The three leading roles are all excellently performed. It's Calamity Jane meets Madame Butterfly, and with the yelping, thigh-slapping cowboys meeting Puccini's glorious romantic music, it works astonishingly well. Ramerrez has been captured and the sheriff is cackling with glee as he looks forward to a good old-fashioned hanging, But it all ends happily for everyone except the sheriff, as Minnie arrives in the nick of time to plead with the townsfolk to free the poor fellow, reminding them of all she has done for them in the past, and telling them that her lover is now reformed and has turned his back on a life of crime.

I must admit that during this opening act, I thought there were too many cowboys on stage and it was rather cluttered and confusing, but that feeling vanished after the interval when the action moved to Minnie's cabin in the mountains.įor the final act, Buether repeats her trick of producing a perfect film-set design for the sheriff's office in town. who is suspicious of strangers anyway, takes an instant dislike to the new arrival, intensified by the fact that he wants Minnie for himself. Then a stranger who gives his name as Dick Johnson enters the saloon and recognises Minnie as the woman of his dreams whom he had met only briefly once before. But there was trouble lurking in them thar hills outside the saloon, where the bandit Ramerrez was known to be lurking and planning to steal the miners' gold. A large, all-male chorus, dressed just like the extra in any number of westerns, rampages around the stage, fighting, drinking, dancing, singing, boasting, card-playing and chatting up Minnie, the saloon owner, just as cowboys are meant to do. The opening act, set in the Polka saloon, sets the scene. By an odd coincidence, it is also 50 years since the English national opera last commissioned a new production of Girl of the Golden West and watching Richard Jones' excellent staging of this gold rush love story makes one wonder why they waited so long. We're all so familiar with Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns that it's easy to forget that he wasn't the first Italian to turn his hand to making a great cowboy story: Puccini did it 50 years earlier.

Girls of the golden west opera review