WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — Opera has come to the Williamstown Theater Festival, long a summer destination for theater in the Berkshires in Western Massachusetts. This year’s festival, curated by Jeremy O. Harris, the playwright best known for Slave Play, runs July 17-Aug. 3. Heartbeat Opera’s adaptation of Barber’s Vanessa ushered in this new era on the opening night of the festival.
Since Heartbeat’s founding 11 years ago, artistic director Jacob Ashworth and music director Dan Schlosberg have taken a laser-like approach to reimagining grand operas such as Weber’s Die Freischütz, Beethoven’s Fidelio, and Strauss’ Salome. The results are concise, emotionally charged productions, with the scores wonderfully transformed into arrangements for a small ensemble. They worked the same alchemy on Vanessa to create a riveting story of passion, self-delusion, and loss. Schlosberg and Ashworth share conducting duties for the run, with the former leading the opening night performance.
When it premiered at the Metropolitan Opera in 1958, Vanessa was the first new American opera produced there in 11 years. Featuring sets and costumes by Cecil Beaton, a stellar cast led by Eleanor Steber in the title role and conducted by Dimitri Mitropoulos, it achieved both critical and popular success. The opera was revived at the Met during the 1964-1965 season in a revised, trimmed version, but never again. The destruction of the original sets in a fire, along with changing musical tastes and the failure of Barber’s next opera, Antony and Cleopatra, in 1966 to open the Met’s new home at Lincoln Center, also contributed to this neglect.
Gian Carlo Menotti, Barber’s longtime personal and professional partner, wrote the Vanessa libretto. It was supposedly inspired, in terms of atmosphere, if not plot, by Seven Gothic Tales by Isak Dinesen (the pen name of Karen Blixen). Set in an isolated country house in a northern climate, Vanessa has tried to hold time at bay while waiting for the return of her former lover, Anatol. Her only companions have been her niece, Erika; her mother, the old Baroness, who has not spoken to her daughter in 20 years; and the loyal old family Doctor.
Anatol appears, but he is the son of the man who inflamed Vanessa’s passions. On the day he arrives, Erika spends the night with him. The love Anatol has to offer does not appeal to Erika, but it does suit Vanessa, and he settles for what is offered to him. As the now-married Vanessa and Anatol depart for a glamorous life in the capitals of Europe, Erika chooses to wait in silence, as her aunt did.
For Heartbeat, Ashworth has reduced the story to its essence by focusing solely on these five characters and eliminating most of the details that serve to establish time and place. This approach equalizes the importance of the five protagonists and the impact each of their actions has on others. Some of the folkloric elements remain, including the folk song that the Doctor sings and the country dances. They do little to alleviate the intensity of the love triangle playing out among Anatol, Erika, and Vanessa.
Schlosberg’s reduction for six instruments captures the passion, lyricism, and ferocity of Barber’s original score for full orchestra but tames them. For all of the beauty and complexity of Schlosberg’s orchestration, and he is a master of orchestral color, his focus is always on the five characters onstage. Barber’s great slashes of orchestral sound, which punctuate every emotional twist and turn, are jarring.
Director R.B. Schlather likewise took a stripped-down approach to the opera, which was performed in The Annex at WTF, a former grocery store transformed into a black box theater in nearby North Adams, Mass. There were no sets, only a few chairs, on the bare stage with a vast white wall at its rear.
Schlather’s staging of the final quintet, which owes an obvious debt to the final trio in Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier, was managed with a brutal frankness that laid bare the follies and fates of the five individuals. Resignation was written across the faces of Vanessa, the Baroness, and the Doctor. Horror gripped Anatol as if he realized he had bartered away love and happiness. Erika was frozen in fear, as she doomed herself to the same fate that had befallen her aunt long ago.
Yuki Nakase Link’s lighting heightened the suffocating atmosphere of the desolate house where existence and emotions were equally stifled. Vanessa and Anatol first appeared as oversized, menacing shadows. Link’s most effective lighting element was a box of white light to freeze-frame Vanessa and Erika at their most vulnerable.
Apart from the Doctor’s rumpled homespun suit, Terese Wadden dressed the characters in white or black. Vanessa and Anatol were the epitome of style and sophistication, while Erika was in white, which at first captured her youth and purity, but later her idealism, determination, and fatalism. By the end of the opera, she too was dressed in black.
Heartbeat assembled a cast equal to the musical demands of Barber’s vocal writing and the dramatic ones of Schlather’s concept. Inna Dukach was a mercurial Vanessa who leaned into the high-camp, histrionic aspects of the role, shifting among unbridled outbursts of passion, self-awareness, and loving concern for Erika. Dukach’s account of Vanessa’s opening aria, “Do not utter a word, Anatol,” was fierce and chilling, foreshadowing her determination to seize this chance of happiness, despite her misgivings.
Dark and handsome, with a ringing youthful tenor voice to match, Roy Hage’s Anatol took a transactional approach to romance and his future. Mary Phillips’ bearing and facial expressions revealed as much of the old Baroness’ character as did her singing. What little warmth was present in the woman’s heart quickly dissipated with a chilling fierceness when her expectations were not met. Joshua Jeremiah’s firm, rich baritone and personal warmth and charm underscored the Doctor’s sense of inadequacy in judging matters of the human heart.
Lore has it that Maria Callas turned down the role of Vanessa, sensing that Erika was the stronger character of the two. Ashworth and Schlosberg share that opinion, and with Ori Marcu, they certainly had an Erika worthy of the claim. At the end of the opera, after Anatol and Vanessa have departed, they inserted a reprise of “Must the winter come so soon?” Erika sings the aria at the beginning of the opera, a premonition perhaps of what’s to come. Heard again at the end, it exposes Erika’s worst fears of being unloved and alone.
In the final moments of the opera, Erika was dressed in an elegant black dress with a string of pearls, just as Vanessa had appeared at the beginning. Trapped in a shrinking rectangle of blazing white light, Marcu’s Erika recoiled in terror as she realized the enormity of her decisions. It was a harrowing conclusion to a penetrating psychological exploration of self-will and delusion, from which no one emerged unscathed.
