The Redemption of “Vanessa,” a Neglected Operatic Masterpiece
“Vanessa” and I go way back. I first encountered Samuel Barber’s opera in 1979, when, at thirteen, I happened to catch a PBS broadcast of a production at the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, which had been directed by Barber’s longtime partner, the composer and librettist Gian Carlo Menotti. I was hooked at once, swayed by the astonishing beauty of the music and the unerring craftsmanship that held it all together. The crux of the plot—an aging aristocrat waiting for her long-lost lover—was alien to my experience, but Barber’s constant current of melody revealed such a profound sympathy for his characters that I was carried along with the tide. Soon after, I used some of my allowance to buy an R.C.A. recording featuring the mostly American cast from the Metropolitan Opera première, a dream team that included Eleanor Steber, Rosalind Elias, and Nicolai Gedda, conducted by the eminent Dimitri Mitropoulos. (It is just as unrivalled an interpretation as Maria Callas’s “Tosca” with Victor de Sabata.) Barber’s idiom was at once extremely conservative—it bore the influence of Brahms, Sibelius, and Tchaikovsky—and utterly original. A prime example in “Vanessa” is “Under the willow tree,” a sinister and rhythmically incisive ensemble scene that masquerades as a catchy folk song. The opera won the Pulitzer Prize in 1958, but its unfashionable avoidance of the serialist and experimental techniques that were rapidly taking over the academic musical establishment made it a piece that few musicians wanted to talk about, or even acknowledge. “Vanessa” was like the illegitimate cousin of a grand old family who is paid to stay away.
So, for years, I held my fervent reactions to myself. Now I know conclusively that I am not alone: the latest manifestation of the work’s growing popularity arrived last Thursday night, when Heartbeat Opera, the scrappy and daring twelve-year-old company that stages radical transformations of classic pieces, brought its version of “Vanessa” to a sold-out house at the Baruch Performing Arts Center. It’s the fastest-selling show in the company’s history, and several performances have already been added, through May 31st.
Prior to that quietly successful Spoleto production (which, thankfully, occurred shortly before the composer died), “Vanessa” had been shunned for some time. After its triumphant Met première, in January of 1958, and a couple of brief revivals through 1965, the piece had decisively departed from the repertory, failing to entrench itself the way the finest operas of Benjamin Britten had done. This was the result partly of the negative reaction of the European press when “Vanessa” came to the Salzburg Festival in the summer of 1958, and partly of the failure of Barber’s second opera, “Antony and Cleopatra,” which had opened the new Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center in 1966, tarnishing the composer’s once solid-gold brand.
But, as the century proceeded toward the new millennium, “Vanessa” began to return to favor, reaching new audiences with productions by the companies of Washington, Los Angeles, Santa Fe, Monte Carlo, and New York City Opera. This journey culminated in the 2018 production at Glyndebourne, which accomplished the feat of finally reducing (most of) the London critics to abashed admiration. Why? Because, folks, nobody writes music like this anymore. The piece is just too good to throw away.
Granted, “Vanessa” has always had its haters, among them Andrew Porter, who was the distinguished, longtime music critic of this magazine. It began at Salzburg: Who are these Americans, writing a European-style opera instead of one on an American theme? (The opera takes place at an opulent estate in a “northern country about 1905.”) And why in the world would anyone composing after the Second World War reëmbrace the long-irrelevant late-Romantic idiom of Puccini and Strauss, with its lush harmonies, rich orchestration, and powerful melodies? Well, why not, when you can absorb the style so convincingly and thoroughly? Barber had proved in “Knoxville: Summer of 1915,” an orchestral song that sets a text by James Agee with both sublime sensitivity and casual perfection, that he could do Americana as well as Copland had, and could therefore allow himself to move on. And “Vanessa” is only so European. Listening to Heartbeat Opera’s committed performance, I wondered why it had taken me so long to appreciate the bluesy cadences of the work’s most famous aria, “Must the winter come so soon?,” or the sinuously winding melodic arc of the second act’s sulfurous duet, “Love has a bitter core, Vanessa.”
The Heartbeat Opera production is jarring, and not just because of the treatment of the music. Heartbeat’s music director, Dan Schlosberg, has pulled off another virtuoso feat, reducing Barber’s meticulous, string-rich orchestrations down to a band of seven instrumentalists, with a piano trio and a harpist joined by three wind players doubling many instruments, in the manner of Broadway pros, allowing the score’s “American” elements to emerge more starkly. Jacob Ashworth, the company’s artistic director, has removed the original’s choral scenes, concentrated the action, and cut down the cast to just the five principal roles. (Some of us of a certain age will miss the deliciously atmospheric opening scene—“Potage crème aux perles”—in which a character orders up a sumptuous meal in French, as Barber himself surely did on innumerable occasions.)
But it is the show’s director, R. B. Schlather, who has drawn out the full implications of Gian Carlo Menotti’s libretto, which in the past was much more savagely criticized than the music. (Porter called it “romantic rubbish—Isak Dinesen rewritten for housemaids.”) The plot is high-class soap opera, offered at a time when most composers were avoiding any subject that glamorized the bourgeoisie. Vanessa (Inna Dukach), a wealthy, middle-aged woman who is jealously guarding her beauty, sits in her snow-surrounded mansion, awaiting the return of a lover, Anatol, from whom she was separated years ago. A man named Anatol (Freddie Ballentine) arrives—but it’s the impecunious son of her Anatol, now dead. She recoils; the young Anatol, after a lavish dinner, makes love to Vanessa’s niece, Erika (Kelsey Lauritano), impregnating her. Expected to marry the charming gold-digger, Erika demurs when she realizes that Anatol has turned his attentions to Vanessa, who, in a swoon, looks past his obvious flaws. They announce their engagement at a winter ball; Erika runs out into the snow, losing her child in what is either a suicide attempt or a crude abortion. The May-September couple depart for Paris; now, Erika sings, “it is my turn to wait.”
Schlather’s approach is the opposite of the genteel Spoleto staging, which invoked the opulent sets and costumes of the Met’s designer, Cecil Beaton, on a smaller stage. Dramatic currents, once suppressed, here bloom unashamed. The new Anatol paws Vanessa’s body before she has a chance to turn around and recognize him; the Old Doctor (Joshua Jeremiah), formerly tipsy but elegant, is now a flat-out drunk, spraying Dom Pérignon all over the floor. Costumes are dark and minimal (at the end, Erika wears the same black-cocktail-dress-and-pearls ensemble that Vanessa wore at the opening); the staging is bare-bones—just a couple of chairs, stark lighting, no projections, and a few minutes of dry ice during the snow scene. There was a lot of big singing in a small space: of the strong cast, Lauritano was the most effective in bringing full intensity at a lower scale, while Mary Phillips, a veteran Wagnerian at the Met, brought some luxurious vocal stylings to the small but pivotal role of the aged Baroness.
Schlather forces us to confront Menotti’s florid but acidic prose, in which the characters are so intent on lying to one another that they only answer questions with other questions, or else with high-flown koans and abstractions. In the closing quintet—“To leave, to break”—Menotti’s language becomes plainer and more devastating, and Barber sets it in a weave of canonic melody that rivals anything in Donizetti or Strauss. Heard whole, the Barber-Menotti product is as gloriously over the top as anything that Bette Davis ever made with William Wyler—and Heartbeat’s reduction of it to its burning cinders is as just as effective as Glyndebourne’s grandly eloquent take. “Vanessa” is here to stay. ♦