John Adams’s fourth full-length opera was first performed in San Francisco in 2017. Then the music of Girls of the Golden West played for almost three hours, but after two reworkings – the first for the European premiere in Amsterdam in 2019, the second for the concert performances in Los Angeles last year on which this recording is based – it runs for just over two. Like its predecessors, Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer and Doctor Atomic, Girls of the Golden West is based on real historical events and characters, in this case in the California gold rush of 1849, as chronicled in contemporary documents and journals of the time, from which the director, Peter Sellars, assembled the libretto.
Reviews of the San Francisco premiere had been mixed; the opera’s sheer length and its discursiveness, which blurred the sense of narrative, were both criticised, but Adams’s cuts and revisions seem to have done a great deal to tighten the dramatic focus. The first act presents the socially and racially diverse community, black and white, Asian and Latin American, brought together by the hunt for gold in this fleeting frontier world, while the second shows the tensions that grew up between the miners and their followers, and their tragic results, culminating in the lynching of a Mexican woman who had killed the man who had tried to rape her. Everything is observed by “Dame Shirley”, the pen name of Louise Clappe, a doctor’s wife from Massachusetts who spent 18 months in the California mining camps and brought that world vividly and wittily to life in her letters home.
The musical world that the opera evokes, though, is a curious one. Adams describes Girls of the Golden West as “not exactly an opera, and … not exactly a musical”, conceiving it in terms of “songs rather than arias” and using the “most direct and simple” musical language of any of his works. And while the energy and urgency of the orchestral writing, with its Stravinskyan dislocations, instantly identifies the score’s composer, the vocal lines seem to veer between folk songs, sentimental ballads and something more high flown and conventionally “operatic”.
This rich mixture just about hangs together musically and dramatically, with only a few loose ends. The recording conducted by Adams features many of the same singers who created their roles in 2017, most notably Julia Bullock as Dame Shirley, and Davóne Tines as Ned Peters, who may or may not be her lover, with Paul Appleby and Ryan McKinny as two of the miners, and Hye Jung Lee in the brilliant coloratura role of the prostitute Ah Sing. Whatever the eventual fate of Girls of the Golden West in the opera houses of the world, it now has a definitive recording.
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