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The Metropolitan Opera gave us two new productions this autumn - "Fanciulla" and "L'elisir d'amore" The Puccini is from a fallow period in the composer's melodic invention, and it is not helped by the borrowing of its best tune for "Phantom of the Opera," but it is very skillfully put together. Given its growing reputation, and the fact that it is after all our piece - Belasco, the Western setting, the fact that it was written for New York - the house needed a new "Girl of the Golden West." The production has its problems - the bar is a little big, and it's nutty to bring Johnson down from the attic to lie unconscious beside the table where Minnie and Jack are playing poker, and there's no excuse at all for creating a grey abandoned mining town as the final scene of an opera that does, after all, end happily. Still, we've had lots worse. The genre bits for chorus and comprimarios in the first act are especially well done.

Barbara Daniels was our Minnie. On the [premiere] night she apparently had major vocal problems, but on October 23 she was fine once she got past her [first] aria - and she's a lovely artist with the right personality for this role. Placido Domingo has become the master of masters - always Domingo, but somehow able to blend it with the character he is playing. Sherrill Milnes was a splendid Rance: he has come to terms with his voice as it is and uses it to full effect; and he has become something of an operatic actor. Terry Cook was an impressive minstrel. Leonard Slatkin, a thoroughly first-class conductor, made his Met debut with an individual interpretation involving more syncopation than is common with Puccini. Giancarlo Del Monaco directed traditionally, with a nice shock moment when one of the dancers gets thrown through the railing of the loggia above the bar. Gil Wechsler's lighting was a disaster, even worse than usual.

Search by season: 1991-92

Search by title: La Fanciulla del West,

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