A week of contrasts

The Royal Opera House is like Mary Poppins’ handbag: anything can come out of it. In the space of twenty-four hours, one can go to Covent Garden to see the most conventional production of Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West imaginable and the most outrageously kitsch production of Cavalli´s La Calisto - and both are good.Piero Faggioni’s production of La Fanciulla (premiered here in 1977) stays true to the tradition of the opera by setting the action in the mountains of America’s Far West. In so doing, Faggioni stresses the link between the plot and its landscape. Indeed, it would be difficult for the action of La Fanciulla to take place anywhere else; the character of Minnie, in particular, is inseparable from the drama’s geographical context. In his seminal book Landscape and Gender in Italian Opera, Emanuele Senici discusses the generic…