A Preview:

Puccini’s American Myth: La Fanciulla del West by Nashville Opera

Joseph E. Morgan | November 15, 2025

This January, Nashville Opera opens its 2025 season with Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West (the Girl of the Golden West)—a rarely performed work that trades Italian salons for a California mining camp and turns a preeminent Italian Wcomposer’s melodic gift toward the rugged drama of the American frontier. Adapted from an American play of the same name, Giacomo Puccini’s thrilling follow-up to Madama Butterfly is set in a California mining camp during the goldrush of 1849 and features feisty and, to Puccini, exotic characters of Cowboys and Saloon gals.

Puccini, steeped in the bel canto tradition, experimented in La Fanciulla

with the harmonic richness of his Northern European contemporaries like Richard Wagner, Richard Strauss, and Claude Debussy. In so doing he forged a score that breaks with the Italian tradition in many ways, particularly in the vocal lines. Instead of memorable melodies, the vocal parts are much more declamatory, mimicking speech and giving priority to dramatic expression over set arias and the individual singer’s virtuosic display. At its premiere, Puccini (the composer of Tosca and La Bohème) declared La Fanciulla to be his masterpiece.

This declamatory style, however, is not to imply that the opera is easily performed; the three leading parts are some of the most difficult in the repertoire to sing and act. Indeed, Italian opera aficionados have been known to bandy the term “tenor killer” about when speaking of the leading tenor role of Dick Johnson. Worse still, the opera had its world premiere at the Metropolitan at the pinnacle of its heyday, with a nearly mythical all-star cast of Enrico Caruso (as Dick Johnson), Emmy Destinn (as Minnie) and Pasquale Amato (as Jack Rance) with Arturo Toscanini at the podium. Puccini, it is said, created the roles of Dick and Minnie for Caruso and Destinn. By performing The Girl of the Golden West (for the first time in over a decade) Nashville opera is throwing down a gauntlet for itself. Thankfully, it seems that they have a cast up to the challenge!

Taking on the role of Dick Johnson in Nashville is the American Tenor Jonathan Burton, who seems to specialize in Italian roles from the end of the 19th century. His “Nessun Dorma” (Turandot) received acclaim, as did his Pinkerton (Madama Butterfly). From Santa Fe to Dallas, to the Chicago Lyric, he has performed with some very important companies. All of that experience aside, the success of his performance will hinge on his performance of “Ch’ella mi creda,” an Aria that has become a standard in recorded collections by many famous tenors. In this scene, Dick Johnson is about to be murdered by a mob of gold prospectors and he asks that they let her (Minnie) believe that he has left and is working towards his redemption for a lifetime of banditry. The part here requires that he employ a dark powerful baritone-like lower register as well as a beautiful, burnished and brilliant upper register (aspects that made Caruso’s voice so incredible) to communicate his character’s dark past and hopeful future.

Minnie will be played by acclaimed soprano Kara Shay Thomson. The New York Times has described her voice as a “…compelling soprano with a plush, vibrant, powerful voice.” She has a broader experience with more 20th century music, but she is most known for her portrayal of Puccini heroines. Minnie, unlike other Puccini heroines (Mimi, Cio-Cio San) is strong and independent, more akin to Tosca. As a woman who runs a rough saloon in a gold rush camp, she is unafraid to draw her pistols! Like Dick, she will need a powerful, sparkling voice to cut through Puccini’s dense orchestration, but she will also need a vulnerable side and stamina all around to endure both acts. Similar to Thomson, Czech soprano Emmy Destinn, the creator of the role, was known for a complex and versatile voice with great depth and a gleaming high register, even at the quietest pianissimo.

Last, but not least, Bass-baritone Kyle Albertson, our Sheriff Jack Rance, has had a stellar career of more than two decades, performing in wonderful places like the Met and Glimmerglass. His role is a near constant, dominating antagonist throughout the three acts requiring a heavy baritone voice that is capable of being humanized. His is not a sociopath like Tosca’s Scarpia, but instead an anti-hero character with a complexity in his love for Minnie. His narrative arch is most interesting going from bossy confidence to hopeless despair. In my opinion, his (and Minnie’s) best scene is the Poker game at the end of Act II when a cheater’s hand, “Tre assi è un paio!” (“Three aces and a pair”) turns the plot. Will the opera have a lieto fine? Puccini’s operas typically do not!
Maestro Dean Martinson will have his own challenges with a vastly sophisticated score incorporating whole tone sounds, striking dissonances, leitmotivs, the local color of American folk melodies and reminiscence motives that create a unique ambiance of time and place.

The following are examples of some of these motives and if you have a keyboard around maybe play the following before you go? (If not, don’t worry, you’ll be humming them when you leave!)

Example 1, a lyrical love theme associated with Dick and Minnie’s first embrace (here most of the reference is in the top line):

Example 2, the bandit Ramerrez’ cake-walk.

Example 3, A theme heard throughout the opera referencing nostalgia for home. The text is “What will my old folks be doing there, far away?”

After the premiere, in Europe La Fanciulla didn’t do as well as it had in New York. In New York it enjoyed a vast number of curtain calls including 19 for the composer alone. The critics, on the other hand, were not so sanguine, lambasting his construction of an American identity in sound even as they also attacked his use of broader European styles–it was either too, or not, “American” enough. In her excellent text on the opera, (Puccini’s La fanciulla del West and American Musical Identity) Musicologist Kathryn Fenton points out that the critics had great difficulty “…reconcile[ing] the opera they expected to see with the one they actually saw. Their view of the opera’s place in Puccini’s repertoire and in the early 20th-century opera canon differed—in some cases drastically—with the composer’s own assessment.” Here in Nashville, where the cowboy’s identity is constantly being reimagined, it’s worth asking whether Puccini captured something true about America—or simply imagined a myth of his own.