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“Per noi emigrati”: Nostalgia in the Reception of Puccini's La fanciulla del West in New York City's Italian-Language Newspapers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 June 2019

KUNIO HARA
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Abstract

The premiere of Puccini's La fanciulla del West at the Metropolitan Opera in 1910 inspired enthusiastic reactions from the New York audience. However, as demonstrated by Annie J. Randall and Rosalind Gray Davis's 2005 study, Puccini and the Girl: History and Reception of “The Girl of the Golden West,” the critical reception of the work highlighted the Italian composer's inability to measure up to the critics’ preconceived notions about the American West. Among the many perceived oddities of the opera was the character of Jake Wallace, a “wandering camp minstrel,” who appeared in an unconventional form of blackface and sang an aria based on a transcription of a Native American song. This essay reexamines the early American reception of La fanciulla by analyzing the coverage of the opera in Italian-language newspapers published in New York. Articles in these periodicals suggest that Jake's nostalgic song (canto nostalgico) and the sentiment of homesickness that it projected played a central role in the positive reception of the work among their readers. Acknowledging such a reaction to the opera reminds us of the difficulty of ascribing a uniformly “American” reception to any work. It also uncovers an unexpected way in which Puccini and his collaborators promoted the opera to a particular segment of the American society.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Society for American Music , Volume 13 , Issue 2 , May 2019 , pp. 177 - 194
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for American Music 2019 

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Footnotes

I would like to thank Naomi André for her guidance and encouragement in putting together the cluster of articles which this is a part of, the anonymous reviewer for valuable comments, and Megan Biondi for her assistance in translating the Italian articles. I would also like to acknowledge the Office of the Provost's Internal Grant Programs at the University of South Carolina for providing funding for the research for this publication.

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