ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 is organized around the theme of departures. Comparing La fanciulla del West to Madama Butterfly, critics heard a significant stylistic departure, particularly with respect to melodic structures, music–text relationships, harmonic approaches, and orchestration. Many struggled to understand the music in this work that seemed to cross so many national, personal, stylistic, and generic boundaries. Some viewed these stylistic changes as Puccini’s attempt to keep up with the newest trend in twentieth-century composition: musical modernism. National identity factored into the critics’ speculations about why he made the changes. Some argued that Puccini’s Italianness blocked him from writing successful melodies for American characters, others blamed the source’s lowbrow American frontier dialect with its slang and lack of traditional operatic prosody. Some heard too much influence from Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, others too much from Strauss’s Salomé. For some the juxtaposition between musical modernisms and Americanisms constituted a severe mismatch in register. The chapter concludes by comparing the New York City reception with that in London and Rome, showing that beyond American borders, the apparent authenticity of the local color mattered far less in work’s reception, and, as the New York City critics feared, the subject matter was ridiculed.
