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Puccini and the Girl: History and Reception of The Girl of the Golden West.

Article Excerpt
Puccini and the Girl: History and Reception of The Girl of the Golden West. By Annie J. Randall and Rosalind Gray Davis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. [xv, 241 p. ISBN 0226703894. $35.] Music examples, bibliography, discography, filmography, illustrations, index.

Annie Randall and Rosalind Gray Davis open their monograph Puccini and the Girl: History and Reception of The Girl of the Golden West by tracing their paths to their topic: in the early 1960s, Davis's father, journalist Marvin Gray purchased a set of twenty-nine letters from Puccini to Carlo Zangarini, La fanciulla del West's librettist, written during the opera's composition. Gray never realized his plans to publish a "small volume" featuring the letters in their original Italian and English translation, and a history of the opera's creation, however, and it is here that Davis and Randall enter the scene. Inheriting the letters after her father's death, Davis, a former journalist turned independent scholar, also inherited his dreams; in 1996, she met Randall, a musicologist, and revived his project, generating a "detailed account of the events" surrounding La fanciulla's conception, composition, and popular and critical conception (p. 8).

Though the scope of Puccini and the Girl is far wider than the twenty-nine letters Davis's father purchased some fifty years ago, at the center of Randall...