For this dance, Adams makes excellent use of timbral variety in the orchestra to build tension, combining mischievous chromatic scales in the clarinets and bassoons with violin trills. One particular example is the “Spider Dance” performed by Lorena Feijóo as Lola Montez, a burlesque number in which she gradually hikes up her skirts farther and farther under the pretext of a spider infestation in her nether regions. This approach was often quite successful. This musical mirror twisted airy open fifths into tritones, octaves into stinging sevenths and ninths, and intuitive rhythmic emphases into Stravinskian gut-punches, while distorting regular meters into irregular ones.
The overall sound environment of the opera (in Adams or other minimalists there is nearly always an overriding aesthetic) was that of Copland’s Americana viewed through a sort of funhouse mirror. John Adams’ score for Girls of the Golden West may not have the complexity of orchestral layering we find in Nixon in China, but it does manage to achieve a significant level of dramatic variation, orchestrational tone-painting, and occasional moments of poignant tenderness. On the other side are a diverse cast of woman and minority characters, huddled together for comfort against the pitiless onslaught, which reaches its bitter climax in the execution of Josefa Segovia – the only woman ever hanged in the state of California. On one side of the stage (often literally) is the debauched and diabolical lynch mob of miners, all its non-gold-prospecting hours spent drinking, gambling, and finding foreigners to beat up. Adams and Sellars’ version offers us a dystopian morality play, a vision of the Wild West seen through the eyes of 21 st century Berkeleyites. Far from asking tough questions by showing the Gold Rush as it was – tumultuous, hard-edged, optimistic, sometimes brutal – Girls ended up just as cartoonish as the Puccini rendering it sought to update. Unfortunately, few non-self-loathing Californians will recognize their origins in this opera. Sellers and Adams often stated in the lead-up to Girls that they were seeking to create an opera grounded in California – a homegrown portrait of the messy but vibrant era in which today’s California finds its roots. It was a libretto that put composer John Adams behind the eight ball before he had even written a note. Taken together, this composite libretto supplied little drama, even less plot, and an endless supply of inane observations that seemed to lead nowhere and to have little relation to one another.
GIRLS OF THE GOLDEN WEST ADAMS SERIES
This situation was exacerbated by Sellars’ ill-advised attempts to fill the holes created by the letters (and to solve the problem of having Dame Shirley’s words appear not only on her own lips but on everyone else’s as well) by adding a series of excerpts from such incongruous sources as Lorca, Twain, Frederick Douglass, and Shakespeare. The materials of Peter Sellars’ libretto – a series of reflections on California life from the letters of East Coast Gold Rush transplant Louise Clapp (“Dame Shirley”), are simply not the stuff of opera. But, unfortunately, they came up slightly short.īefore going into the redemptive aspects of the performance (on which I plan to spend most of this review), it deserves mention that San Francisco Chronicle reviewer Joshua Kosman was absolutely right in his diagnosis of Girls’ weaknesses as a dramatic piece. Given the libretto that it had to work with, both John Adams’ composition and the SF Opera’s production did about as much as humanly possible to rescue this train-wreck of a dramatic piece from itself.
I really wished to avoid joining the pig pile of derision that has fallen on SF Opera’s premiere of John Adams and Peter Sellars’ Girls of the Golden West.
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