1 This replaced a 20-year-old production directed by Otto Schenk, which was renowned for being ‘about as close to Wagner's original stage conception as possible’: Ed Pilkington, ‘The Met's Ring Cycle: Wagner as it's Meant to be?’ The Guardian (12 May 2009).

2 Zambello's Ring was hailed by Philip Kennicott in The Washington Post as ‘one of the best “Ring” cycles in more than a quarter of a century’ (‘San Francisco Opera's “Ring” Cycle is Ambitious, Brilliant’, 20 June 2011).

3 When Campbell's soup cans poured paint down onto the stage from on high, the riots in Nuremburg seemed to elide with the sack of Katharina's great-grandfather's theatre. Boos mingled with ecstatic ovations when the curtain fell. She and her half-sister Eva Pasquier-Wagner were handed the reins of the Festival two years later, and critics enthusiastically heralded the beginning of a new era for Bayreuth. Daniel J. Wakin, ‘Choice Signals New Era for Bayreuth Festival’, New York Times (2 September 2008); Simon Morgan, ‘Curtain Goes Up on New Era in Bayreuth’, Expatica Germany (23 July 2009); Roger Boyes, ‘Bayreuth Festival Starts New Era by Discussing Hitler and Wagner’, The London Times (27 July 2009). Boyes begins by suggesting that this new regime ‘could be the making of a revolution in one of Germany's most hallowed shrines’.

4 See, for instance, the defences put forth of Bayreuth's centenary Ring directed by Patrice Chéreau and conducted by Pierre Boulez; a cross-section is given in Nattiez, Jean-Jacques, ‘“Fidelity” to Wagner: Reflections on the Centenary Ring’, in Wagner in Performance, ed. Millington, Barry and Spencer, Stewart (New Haven, 1992), 75–98Google Scholar.

5 On the analogy of the x-ray, see Bell, Michael, ‘The Metaphysics of Modernism’, in The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, ed. Levenson, Michael (Cambridge, 1999), 9–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Badiou, , Five Lessons on Wagner, trans. Spitzer, Susan (London, 2010), 83Google Scholar. Badiou's project is staked on a prediction: ‘we are on the cusp of a revival of high art and it is here that Wagner should be invoked. My hypothesis is that high art has once again become part of our future – I have no idea how this is so, but I am absolutely sure of it’ (82–3).

7 Levin, , Unsettling Opera: Staging Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, and Zemlinsky (Chicago, 2007), 20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Even the Wagner Sämtliche Werke presents only the music and words of each opera as the master-text, with the composer's often detailed staging instructions confined to separate, appendix-like volumes.

9 Altman, Rick, Silent Film Sound (New York, 2004), 251Google Scholar. The film followed on from the Metropolitan Opera's 1903 production of the opera. This North American première re-created the original 1882 production at Bayreuth, with the help of members of the original cast.

10 Quoted in Christie, Ian, ‘Early Phonograph Culture and Moving Pictures’, in The Sounds of Early Cinema, ed. Abel, Richard and Altman, Rick (Bloomington, 2001), 8Google Scholar.

11 Dickson, W. K. L. and Dickson, Antonia, ‘Edison's Invention of the Kineto-Phonograph’, The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine (June 1894), p. 206Google Scholar; quoted in James Buhler, review of Encyclopedia of Opera on Screen: A Guide to More than 100 Years of Opera Films, Videos, and DVDs by Ken Wlaschin, and The Opera Singer and the Silent Film by Paul Fryer, this journal, 18/3 (2006), 333.

12 See, for instance, Tomlinson, Gary, Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera (Princeton, 1999), 149CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tambling, Jeremy, Opera and the Culture of Fascism (Oxford, 1996), 125–30Google Scholar; Steinberg, Michael P. and Stewart-Steinberg, Suzanne, ‘Fascism and the Operatic Unconscious’, in Opera and Society in Italy and France from Monteverdi to Bourdieu, ed. Johnson, Victoria, Fulcher, Jane F. and Ertman, Thomas (Cambridge, 2007), 267–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Williams, Bernard, On Opera (New Haven, 2006), 133Google Scholar.

13 This records the Metropolitan Opera's 1991 production of La fanciulla del West starring Barbara Daniels, Sherrill Milnes and Plácido Domingo, conducted by Leonard Slatkin (Deutsche Grammophon; DVD reissued 2005).

14 Belasco could not have known Gold Rush California as well as he claimed; among The Girl's more immediate influences was surely the dime novel and Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. See my review-article of Puccini and the Girl, in Opera Quarterly, 24/1–2 (2008), 112–19.

15 Mail, Jens, ‘Von Aachen bis Wuppertal: Die NRW-Rundschau’, Crescendo, 5/3 (June/July 2002), 20Google Scholar; Fasel, Andreas, ‘Kein Märchen vom goldenen Westen’, Welt Online (10 March 2002)Google Scholar.

16 The first quotation is of Fred Cohn, in a review of the Opus Arte DVD: ‘Puccini: La fanciulla del West’, Opera News, 75/10 (April 2011); the second is Richard Fairman, writing in the Financial Times (8 December 2009).

17 The sense that an opera could have a fixed visual text was connected to the historical accuracy of those visions: this is true even for the earliest Italian staging manuals of the mid-nineteenth century, and even for an opera as strange as Aida. See, for instance, Mallach, Alan, The Autumn of Italian Opera: From Verismo to Modernism, 1890–1915 (Lebanon, NH, 2007), 203Google Scholar.

18 The composer's English remained poor despite numerous trips to Britain and America. On his initial, cautious enthusiasm for the play, see, for instance, Girardi, Michele, Puccini: His International Art, trans. Basini, Laura (Chicago, 2000), 260–2Google Scholar.

19 Belasco notoriously reproduced an entire Child's Restaurant on his stage, complete with fresh-brewed coffee and pancakes. This strategy was not without its detractors: as early as 1914 Sheldon Cheney condemned Belasconian realism for its ‘decorating’ impulse, which ‘destroy[ed] simplicity in a doubtful attempt at “naturalness”’; The New Movement in the Theatre (1914); quoted in Yannacci, Christin Essin, ‘Landscapes of American Modernity: A Cultural History of Theatrical Design’, Ph.D. diss. (University of Texas at Austin, 2006), 40Google Scholar. Similarly, a few years later Clayton Hamilton praised the director for renouncing ‘imitation’ in favour of ‘suggestion’, and for no longer ‘cluttering his stage with a collective mass of junk to remind the spectator of actuality’; ‘Belasco and the Independent Theatre’, The Bookman (March 1917).

20 Robinson, Marc, The American Play, 1787–2000 (New Haven, 2009), 144Google Scholar.

21 See, for instance, Sandweiss, Martha A., Print the Legend: Photography and the American West (New Haven, 2002), 47–86Google Scholar.

22 Belasco, The Girl of the Golden West (1905; electronic edition by Alexander Street Press, L.L.C., 2012). Act IV is called ‘The Last Picture’ on the original typescript. Belasco's annotated copy of this typescript was given by the playwright to Arturo Toscanini and survives in the Toscanini family collection; at the time of writing, this document was partially reproduced at www.fanciulla100.org/virtualmuseum_BelascoToscanini01.html (accessed 1 March 2012).

23 See Green-Lewis, Jennifer, Framing the Victorians: Photography and the Culture of Realism (Ithaca, 1996)Google Scholar; Armstrong, Nancy, Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism (Cambridge, MA, 1999)Google Scholar; Akiva Novak, Daniel, Realism, Photography, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge, 2008)Google Scholar; and Henderson, Andrea, ‘Magic Mirrors: Realism in Victorian Physics and Photography’, Representations, 117 (Winter 2012), 120–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 Sandweiss, Print the Legend, 2–3.

25 The first quotation is from Philip Gilbert Hamerton, Portfolio Papers (1889); the second is Albion Tourgee, ‘Migma’, in Our Continent, II/21 (1882); both are quoted in Sandweiss, Print the Legend, 285–6.

26 On realist fiction and the technique of collage, see Novak, Realism, Photography, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 1–35, here 5.

27 The original reads, ‘To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced is the work of art designed for reproducibility’; Benjamin, , ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Zohn, Harry, ed. with an introduction by Hannah Arendt (New York, 1968; first published 1936), 224.Google Scholar

28 The letter in question, dated 25 July 1907, is the third in a series of notes Puccini sent to Zangarini during their collaboration. The series has recently been reproduced and translated in its entirety in Randall, Annie and Gray Davis, Rosalind, Puccini and the Girl: History and Reception of The Girl of the Golden West (Chicago, 2005); this letter is on p. 57Google Scholar. Emphasis original.

29 David Rosen, ‘Staging Puccini's West: The Mise en Scène of Jules Speck, Stage Director of the Metropolitan Opera’, paper presented at Fanciulla 100: Celebrating Puccini (Boston, December 2010).

30 Many of these are reproduced in Randall and Davis, Puccini and the Girl, Plates 3–13.

31 ‘Verdi is the most site-specific of composers … You need to start with a veneer of ordinariness’; Ross, ‘Verdi's Grip’, The New Yorker (24 September 2001), 82–7.

32 Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, 223. W. H. Auden made a similar comparison in an essay on verismo opera: the ‘naturalistic’ writer ‘cannot hold consistently to his principles without ceasing to be an artist and becoming a statistician’; see ‘Cav & Pag’, in The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays (1948); quoted in Schwartz, Arman, ‘Rough Music: Tosca and Verismo Reconsidered’, 19th-Century Music, 31/3 (Spring 2008), 237–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 Stoppard, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead (New York, 1967), 21.

34 Here the numerous accounts of Belasco's controlling directorial style may be taken as emblematic; they parallel those stories told about Wagner as director.

35 See, for instance, Clayton Hamilton, ‘The Drama: Dramatists of the Current Season’, The Forum, 39 (1907–8), 374–5: ‘in a Belasco production the work of the dramatist is so completely veiled by the work of the stage-director. Yet, imagine for a moment how disillusionizing [sic] it would be to read The Girl of the Golden West! Despoiled of its apparently natural investiture, it would stand revealed as the mechanical melodrama that it really is.’

36 See, for instance, the following excerpt from Belasco's autobiography, The Theatre through its Stage Door, ed. Louis V. Defoe (New York, 1919): ‘No experience in the world can teach an actor or a producer to follow absolute naturalness – the instinct must be born in him. I change not only details in the play during these rehearsals, but also in the lighting of the stage, for the reason that the spell produced by light is an incalculable aid to the art of the actor. Light has a psychological effect which perhaps he is not able to explain, but he feels it instantly and responds to it, and then the audience just as quickly responds to him’ (74).

37 Greenwald, , ‘Realism on the Opera Stage: Belasco, Puccini, and the California Sunset’, in Opera in Context: Essays in Historical Staging from the Late Renaissance to the Time of Puccini, ed. Radice, Mark A. (Portland, 1998), 279–96Google Scholar.

38 Schwartz, Arman, ‘Puccini, in the Distance’, this journal, 23/1 (2012), p. 168Google Scholar.

39 On this technique, see especially Senici, Emanuele, Landscape and Gender in Italian Opera: The Alpine Virgin from Bellini to Puccini (Cambridge, 2005), 228–62Google Scholar; also Leppert, Richard, ‘The Civilizing Process: Music and the Aesthetics of Time–Space Relations in The Girl of the Golden West’, in Musical Meaning and Human Values, ed. Chapin, Keith and Kramer, Lawrence (New York, 2009), 116–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 Atlas, Allan W., ‘Belasco and Puccini: “Old Dog Tray” and the Zuni Indians’, The Musical Quarterly, 75/3 (1991), 362–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41 Quoted in Stuart, Roxana, ‘Uncle Giacomo's Cabin: David Belasco's Direction of La fanciulla del West’, in Opera and the Golden West: The Past, Present, and Future of Opera in the USA, ed. DiGaetani, John L. and Sirefman, Josef P. (Cranbury, NJ, 1994), 140–8, here 144Google Scholar.

42 Quoted and translated in Viale Ferrero, Mercedes, ‘Stage and Set’, in The History of Italian Opera, vol. V: Opera on Stage, ed. Bianconi, Lorenzo and Pestelli, Giorgio, trans. Singleton, Kate (Chicago, 2002), 107Google Scholar. After the première, Puccini supervised productions in Brescia, Lucca, Liverpool, Turin, Naples, Genoa, Budapest and Monte Carlo.

43 La scena di Puccini, ed. Fagone, Vittorio and Crespi Morbio, Vittoria (Lucca, 2003), 265Google Scholar.

44 I am referring to the formulation of Carolyn Abbate, following Vladimir Jankélévitch; see Abbate, , ‘Music: Drastic or Gnostic?’ Critical Inquiry, 30/3 (2004), 505–36Google Scholar.

45 For Levin's distinction between literalist/monologic and heteroglossial or polylogic stagings, see his Unsettling Opera, 30–2 and 47.

46 Senici, Landscape and Gender in Italian Opera, 258; on this passage within Senici's reading of La fanciulla, see also Schwartz, ‘Puccini, in the Distance’, p. 179.

47 Levin, Unsettling Opera, 51.