‘I had a home once and I ain’t forgot it – a home up over our little saloon down in Soledad’, the camp girl Minnie tells Jack Rance in David Belasco’s Girl of the Golden West, rebuffing him by recalling the love shared by her parents. He demands; she evades by pointing away: an encounter that can be taken to be paradigmatic for the opera based on this play, Giacomo Puccini’s La fanciulla del West. There the principal librettist, Carlo Zangarini, re-arranged the text to open instead with the pointing gesture: ‘down there in Soledad, I was a little girl’ (‘Laggiù nel Soledad, ero piccina’). Puccini emphasises it even more. At ‘Laggiù’, her voice hovers, suspended, circling around e′′; the orchestra, which had sounded a lush perpetuum-mobile chorale in support of Rance, suddenly drops away mid-phrase. Minnie touches down to an a′ at ‘Soledad’ and a new, sparser texture is heard, with only a staccato bass line, and quiet chords in the upper strings; flutes, clarinets, and horns play open fifths, pianissimo, where the libretto has commas. After this, ‘ero piccina’ continues as a mere afterthought. ‘Laggiù nel Soledad’ is Minnie’s single showpiece in an opera that is parsimonious with its lyricism, the only bit that sopranos are likely to record for their Puccini albums. And even there, amid the sultrier pleasures of ‘Sì, mi chiamano Mimì’, ‘Un bel dì’ and ‘Che il bel sogno di Doretta’, it runs the risk of being skipped – as it was almost inevitably when the present author, during her teenage years, was discovering the Puccini Heroines of Leontyne Price. Its peculiarities make ‘Laggiù nel Soledad’ a fitting representative of the opera as a whole. La fanciulla is an oddly fugitive work, almost but not quite doing what an opera by Puccini is expected to do. It is the not quite that interests me now: the way Puccini’s music here remains inscrutable and resistant to popular affection, even while accumulating critical favour; the way it seems to gesticulate wildly in an unreadable semaphore; the way that the melodies evade recollection. The fact that the opera is still revived despite not flourishing during Puccini’s lifetime means that we can catch it repeatedly in its evasive act – its hollering, pointing and sidestepping cowboy dance. The pointing gesture at the opening of ‘Laggiù nel Soledad’ forces the music into a caesura, the accompaniment breaking off mid-phrase. In so doing it replicates musically the odd visual semiotics of Belasco’s play, whose characters were constantly pointing at

中文翻译：

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歌剧点普契尼，《Laggiùnel Soledad》（米妮），拉凡西拉·德尔·韦斯特，第一幕

“我曾经有一个房子，但我没有忘记它–一个在索莱达（Soledad）的小轿车上方的房子”，营地女孩Minnie在大卫·贝拉斯科（David Belasco）的《金色西部女孩》中对杰克·兰斯（Jack Rance）说道，回想起了她的父母。他要求；她通过指向远方来逃避：根据贾剧（Giacomo Puccini）的《歌迷》（La fanciulla del West），这场戏可以被视为歌剧的典范。在那里，主要的自由作家卡洛·赞加里尼（Carlo Zangarini）用指尖手势重新布置了文本，以打开它：“在索莱达（Soledad），那是一个小女孩”（'Laggiùnel Soledad，ero piccina'）。普契尼更加强调这一点。在“Laggiù”，她的声音徘徊，悬浮，在e''周围盘旋；乐团在支持兰斯（Rance）的情况下听起来像是动静不息的永动机，但突然间中音就消失了。Minnie在'Soledad'处降到a'，并听到一种新的，稀疏的纹理，只有断断续续的低音线，而上弦则安静。笛子，单簧管和号角演奏开放的五分音，pianissimo，在其中libretto带有逗号。此后，“ ero piccina”仅是事后的想法。“Laggiùnel Soledad”是米妮在一部歌剧中的唯一代表作，这与歌剧的抒情性格格不入，这是女高音歌手很可能会为其普契尼专辑录制的唯一曲目。甚至在那里，在“Sì，mi chiamanoMimì”，“ Un beldì”和“ Che il bel sogno di Doretta”的闷热乐中，它都有被跳过的风险–因为当下作者几乎不可避免地，在她十几岁的时候，发现了列昂·普莱斯（Leontyne Price）的普契尼女英雄。它的特殊性使“Laggiùnel Soledad”成为整个歌剧的合适代表。La fanciulla是一部奇怪的逃亡作品，几乎但不完全符合普契尼的歌剧预期。现在我还不太感兴趣：即使在积累批判的支持的情况下，普契尼的音乐在这里仍然难以理解，并且不受大众喜爱。它似乎在不可读的信号量中疯狂地打手势的方式；旋律回避回忆的方式。尽管在普契尼一生中没有兴盛，但歌剧仍然可以复活，这意味着我们可以在其回避行为中反复捕捉它-嘶哑，指向和回避的牛仔舞。“Laggiùnel Soledad”开头的指向手势迫使音乐进入凯撒舞，伴奏中断了中段。通过这样做，它在音乐上复制了贝拉斯科的戏剧中奇特的视觉符号，其角色不断指向