Abstract
AbstractGiacomo Puccini'sLa fanciulla del West, premièred in New York, 1910, represents what we might call a photographic turn in the later Puccini. For one, itsmise-en-scènewas given textual status equivalent to that of libreto and music. The opera's first costumes and sets were crafted for the Metropolitan Opera House from stills of the source play,The Girl of the Golden Westby David Belasco. What is more, the circulation of photographs and eventually a staginglivretensured thatLa fanciullalooked the same in every iteration. In this model, authorship and performance become acts of remediation between layers of machine-generated souvenirs. BothThe GirlandLa fanciullabear the marks of their mediated nature:The Girlsuggests a fragile third dimension through the use of panoramas and scrims; during its famous Act I sunsetLa fanciullamoves from a realist sound-world towards a fantasy one, the latter marked by disembodied humming from a tenor chorus and even a new instrument, thefonica, designed by Puccini to be sounded by electricity. This essay suggests that the purported resistance of Puccinian opera to revisionist staging has its roots in critiques of realism's ‘statistical’ universe, and the perceptual modes held to be available to mass-consumed art.
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