10, is the radiant young soprano Julia Bullock, and Mr. But the Shirley in this elaborate San Francisco Opera production, which I attended on Wednesday and which runs through Dec. Her disarmingly honest impressions of these women (“miserable people,” naked except for a “quantity of grass around the waist and covering the thighs”) are a little uncomfortable to read in the pages of her published letters. SAN FRANCISCO - During an early scene in John Adams’s new opera, “Girls of the Golden West,” the story’s plucky heroine, based on a real woman known as Dame Shirley, describes some Native Americans she encountered en route to a California mining encampment during the Gold Rush. Review: John Adams Mines Gold Rush History for His New Opera But given a chance, I'll probably see this. But Adams now has no real librettist, the words culled from original sources were not written to be sung, and the unsatisfactory result as Tommasini describes it doesn't surprise me. Adams's early success "Nixon in China" had a proper librettist, Alice Goodman, who actually wrote the words so that they could be sung, with Sellars in the background (as Svengali?). According to Anthony Tommasini, the music has virtues but the libretto - assembled rather than written by Peter Sellars - is a problem. "Girls of the Golden West" has been premiered in San Francisco, and I expect Peter Gelb will eventually bring it to the Met.
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