Samuel Barbers Opera, Vanessa
JAMES, HIBBARD
MUSIC By Hibbard James Samuel Barber's Opera, Vanessa' Samuel Barber's first opera, Vanessa, was the first American opera to have its premiere at the Metropolitan Opera in many years, and I must...
...In an outstanding cast, Rosalind Elias is superb as Erika...
...But everybody in Vanessa is much too genteel to fire a shotgun, except at a pheasant...
...When he arrives, he turns out to be her lover's son, and she retires to her bed in a huff...
...Now that Barber has shown what he can do in this form, I hope he will be encouraged by the opera's enthusiastic reception to do another which will offer him more scope for his inventiveness and feeling for melody...
...There can be no complaint about the production, which is impeccable: Mr...
...shortly thereafter, Erika and Anatol retire in a passion which results in her pregnancy...
...Menotti has given him only occasional opportunity for cutting loose with the kind of soaring melody that makes opera come alive, Mr...
...Her singing is extremely uneven, and some of her high notes were decidedly squeaky...
...And while this may be admirable in real life (or even in an Oscar Wilde comedy), it doesn't make for the conflict of raw passion so essential to opera in the grand style...
...For Vanessa he has written one of his eminently singable and well-constructed librettos, but he has chosen such a muted Chekhovian plot that neither he nor the composer have any place to go...
...Though she is the title role, Vanessa is not nearly so important or interesting as her niece, Erika...
...Barber had worked up a full head of musical steam...
...By the second act, Mr...
...Particularly fine, too, is Giorgio Tozzi in the subordinate role of the old family doctor...
...In a role which could all too easily become over-sentimental, she sings the music with the right combination of wanning simplicity and delicately shaded pathos...
...Furthermore, he has encrusted the story with one or two unresolved mysteries that are not intriguing but annoying...
...Bing got Cecil Beaton to do the sets and costumes, assembled an exceedingly strong cast, and got Dmitri Mitropoulos to conduct...
...After the fumbling first act, the music sings and shimmers in a way that suggests Richard Strauss, without being in any way derivative...
...Mitropoulos conducted with a vigor that demanded and received the best from the singers...
...Her acting is of the type usually associated with road-company Toscas...
...Barber has fashioned a score that seems to realize the demands of the libretto almost perfectly...
...Chekhov himself said that if a shotgun goes off in the third act, it must be hanging on the wall in the first act...
...But the music itself has long arid stretches which detract from the impact of the opera both musically and dramatically...
...This so upsets Erika that she make a half-hearted attempt at suicide...
...Nevertheless, grateful as I am to the Met for producing it and to Barber for writing it, I have a few marked reservations about Vanessa...
...At the beginning, I was afraid we were in for an evening of technical tricks, but that notion was happily dispelled by the music that heralds the approach of Anatol's long-awaited sleigh...
...Barber must have liked the characters of Erika and the doctor the best, too, because he has fashioned his best music for them...
...Finally, Vanessa and Anatol go to live in Paris, leaving Erika to languish in the great house with her grandmother (who, for reasons obscure to me, refuses to say anything to anyone...
...At the beginning of the opera, Vanessa is momentarily expecting the arrival of a man who she thinks is her grand passion of twenty years ago...
...In spite of the fact that Mr...
...MUSIC By Hibbard James Samuel Barber's Opera, Vanessa' Samuel Barber's first opera, Vanessa, was the first American opera to have its premiere at the Metropolitan Opera in many years, and I must confess to a certain uneasiness in commenting on it...
...After a certain amount of skirmishing, Vanessa decides to marry Anatol...
...This is surprising, because Menotti has shown such excellent ability as his own librettist in his own operas...
...It is equally obvious that if the dramatist goes out of his way to call our attention to a shotgun on the wall in the first act, we are a little baffled if it never goes off...
...After all, it takes the Met a long time to screw up its courage to do a new opera (for all his love of innovation, this is the first that Rudolf Bing has tackled), and no one wants to scare them off...
...In spite of my reservations, Vanessa strikes me as a beautifully done opera...
...He let down a little in the last act, but he had little alternative if he was to remain true to the libretto...
...The basic fault, I think, lies with the libretto that Gian-Carlo Menotti supplied for his friend...
...As Vanessa, Eleanor Steber is barely adequate...
Vol. 41 • February 1958 • No. 5
