the 70s. I didn’t notice him so much in the first act but the second half of the second act was really quite tense and he was important in that part.

Most of the men who fancied Minnie were miners. Only a few of them seemed to have real characters but as there are eight of them, it would be difficult to get to know them all. The one who really stood out was Sonora, who was sung by Daniel Sutin. At the end Minnie tries to bring the miners round to her way of thinking and Sonora cracks first and helps Minnie to persuade the others. He seems like a good sort of guy or maybe he was just the first to stop thinking with his willy but he was the most likeable character in the opera.

Graeme Danby and Clare Shearer were the two Red Indians, Billy Jackrabbit and Wowkle. Clare Shearer in particular was really funny. She mostly just made sounds and spoke in half-sentences but she made it funny without giving the impression she or Puccini or the librettists were making fun of anyone - because she wasn’t just funny, she was another character I really liked.

Madam Caterpillar

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