“I have a cabin in the Sierra Nevada Mountains not far from where these events in the opera took place. So I said to John, ‘Let’s have the great American opera about California.’”įor his part, Adams - whose 1987 Nixon in China was an absolute triumph when staged at SF Opera in 2012 - was drawn to the idea by his actual proximity to the subject matter. Peter Sellars (librettist, director) and John Adams (composer) of ‘Girls of the Golden West.’ Photo by Jacklyn MedugaĪ couple years ago, Sellars was contacted by La Scala in Milan to direct a production of Puccini’s belovedly creaky 1910 La Fanciulla del West, aka The Girl of the Golden West, which did much to cement the stereotypes of the time in the international popular imagination.Īs Sellars told the Washington Post, “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. It was partly this frustration with the hokeyness of previous representations that drove director and librettist Peter Sellars to team up with minimalist composer John Adams and create Girls of the Golden West, a new work premiering at the San Francisco Opera (Tue/21-December 10 at the War Memorial Opera House, more info here.)
#Nyt music the girls of the golden west john adams series
While current HBO series Westworld adds dark, sci-fi undercurrents to the Wild West trope and recent HBO series Deadwood gave the frontier people of the 1800s some realistic curse-words and filthy predicaments, the California Gold Rush remains more of a sanitized theme park ride than the hugely consequential, environmentally degrading, murderous and politically momentous clash of cultures and value systems it was. ALL EARS After two decades of well-worn Gold Rush metaphors about Silicon Valley, we’re long overdue for a fresh take on a time period calcified in most peoples’ minds as some boisterous, Disney-esque romp, rife with (mostly white) 49er bromances, shady stereotypes, and lusty Madames with hearts of, well, gold.
0 kommentar(er)
