It should have been a cognac red, of course. What hindered the interpretation was the bad colouring of that piece of the scenery – a sort of diarrhoea brown-black. After some minutes I saw the plot: a giant Sequoia tree cut down. In the second part of the opera we see a huge trunk of a huge tree, as well as the end of that tree on the ground, frontally. It took me a while to ‘read’ the set-up of the scenery on stage. A Failed Nation is what I called the USA. It felt as if the summa summarum of the United States of America which I wrote not long ago, has been realised in Adams’ music and Sellars’ poetry. After you have left the opera house, there is not a glimmer of hope left. However, in The Girl of the Golden West that dream is now stone-dead. Listening to the final chant of Ned – who has been given the superior voice of Davóne Tines – I could not help but hearing Martin Luther King’s chant I have a dream… Those rowdies very much remind one of the ugly chants of the even uglier crowds that can ben seen at the supporters’ rallies of Donald Trump. The contrast between on the one hand the music which supports the rowdy miners’ songs, and the dark lyricism of the arias sung by the Latino ‘Ramón’ and the Black ‘Ned’ is almost painful. Adams’s music and especially Peter Sellars libretto, which situates the action in the same historical period as Puccini’s opera, are aiming at America’s Here and Now: The Trump Era. Whereas Puccini’s opera is a rather moralistic tale of the Californian West – with an Italian libretto by Guelfo Civinni and Carlo Zangarini, based on the play The Girl of the Golden West by the American author David Belasco o – it is also, very much like his Butterfly, a European’s Old World criticism of the New USA. Adams’ Girls of the Golden West, may indeed look like a reference to Puccini’s 19 th-century The Girl of the West, which is certainly also is however, Adams’ libretto and music are all about now. Listening to Adams’ latest, though, I did think of Butterfly, Puccini’s work of contemporary realism, describing the cool seduction of a Japanese girl by an American Navy man in Japan, who then leaves her. After all, I am a mere amateur… Now, of course, I have read its synopsis. That another favourite opera-man of mine, Puccini, already wrote an opera under the title La fanciulla del West – The Girl of the West – I did not know. Masses, including Whites, Mexicans, Blacks and Chinese. Once having listened to it, this title turns out to be a witty play with words, golden referring to both the American West as an Ideal, seducing Americans to go out there – California or bust! –, as well as to the Gold Rush, the period that masses moved out West, to dig for the yellow riches. The tittle Girls of the Golden West did not indicate a specific subject. Before entering The Amsterdam Opera House, I only knew the name of the composer, one of my favourites: John Adams. Perhaps, nothing as exciting as going to new opera and having no idea what it is about.
0 kommentar(er)
