Images KEN HOWARD / MET OPERA

La Fanciulla del West is love story that unfolds in 1849-1850, during the Gold Rush, at a mining camp at the foot of the Cloudy Mountains in California. It has just wrapped up the seventh season of the CCP Met Opera in HD, a screening of the operatic productions of the Metropolitan Opera of New York, through high-definition (HD) digital video technology and Dolby sound. Watching the program was as awe-inspiring an experience as watching a live opera at the Met.
Held recently was the screening of the season-ender, Italian composer Giacomo Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West, at Greenbelt 3 Cinema 2.

This three-act opera based on David Belasco’s The Girl of the Golden West was first performed in 1910 at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, where it was a highly publicized success. It starred Enrico Caruso and Emmy Destinn, for whom Puccini specifically created the roles of Dick Johnson and Minnie.

In the season-ender screening, Eva-Maria Westbroek takes the role of Minnie, the girl of the title and owner of the bar, the Polka Saloon, which the miners of the Californian camp, where the opera is set, frequent to relieve themselves of boredom. It is at the Polka Saloon that Minnie meets Dick Johnson, actually Ramerrez, a bandit on the run, along with his gang of Mexicans. Jonas Kaufmann plays the role of this bandit-turned-lover, with whom, as soon he enters the bar, Minnie falls in love instantly. It is love at first sight. Also in the cast is Željko Lučić, who plays the cynical sheriff Jack Rance, who is in love with Minnie.

La Fanciulla del West, an Italian take on what The Girl of the Golden West author Belasco described in his memoir as “the wild Californian days of 1849,” is, as an Italian critic once put it, “profoundly Puccinian.” It is Puccini at his most colorful, most passionate, perhaps even most intimate, replete with cowboys chugging whiskey and playing poker, a snowstorm, and a breathtaking tableau of the high Sierras, which had infected Puccini with what he called the “California disease,” enamored as he was of its “exotic” location.

While the opera isn’t as popular as the composer’s other works, like La Boheme and Madame Butterfly, Puccini was very pleased with it. He considered it, as he told his English friend and confidante Sybil Seligman, “in my opinion, the best opera I have written.” Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini called it a “great symphonic poem.”

A special program of the CCP film, broadcast, and new media division, under the production and exhibition department, CCP Met Opera in HD is in partnership with the Metropolitan Opera of New York, the Filipinas Opera Society Foundation, Inc., and Ayala Malls Cinemas. www.culturalcenter.gov.ph