Left to right, Ryan McKinny as Clarence and Paul Appleby as Joe Cannon with the San Francisco Opera Choir / Cory Weaver
SAN FRANCISCO—The apple premiere of John Adams and Peter Sellars’ new opera Girls of the Golden West (seen Nov. 21) took abode two canicule afore Thanksgiving. The aboriginal Thanksgiving took abode in 1621, and what we alarm the “Indian Wars” began in 1622. It didn’t booty continued afore the intercultural New Apple kumbaya burst into European ancestral supremacism.
A agnate arrangement emerged in the West. In the resolution of the Mexican-American War of 1846-48, the U.S. acquired about bisected of Mexico’s territory, including California. According to the opera program, “In March 1848, there were beneath than 800 non-native Americans in California. After the Gold Rush…the citizenry soared to 300,000 new Americans, abounding of them clearing in boomtowns such as Downieville. Yet there were actual few women amid them. By 1860, developed women fabricated up aloof 19 percent of the state’s population.”
Girls of the Golden West is set in this early, male-centric 1850s Gold Rush era, administering our absorption to several women who fabricated their mark on the new state. The appellation recalls the 1910 “spaghetti Western” opera La Fanciulla del West by Giacomo Puccini, based on the American comedy The Girl of the Golden West by David Belasco, whose ancestor was one of the aboriginal 49ers.
The New York Times singled out this San Francisco Opera (SFO) premiere as “the best agilely advancing new opera of the season.”
A commensurable adventure about the intersectionality amid white, Latino and built-in populations in California, admitting far beneath blood-soaked in the telling, is the archetypal ballsy Ramona.
Adams began basic Girls two and a bisected years ago, at a time aback the accepted Admiral Barack Obama could optimistically attending avant-garde to handing over the White Abode to his Democratic Party successor. Abundant baptize has flowed out of California’s Sierra Nevada since. At the premiere, afore the aboriginal agenda of the opera was heard, the supertitle console displayed the names of the opera sponsors. Applause bankrupt out aback “National Endowment for the Arts” was projected. This is a new American opera with a fresh, radically analytical attending at our history that either our accepted admiral or carnality admiral would acceptable airing out on.
Immediately afterward the opera’s performance, John Adams was presented with the San Francisco Opera Medal, the aboriginal time to a composer, by Company General Director Matthew Shilvock. Adams recalled: “When chat came out about what this opera was about, bodies said, ‘Well, that’s not a John Adams opera. He’s accounting about presidential politics, agitation and the apparatus of the diminutive bomb.’ But Girls of the Golden West is actual abundant about appropriate now. What gives me achievement is that I alive in California.”
Adams, originally from Massachusetts but a citizen of Berkeley for abounding years and buyer of a berth in the Sierra Nevada mountains, angry 70 in February. He was internationally acclaimed by a cyclone of concerts. His works, both operatic and symphonic, angle out amid the world’s best-crafted abreast classical compositions. His date works, all in accord with Peter Sellars, accommodate Nixon in China (1987), The Afterlife of Klinghoffer (1991), El Niño (2000), Doctor Diminutive (2005), A Flowering Tree (2006), the Affection aria The Gospel According to the Added Mary (2012), and now Girls of the Golden West. Four of his operas acquire been presented by SFO.
Girls is based on aeon sources thoroughly researched by Peter Sellars: miners’ diaries, bi-weekly stories, speeches, balladry in both English and Spanish, Mark Twain (his account Roughing It), and 15 song lyrics from the era, some calm in the 1854 Put’s Aboriginal California Songster, and others from Songs of the Abundant American West, aggregate and edited by the Marxist biographer Irwin Silber with music edited and abiding by Earl Robinson.
The arch brood of the project, however, is Louise Amelia Clappe (1819-1906), who recreated herself as “Dame Shirley.” She and her physician bedmate Fayette, both Easterners, accustomed in the adjustment of Rich Bar, 200 afar northeast of San Francisco on the Feather River. From there she wrote dozens of long, detailed, clear and advertent belletrist aback home to her sister in Amherst, Mass., after appear in book form. Primitive admitting it was, after any of her accepted affable comforts, “This aberrant action fascinates me.” She serves as the narrator of abundant of the action in the opera, alluringly interpreted by Julia Bullock.
Other characters in this frontier, Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny-like assignment accommodate Ned Peters, an able bondservant (Davóne Tines); Joe Cannon (Paul Appleby), a white miner with a airy temper; Clarence (Ryan McKinny), a white miner bottomward on his luck; Ramón (Elliot Madore), a Chilean who has fabricated his way up to gold country. And two added women from the title: Ah Sing (Hye Jung Lee), a Chinese prostitute whose goals are to save money, ally able-bodied and own a farm—her texts acquire from Songs of Gold Mountain: Cantonese Rhymes from San Francisco Chinatown and Kenneth Rexroth’s adjustment of Chinese poetry; and Josefa Segovia (J’Nai Bridges), of built-in Mexican origin. Best of these are based on actual figures, as is the dancing role of Lola Montez, performed by ballerina Lorena Feijóo. All the soloists are adolescent singers in their 20s and 30s who accomplish this arduous music superlatively. Maestro Grant Gershon, an accomplished Adams hand, conducts this circuitous account with absolute authority.
Dame Shirley has an about mystical appointment with some built-in women, but there is no aboriginal appearance as such. The apriorism of the opera recognizes the genocide adjoin Aboriginal Nation bodies (90 percent were abolished by 1857), but at the time alike the best accommodating whites saw afterlife as abundantly afflictive but inevitable.
In a disorderly alehouse dancing arena one man appears with a ladies’ bandage dress anatomy about his waist, which he swirls in time with the music—a attenuate adumbration at the attendance of gay men in that über-macho environment?
At the pre-opera allocution with the librettist, Sellars asserted that “California is a abundant action and the accomplished apple knows that…. Gold in California was apple news,” and led to possibly “the world’s aboriginal multicultural society.” He was asked how abundant affiliation Girls has to Puccini. “None at all,” he replied. But conceivably he protests too quickly.
La Fanciulla del West is advised Puccini’s musically best avant-garde score, with able influences of Debussy in its smoky, ablaze orchestration. It additionally appearance a mostly macho choir and to an admeasurement romanticizes the era and characters. In Girls the sentimentalism goes alone one way, however: With the barring of narrator Dame Shirley and her bedmate Fayette (Kai Brothers in a abject role), all the added white and macho characters are allotment of the miners’ mob accustomed to racist, bashed vigilantism and hyper-American patriotism. Whereas the added two “girls,” the aforetime apprenticed Ned, the Latinas and Latinos and the aboriginal people, all acquire a anapestic dignity of accomplishment and affect that stands out all too politically and acutely correctly.
Now of advance absolute images of the multiracial agreement of the mining camps should be brought out (which Puccini did not finer do); but from a believable affecting point of view, it aloof does not accomplish sense, for example, for the lovers (perhaps newlyweds) Ramón and Josefa to be exchanging adventurous verses of the abundant after Argentine artist Alfonsina Storni (1892-1938) from a book appear in 1919.
Ned’s two big arias are fatigued from The Action and Adventures of James Williams, a Fugitive Slave, and from Frederick Douglass’ oft-quoted July 5, 1852, abode What to a Bondservant is the Fourth of July? Ned attempts to alive in such a way, as Antony says of Julius Caesar, that bodies will say of him, “This was a man” (of advance abandoning the acclaimed byword of the Memphis sanitation workers of 1968). The Douglass aria delivered beeline to the admirers includes that access about Black Americans agreeable in every array of profession and trade, and alike adherent the Christian’s God, yet “Still we are alleged aloft to prove that we are men!” Added references to Shakespeare abound in the opera, abnormally the arduous Macbeth, whose adventure of betrayal and confiscation mirrors the anarchic Gold Rush mentality. We are reminded that Shakespeare was acclaimed and acutely admired in 19th-century America.
As a character, Ned’s storyline is mashed into Dame Shirley’s. They are portrayed absolutely about adoring on anniversary other, alike in the attendance of her husband, and in one arena he prepares an busy “coronation dinner” for his “queen.” It would assume they are accepting an affair. It’s not my business, of course, but how would they acquire gotten abroad with it at the time? The accord seems affected out of the documentary sources and askance into article absolutely unrecognizable.
Another conflation of apparently different belief takes abode amid two absolute persons: Ramón Gil Navarro, who wrote a book about his Gold Rush experience, and (in the opera) his lover Josefa Segovia, who in aegis stabbed Joe Cannon to afterlife on July 4, 1851. She was hanged by the mob the abutting day.
The affairs admits to some artistic authorization in dates aback assertive actual contest took place, but does not abode these casuistic artifice points. A added ambagious appearance is Joe Cannon, whose appearance morphs several times: Frequenter of prostitutes, he gradually avalanche in adulation with Ah Sing, becomes in actuality her abstruse husband, again turns into a bootless miner defective to escape (from an anti-Chinese mob or from his debts?), and assuredly turns up on Josefa’s doorstep. The Empire Bar, in one of the abounding hotels that housed and entertained the miners, has ablaze neon lights, which I could acquire with an anachronistic smile. The opera employs a abundantly sized rolling panorama as an accurate 19th-century affected effect.
These are a few of the anecdotal chain issues which could be addressed afore Girls departs for its abutting venue. Excessive allegiance to the sources can be ambiguous if it draws abroad from developing solid characters. Conceivably some of the continued balladry ability be cut aback as unnecessary: Presently the assignment runs three hours, 21 account with one intermission—overly long, I would say, by 21 minutes.
As allotment of Peter Sellars’ concept, the admirers can see accomplished the sets and watch the backstage activity. This conceit absolutely fulfills a different purpose from time to time: For example, in a arena area the mob is actuality affronted up adjoin the Latinos, they are aboriginal heard singing off-stage, and we see the abettor aqueduct arch that chorus, suggesting that abaft the scenes there are added armament “orchestrating” the nativism. The mob carries Tiki torches—hmmm, area acquire we apparent those lately?
As a musical-theatrical analysis of gender, chase and ethnicity, immigration, vigilante justice, and the basal belief of a country consistently asking, “Who is a absolute American?” Adams and Sellars acquire succeeded, as Sellars says, in “evoking a assertive aeon of American history, but this opera additionally carries the DNA of our aeon appropriate now.” Abundant is fabricated of the aboriginal Fourth of July in the anew American California (Adams uses bottomward fourths as his agreeable burden for this scene).
The artistic aggregation makes acceptable use of alarming contrast, assuming up the affectation of American celebrity and practice. The mob gathers while the choir sings, “To one and all both adolescent and old, / You’re acceptable to the acreage of gold.” Dame Shirley comments on the massacre, “I hadn’t accomplished that in the 19th aeon men could be baffled like dogs.”
Another affair appropriate by the opera is the bang and apprehension alternate attributes of the American economy. San Francisco, which so abounding Silicon Valley workers alarm home, is a acceptable abode to brainstorm on that.
As historian Gary Kamiya writes, “Like all of us, they were shaped by the attitudes, beliefs, and prejudices of their time, and the anarchic, greed-driven cosmos of the mining camps accustomed those prejudices to blossom. The blasting were a abundant crucible, a analysis of character. Some Argonauts bootless the test; others accepted to be fabricated of the accomplished mettle; best fell in between.”
Above all, Girls is a acutely animal piece, a celebration about aggressive bodies who approved to charm themselves. The final words of the opera accord to Dame Shirley, advertent the skies and mural of California and pronouncing it, as so abounding ancestors aback acquire done, “fathomless splendor.”
Girls is a co-commission by the Dutch National Opera, Amsterdam (look for it in aboriginal 2019) and the Dallas Opera (March 2021).
Remaining performances of Girls of the Golden West booty abode on Nov. 29, Dec. 2, 5 and 7 at 7:30 pm, and Dec. 10 at 2 pm at the War Memorial Opera House, 301 Van Ness Ave., San Francisco. Tickets are accessible at the SFO website, or alarm (415) 864-3330. The website will additionally advance you to a array of accessory contest surrounding the premiere. In the opera abode antechamber several affectation cases appearance alluring aboriginal abstracts and artifacts of the period.
