On 24 May at the Mariinsky II as part of the XXVII Music Festival Stars of the White Nights there will be a premiere of Giacomo Puccini’s opera La fanciulla del West. The Stage Director and Production Designer is Arnaud Bernard. The lead roles will be performed by: Maria Bayankina (Minnie), Akhmed Agadi (Dick Johnson), Kirill Zharovin (Jack Rance), Andrei Popov (Nick), Oleg Sychov (Ashby), Sergei Romanov (Sonora) and Gleb Peryazev (Jake Wallace). Valery Gergiev will be conducting.
When completing work on the score of La fanciulla del West in the summer of 1910, Giacomo Puccini, who had by then already composed La Bohème, Tosca and Madama Butterfly, had no doubt that of all of his operas this was the very best. “Believe me, this has everything: it’s an epic piece, touching, it’s a true spectacle and ends beautifully,” he wrote to his publisher Giulio Ricordi. As the basis of the plot, he had taken David Belasco’s popular Broadway play The Girl of the Golden West, which the composer had seen during his visit to America. The Metropolitan Opera, which purchased the opera, prepared for the premiere with all due pomp. Success was guaranteed: Arturo Toscanini was conducting, the lead tenor role was sung by Enrico Caruso, David Belasco was in charge of the production and the composer himself led the rehearsals. At the premiere he received countless curtain calls. Half a year later, La fanciulla del West was being performed in Europe: premieres took place in Covent Garden in London and the Opera di Roma, and in 1912 it was staged at La Scala, followed by theatres in Paris, Berlin and Vienna.
At opera houses today, La fanciulla del West is not seen so very often. In Russia the opera has been staged on just a handful of occasions, and it has never been performed at the Mariinsky Theatre at all. The title was suggested to Valery Gergiev by stage director Arnaud Bernard, who at the Mariinsky II had already staged Verdi’s opera I vespri siciliani. Of his concept he says that “The most difficult thing in this production was building the relationships of the characters on the stage, their words, actions and reactions. Here everything is like a Swiss watch: take out one detail and the mechanism stops working. Already in the first scene one person shouts something, another person shouts something else, the company nearby is playing cards, and in the next room the dancing starts, the frequency with which the scenes change is like in a film. For me, an extra, a seemingly lesser artist, is just as important as a soloist. It’s the same in a film, where everyone in the scene is significant.”
The first performances at the Mariinsky II will also take place on 26 May (at 13.00 and 19.30) and on 14 and 28 June.
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