It was 95 years ago that the Metropolitan Opera Company pulled out all PR stops to prepare the public for the world premiere of “The Girl of the Golden West,” billed as “An American Opera.” No one seemed to mind that label then, except for the work’s composer – the Italian Giacomo Puccini.

Arriving in New York in the fall of 1910 for rehearsals, the “American Opera” line so upset him he demanded the billboards carrying it be changed. Yet his opera, “La Fanciulla del West” in its original Italian, is still viewed as a relic of an earlier America. Performed much more rarely than Puccini’s hits, it will receive a major revival on Sunday by the New York City Opera.

George Manahan will conduct the new production, which is directed by Lillian Groad, with sets by John Conklin, costumes by Constance Hoffman, and lighting by Robert Wurtzel. Soprano Stephanie Friede plays saloon-keeper Minnie, baritone Stephen Kechulius is ardent sheriff Jack Rance, and Renzo Zulian (in his company debut) takes on a role created by super-tenor Enrico Caruso: handsome Dick Johnson, the stranger with “a past” whom Minnie comes to love.

Maybe Puccini demanded those posters be changed because he saw trouble lurking below the frenzied welcome. He wasn’t far wrong. The stakes for his new work were higher than that of its second-act poker game: “Fanciulla” was an attempt to seize national cultural legitimacy overnight. The Met and its wealthy, powerful backers were eager to become world players in the arts; how better to take the lead than by buying a new work from opera’s most popular living composer?

After years of slow, sometimes painful work, Puccini and his primary librettist, Carlo Zangarini, converted David Belasco’s Broadway play, set during the California Gold Rush (1849), into a three-act drama which featured poker games; saloon dances; Indians singing “Ugh!” (when they weren’t singing Italian); a spectacular snowstorm in the second act; and a heroine on horseback, racing to save the man she loves from a lynch mob.

It sounds like a strong story for any dramatic vehicle. And the music Puccini wrote is among his most glorious, chromatically richer than anything he’d achieved before. If Wagner had been an early influence, Debussy (whose “Pelleas et Melisande” premiered a few years before “Fanciulla”) was a newer, quickly assimilated one. “Fanciulla” is written with strict attention to dramatic and musical pacing. Its few arias are short, almost terse, with little of the expansive flair of the arias for “La Boheme” or “Tosca.” (The composer was hurt when critics accused him of writing arias that fit perfectly on 78s.)

Listening to “Fanciulla” today, it’s hard to understand why the opera never achieved the success of other Puccini works. Recordings have won it a loyal following, as has a terrific Kultur video (now on DVD) of a Royal Opera House Covent Garden production starring Placido Domingo and Carol Neblett. A handsome Met production, which premiered in 1991, attracted additional admirers.

A new study of the work, its creation, and subsequent reception, “Puccini and ‘The Girl'” by Annie Randall and Rosalind Gray Davis (University of Chicago Press) is a must for anyone interested in opera, America, and why the two are still comparative strangers. Ms. Randall and Ms. Davis have made a thorough study of correspondence, memoirs, and press clippings, telling a fuller tale of the opera’s creation than has been heretofore known.

After weeks of rehearsal (supervised by Belasco and the opera’s conductor, Arturo Toscanini) and accelerating public interest, the work opened at the Metropolitan’s first opera house, on 38th Street and Broadway, on December 10, 1910. The rich and famous turned out in profusion, competing with the opera for press inches the next day. “Society in Great Array Attends the Premiere; Women Wearing Gorgeous Gowns and Jewels,” sighed a headline in the Herald.

At least on opening night “Fanciulla” was a hit: Its stars, Caruso, Emmy Destinn, and Pasquale Amato were hailed, along with the conductor, orchestra, and composer, in an impressive total of 55 curtain calls. But subsequent reviews didn’t partake in the ecstasy. “The opera is lacking in what the painters call ‘quality,'” wrote the man on the aisle from the New York Sun. “The Puccini quality is there, but it is restrained.”

Another found it “far inferior to ‘La Boheme,’ ‘Tosca,’ and ‘Madama Butter fly.’ What the public has always wanted, wants now, and always will want in any opera, above all things is melody. … There is surprisingly little of this in ‘The Girl of the Golden West.'” Others (overlooking the growing immigrant culture in America – or maybe fearing to notice it) criticized the un-Americanness of the music, the Italian language, the “foreigners” in the cast.

In short, this was a classic case of an artist, working at his peak, turning out his most daring work – and getting smacked down for it.

The opera played 11 performances in its first season, and it remained in the Met repertory through 1914. Then it disappeared from the house until 1929, when it opened in a new production, played three successful seasons – and vanished for another quarter century. The opera appeared sporadically through the 1960s (in part thanks to Renata Tebaldi, whose recording of Minnie is one of her best), vanished again, then returned in 1991 for another three seasons.

Perhaps it’s only in our new century, further away than ever from the rough, raucous American West the opera dramatizes, that “Fanciulla” can be appreciated for what it is – a richly scored and paced drama about a subject opera has avoided as less than surefire: middle age. The lovers in “Fanciulla” are struggling to find a new life despite being stranded at the end of the line. Minnie, though adored by the men in the camp, is an isolated, even desperate figure. Rance is too over bearing and angry a man to suit her. Johnson is little more than a momentary hope, a man she met once and felt something for. But his chance appearance in Minnie’s saloon has all the impact of a sign from heaven for her, and a curse from somewhere else for the rest of the cast.

In addition to the unfashionable theme, “Fanciulla” is not a conventional operatic tale of virtue inspiring redemption, as early interpreters had it. (Much was made in 1910 of Minnie’s goodness rescuing Johnson from evil: People seemed more comfortable with the opera’s melodramatic roots than with what Puccini made of them.) When Johnson visits Minnie in her cabin, this potentially compromising situation is scored to music of extraordinary erotic suggestion.

Every effect in the music – the gently falling snow, the accelerating wind bringing the storm closer, the music swooshing in fervor as Johnson asks Minnie for a kiss – brings stage action and erotic sentiment into an embrace. There’s little romance and no coyness here: “Fanciulla” must have made its corseted and jeweled audiences uncomfortable with its frankness.

The opera’s real theme seems to be the triumph of love (and sex) over convention; its lesson how loneliness and frustration diminish us. In the opening barroom scene, a minstrel strolls on singing a song, lamenting the home and mother he’s left behind. The miners take up the theme in poignant harmony. We hear the theme again when Minnie, overcome with longing, stops reading from the Psalms during the wonderful Bible instruction scene. When she wins Johnson’s freedom and chooses to leave her old life behind, the men sing a farewell on the minstrel’s theme as Minnie and Johnson walk off into the sunrise.

This is not an upbeat ending, even in tragedy-inflected opera. Minnie and Johnson face a future as outlaws, unwelcome in America or Mexico; the men Minnie has cared for know they will never see her again. Even though no one dies, “Fanciulla” is one of the saddest operas in the canon.

Maybe this is why it wasn’t a hit in 1910. Its vision of America as a wilderness of lost souls hardly fit the triumphalism already urging American ambitions toward its position as a world-power. Its scenes of immigrants, natives, prospectors, banditos – all rivals for space, assets, life, and love – are jarring compared to any number of Hollywood horse operas. (The 1938 MGM musical “The Girl of the Golden West,” starring Jeannette McDonald and Nelson Eddy, scarcely bears watching today.)

Long before multiculturalism and revisionist histories, Puccini and his librettist caught a whisper of a deeper, darker, truer America. Perhaps now is the time for opera companies to hear what “Fanciulla’s” creators heard, and audiences to admire their achievement.

“Girl of the Golden West” will be performed April 3 & 23 at 1:30 p.m.; April 8 & 16 at 8 p.m.; and April 13, 19 & 21 at 7:30 p.m.(Lincoln Center, 212-307-4100).