Dame Shirley’s interactions with Ned-portrayed by the sensational young bass-baritone Davóne Tines-have a slapstick, vaudeville character. Stagehands are seen moving props on and off anachronisms intrude, including neon beer signs at the hotel bar. The idea is to present an off-kilter fantasy of gold-rush life, framed by Brechtian distancing. Act I attempts something tricky, which doesn’t quite succeed onstage. A similar incident unfolded in Downieville, California, in 1851. She is lynched, and nonwhite miners are driven out of town. In the dénouement, Joe tries to force himself on Josefa, who responds by stabbing him to death. She encounters a boastful miner named Clarence a hard-drinking lout named Joe Cannon Ah Sing, a Chinese prostitute who dreams of settling down with Joe Ramón, a Mexican hotel bartender and Josefa, Ramón’s lover, who works at the bar. Dame Shirley, as Clappe is known in the opera, arrives at a camp with her husband, a physician, and Ned Peters, a fugitive slave turned cowboy. Sellars also drew on miners’ ballads and on Hispanic, African-American, and Asian testimonies. The main source is Clappe, whose letters to her sister were later published as a journal, under the pseudonym Dame Shirley. Most of the incidents enacted onstage took place in the Sierra Nevada in 18. Still, “Golden West” seems an uneven, overlong creation. Sellars’s approach has displeased many music critics, who prefer the dense, hypnotic librettos that Alice Goodman wrote for Adams’s first two operas, “Nixon in China” and “The Death of Klinghoffer.” (Goodman’s work is now available in a volume titled “History Is Our Mother,” from New York Review Books.) It’s worth recalling that those operas, now considered classics, were initially dismissed as artificial and inert. The method was first applied a decade ago, in “Doctor Atomic,” the Trinity opera. Sellars has lately adopted a documentary style of libretto writing, compiling texts from memoirs, letters, and historical accounts.
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It shows a past that is not really past, a hollow myth still in the making. In fact, “Golden West” is an entirely different beast. The title that Sellars and Adams chose has proved problematic: some opera patrons are put off by the implicit critique of Puccini’s chronically underrated score. Sellars had the idea for his latest project after receiving an offer to direct Puccini’s opera he became convinced that a franker treatment of the gold rush was needed. Puccini’s “La Fanciulla del West,” based on David Belasco’s play “The Girl of the Golden West,” was first seen at the Met in 1910. The gold rush has reached the opera stage before. Clappe’s closing aria is therefore no rhapsody: the majesty of nature sits in silent judgment. Here it becomes a grotesque bacchanal of white-male supremacy, capped by a Fourth of July party that degenerates into a racist riot. The California gold rush was the proving ground of Manifest Destiny, transmuting rugged individualism into wealth and glory. In forty years of collaboration, they have addressed all manner of provocative topics-Richard Nixon’s visit to China, the Achille Lauro terrorist incident, the 1994 Northridge earthquake, the Trinity atomic-bomb test-yet they have never launched such a frontal assault on our national mythology. Both Adams and Sellars are California residents, but neither is inclined to romanticize the state. Like all of Adams’s stage works to date, “Girls of the Golden West” was directed by Peter Sellars, who also assembled the libretto. This music has an especially piercing effect because it comes in the wake of a cavalcade of horrors. Girls of the Golden West.Adams’s “Girls of the Golden West” is a frontal assault on our national mythology.
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Ryan McKinny, Paul Appleby and Elliot Madore in Girls of the Golden Westis a far cry from the relative topicalities of Richard Nixon, the hijacking of the Achille Lauro or even the testing of the first atomic bomb, with themes of patriotism, the American Dream, integration, racism and the thorny question of what constitutes being an American placed stage front and centre, I doubt you’ll see a more chilling reminder of the simmering forces that can lead to an explosion like Charlottesville anytime soon. In fact, though the historically refracted Receiving the San Francisco Opera Medal onstage following the well-received premiere performance, Adams took a swing at the divisive immigration policies of the Trump Administration his only comfort, he maintained, was living in California.
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Who’d have thought an opera about the Californian Gold Rush could feel quite so contemporary? Even its composer, John Adams, admitted he didn’t see that coming when he started work on his latest magnum opus during the early days of Donald Trump’s tilt at the White House.