New opera re-examines Calif. Gold Rush

By MIKE SILVERMAN

Associated Press

NEW YORK

Move over Puccini, and make way for the Girls.

A new opera by American composer John Adams aims to tell the true story of California’s Gold Rush, capturing the excitement but also the greed, brutality and racism that followed the quest for instant riches as prospectors from all over the world flocked to the Sierra Nevada in the early 1850s.

Premiering at the San Francisco Opera on Nov. 21, the work is titled “Girls of the Golden West,” a twist on Puccini’s 1910 opera, “Girl of the Golden West” (“La Fanciulla del West” in the original Italian), which offered a heavily romanticized view of the period.

As usual with Adams in recent years, his collaborator is Peter Sellars, who created the libretto entirely from original sources – letters, diaries, songs and speeches – and also will direct.

The Associated Press sat down with Adams and Sellars recently to discuss the project.

Q. Your previous operas have tended to deal with more recent events: “Nixon in China,” “The Death of Klinghoffer” and “Doctor Atomic” (the first two had librettos by Alice Goodman). What attracted you to a subject further back in American history?

Sellars: La Scala had asked me to make my debut directing Puccini’s “Girl of the Golden West.” Now anybody who knows me would not call and ask me to do that, but I did the research ... and that libretto is pure popcorn. So I said to John, “Let’s have the great American opera about California.”

Adams: I like the idea of an updated work which tells the story through the voices of the real people with our contemporary consciousness of what really went on during that time. Much of the opera is upbeat, kind of funny and entertaining, and it’s only as it goes along that we suddenly feel events getting out of control.

Sellars: Which I think is what the Gold Rush felt like. At the beginning, spirits are high, and every day your luck could change any minute, and then two years into it, things got tougher and it winds up a bit like Silicon Valley, where some people are going to be very rich and other people are going to be nothing.

Q. Why choose a title that so closely mimics Puccini’s opera? Is it an implied critique of his work?

Adams: I have no intention of some sophomoric snarkiness. Nobody’s ever going to accuse me of competing with Puccini for writing melodies. I’m going to tell you something, and I’m not being coy. I actually don’t know the Puccini opera. I looked at about 10 minutes of it on YouTube, and it just wasn’t my cup of tea. It seems like a perfectly respectable period piece in the same way as Jack London. I think our opera is a lovely counterpoint.

Sellars: Puccini, of course, was a million miles away, not at all on location, so he was writing with images from silent movies ... and the research just called forth a whole other set of stories.