Old Horse, New Saddle

The Polka Saloon. Sunset. Suddenly the sheriff rises from the faro table and snarls at an amateur gunslinger: "Ragazzo, e l'whisky che lavora [Boy, your whisky is too strong]." His angry Italian rings strangely in that watering place of the American frontier. His opponent is fast on the draw, but not fast enough: on the stairway appears a girl in fringed jerkin and boots, firing from the hip. The revolver spins out of the gunslinger's hand. The girl strides coolly across the bar. "Vi do la buona sera, sceriffo" she says to the sheriff.

The Metropolitan Opera season has not opened on a gaudier note since Maria Jeritza made her entrance as the stripteasing heroine of Thais in 1923. The cowgirl with the red braided hair was Soprano Leontyne Price (TIME cover, March 10), and the opera that rang up last week's curtain was La Fanciulla del West, or The Girl of the Golden West, by that old roughrider, Giacomo Puccini. Even among ardent Puccini fans, Fanciulla is often regarded as an embarrassing mistake, and the Met has not staged it in 30 years. But last week's production was more than good enough to remind the audience that even in horse opera there is more than one tune to sing from the horse.

Not for Singers. Puccini saw David Belasco's The Girl of the Golden West in New York in 1907, promptly announced that "I shall write the music and we shall have the American opera ... I have never been West, but I have read so much about it that I know it thoroughly." Puccini, of course, knew no more about the American West than he knew about Japan when he wrote Madama Butterfly. But operagoers in 1910, when Fanciulla had its premiere at the Met, were no fussier than televiewers are today: with Caruso and Emmy Destinn in the leads, the premiere tied up traffic for hours near the opera house. The delighted Puccini celebrated by buying a $3,000 speedboat and naming it the Minnie. Neither the Minnie nor the opera enjoyed clear sailing: the speedboat had a collision on an Italian lake and almost sank; the opera disappeared from the Met's repertory.

One reason that Fanciulla failed to catch on permanently is that it was not truly a singer's opera: moving in the direction of Turandot, Puccini at the time was experimenting with more complex harmonies, increasing the importance of the orchestra and giving the singers fewer of the swooning set pieces that illuminated works like Boheme. And although the libretto is no more farfetched than that of many another opera, it falls strangely on American ears attuned to Hollywood and TV westerns.

As Fanciulla opens, a crowd of gold miners surges into the Polka ("A Real Home for the Boys"), order "veeskey" and proceed to drink a toast ("Veils Fargo!" shouts one sport; "Ip! ip!" reply the miners). The most unpopular man in the place is Sheriff Jack Ranee, who divides his time between lusting after Minnie, the Polka's owner, and pursuing a bandit named Ramerrez. In Act I, Minnie falls in love with Dick Johnson, a stranger in the Polka, invites him up to her place on the mountain only to learn in Act II that he is Ramerrez. When Johnson-Ramerrez is collared in her shack, Minnie proposes a game of poker with the sheriff--with Johnson's life and her own body as the stakes. Minnie takes that game by slipping some cards from her stocking, saves Johnson a second time by flourishing a pistol at the molasses-witted miners, marches off with Dick, singing at the curtain, "Addio, mia dolce terra, / Addio mia California!"

Last week's performance was superb, with Soprano Price handling her warm and lustrous voice impeccably, and infusing the figure of Minnie with a believable passion that might have surprised even Playwright Belasco. Tenor Richard Tucker did an admirable job as Dick Johnson, the silliest role in the opera, and Baritone Anselmo Colzani, the only Italian among the principal characters, swashbuckled through the role of the sheriff like a refugee from Gunsmoke. And although the opera provided few memorable arias (one striking exception: Johnson's "Ch'ella mi creda libero"), it had a score full of surgingly beautiful moments. The weakest links in the production were the cavernous sets, borrowed from the Chicago Lyric Opera; they looked for all the world as if they dated back to Caruso's day.

Social Saviour. To see the Met open its 77th season, the audience paid a record-breaking $94,294.50 at the box office, with orchestra seats going for $45 apiece and an eight-seat box for $650. The crowd was enthusiastic, glittering (inveterate Social Moth Hope Hampton, a onetime operatic hopeful, appeared splattered with sequins, chinchilla and diamonds), but, as Columnist Cholly Knickerbocker reminded his readers, scarcely Top Drawer. The Old Guard, as opposed to Publiciety, celebrates the opening on the second Monday of the season. What saved the night socially, according to Knickerbocker, was the presence of Labor Secretary Arthur Goldberg, whose intervention last summer saved the Met season. Goldberg stopped backstage to congratulate Soprano Price ("I am a connoisseur of music, and I love your voice"), climbed on a sofa during intermission to read a note from President Kennedy: "The discord ended, let the harmony begin."

Although all was not yet harmony in the opera house--Arbitrator Goldberg still has not decided how much extra salary the Met will have to pay its orchestra this year--there were still more hopeful omens on the second night of the season. In Mozart's Cost Fan Tutte, Connecticut's Teresa Stich-Randall made a long-overdue Metropolitan debut as Fiordiligi, displayed the purity, fullness and control that have won her ardent fans in Europe and on records. In the same opera, Negro Tenor George Shirley, 27, last year's Metropolitan Opera Auditions winner, filled in on short notice in the role of Ferrando, carried off the assignment with a handsomely rounded voice and natural dramatic flair. The Met was still suffering from shaky finances, but its voices were suffering from practically nothing at all.

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