What a Difference a Fanciulla Makes!

Same opera, same production, same cast—but the difference was like night and day. On January 3rd, an indisposed Debbie Voigt was replaced by Portuguese soprano Elisabete Matos in Puccini's La Fanciulla del West. Matos had made her Met debut on December 22nd, a scheduled performance in the same role. In Europe she sings Sieglinde, Gioconda, Iphigenie, Chimène, Butterfly.

Matos is a genuine spinto — except when she sounds like a real lyric — except when she sounds hochdramatisch. In Europe, she sings in all these categories, but to hell with fach. She has a golden, gleaming sound, warm and fragrant when she lets her guard down romantically (and Minnie, remember, is a girl who loves love stories), lyric and casual when jesting with her family of miners, and though brilliant and full (and smack on pitch for the B of “stelle” and the C’s in Act II), her voice is never harsh in anguish or triumph. With a Minnie of this quality, Puccini’s opera finally and worthily celebrated its hundredth birthday at the Met. (Can we have her back again soon? Please? As Butterfly, say, or Sieglinde?)

Matos, though younger, looks very like Debbie Voigt: She cuts a sturdy figure, more athletic frontierswoman than fashion model. A natural actress, she seemed to know each miner inside and out, able to play with them, tease them, slap them about, tousle their hair. This makes all the sillier Giancarlo Del Monaco’s staging of the opera’s climax, when Minnie begs the miners to spare her lover’s life: She has no need to fire guns at them. She knows and we know they’ll never shoot at her. They adore her. She’s never asked them for anything before—and now she does, and of course they let her and her lover depart together romantically into the sunset. (Del Monaco, thinking as usual that he’s cleverer than Puccini, sends all the miners off with them, instead of having them wave farewell.)

With a different prima donna, a genuine Fanciulla at the heart of the opera, every singer on the stage seemed to turn up an energetic notch or two—glorious high notes from Giordani, fine contributions from Owen Gradus’s Jake, Keith Miller’s Ashby, Dwayne Croft’s Sonora and, well, drinks around the bar, boys! I mean, ragazzi! Great work by all hands. A starry night.