Review of Samuel Barber’s Vanessa by Ópera do Castelo

Ópera do Castelo of Lisbon brought a thrilling national première of Samuel Barber’s Vanessa to Portugal October 31 through November 2, nearly sixty-eight years after the Metropolitan Opera debut of the Pulitzer Prize-winning work. The production was a collaboration with the host São Luiz Teatro Municipal and featured stage direction, scenography, and lighting design by Daniela Kerck, costumes by Hannah König, and musical direction by Diogo Coasta, leading the Orquestra Filarmónica Portuguesa. 

Barber chose Italian-American Gian Carlo Menotti, Barber’s life partner, to serve as the librettist for Vanessa. Menotti himself was a composer of twenty-five operas, written mostly to his own libretti. Together, the duo chose the influence of the Seven Gothic Tales by Isak Dinesen to construct an opera with a fully original plot. After its première in January 1958, as a commission of the Metropolitan Opera, Howard Taubman wrote in The New York Times that Vanessa was “the best American opera ever presented” at the Met.

Barber and Menotti set the work in a remote mansion in a northern European country in 1905, perhaps not unlike the mansion Barber and Menotti owned called Capricorn, in the woods near the Hudson River in Mount Kisco, New York. This was the home they bought in 1943 and shared for over 40 years.

In the opera, Vanessa awaits the imminent return of her lover, Anatol, whom she has not seen in twenty years. She has waited secluded in her estate, where her niece, Erika, and her mother, the Baroness, have been subjected to her steadfast fantasy of a future life with Anatol. A man does come, but he reveals himself to be the namesake son of the now-deceased Anatol. The younger man avails himself to Erika and to Vanessa, and the ensuing consequences set the stage for a complicated psychodrama worthy of the great neo-romantic music of one of America’s greatest composers of the twentieth century.

Vanessa is a complicated figure, craving happiness that has eluded her for a lifetime, especially in the protracted period since she last saw her lover. When the younger Anatol appears unexpectedly in his father’s place, a wild cache of psychological contingencies floods to the surface. Everyone is affected by Vanessa’s actions and choices, which portend anything but harmonious consequences.

Soprano Catarina Molder, the founding artistic director of Ópera do Castelo, presented the title role with power, pathos, and vulnerability. A seasoned artist with a long and diverse history as performer and impresario, Molder triumphed on at least two levels, masterfully rendering one of the great roles in the American oeuvre, while introducing a primarily Portuguese audience to an American classic for the first time. As Vanessa, Molder shared her character’s complexity and Barber’s dramatic mastery with commanding strength that soared in hope and insecurity In the Act I aria, “Do not utter a word,” and floated in susceptibility later in Act I, “Oh, how happy I feel this morning, how happy!“

Beatriz Volante, as Vanessa’s niece, Erika, and Ermin Asceric, as the younger Anatol, shone brightly in this production. Both sang exquisitely, serving the American libretto with stellar English diction. While Barber and Menotti conceived Vanessa in the title role, their story appears more attuned to Erika’s plight in her aunt’s shadow, forced to live in Vanessa’s once splendored hermitage and then to endure the betrayal of losing the young Anatol to Vanessa while carrying and losing his baby in secret. Volante, a Portuguese soprano who has trained in London, captured the audience’s attention with clear and ravishing lyricism in the opera’s first aria, the iconic “Must the Winter Come so Soon,” and she displayed strength, range, and virtuosity throughout, until the opera’s final, resigned utterance, “Now it is my turn to wait!”

Asceric brought artistry and elan to the junior Anatol, whose surprise arrival injects a dark twist early in the plot. Asceric’s Anatol showed equal parts transparent and duplicitous, passionate and cavalier, brash and sophisticated. His singing was promisingly glorious, as displayed in the arias, “Outside this House the World has Changed” and “Love Has a Bitter Core”. A young Bosnian tenor who trained and achieved early professional successes in Serbia, Asceric marks a significant milestone in his young career as Anatol, rising to a challenging lead in a Portuguese production of a tour-de-force American work.

Contralto, Alexandra Calado, an equally credentialed actress and singer, brought steely resolve to the Baroness, casting a palpable shroud of disapproval over the misguided life choices of her family at the heart of Vanessa’s plot. The Baroness’ daughter Vanessa, who waits decades in seclusion for the return of a temporal lover, and her granddaughter, Erika, who forces the consequences of an unwanted pregnancy from a solitary night alone with Anatol, disregard the dismayed matriarch’s experiential wisdom. Calado’s Baroness, in an uncomfortably silent response, spoke more devastatingly than words.

The acting of Luís Rodrigues as the dubious Doctor, and Tiago Amado Gomes as Nicholas, the indispensable Major-Domo, brought welcomed levity to Menotti’s otherwise brooding, traumatic drama. Rodrigues’ polished stage presence and graceful dance skills (“Under the Willow Tree” and “I Should Never Have Been a Doctor”) and Gomes’ glimpses into behind-the-scenes quirks of the regimented Major-Domo (“Ah, these lovely furs so soft, so sweetly scented”), elicit laughter just when the story needs it the most.

The stage direction of the German director, Daniela Kerck was straight-forward and loyal to the score. She enabled the drama with realistic sets and an atmosphere of wintery isolation, established by the snow that made the arrival of the long-lost lover seem precarious, and the disappearance of a distraught Erika feel life-threatening. Kerck’s blocking of ensemble scenes brought clarity and function, such as in the Act II dance sequence, in which Barber fused two tunes in a dramatically unsettling fashion.

Vanessa is a large musical structure, which Samuel Barber would not undertake until his late forties. In his own words, he had finally mastered, “how to write for orchestra, how to write for chorus and ballet, how to write for solo voice and orchestra. When I had learned that, I was ready.” The music draws on influences of Puccini, Strauss, and even Webern, and the musical demands on singers and orchestra alike are significant. Not only were the singers equal to the challenge, but Diogo Costa led a fiery Portuguese Philharmonic Orchestra that would hold its own in any of the great European cultural centers. Ensemble artistry, phrasing, colours, and precision provided a dramatic and reliable foundation for great music-making throughout the opera. The opening instrumental passages of each act, including a charming Intermezzo, displayed especially virtuosic woodwind playing. Maestro Costa is clearly at home in the opera pit, with singers and orchestra alike, and his forces performed as a well-honed, dramatic unit from start to finish. Pianist Isa Antunes, assumed the role of onstage orchestra as a solo pianist during the engagement party scene. She played flawlessly.

Catarina Molder, Ópera do Castelo, Teatro São Luiz Municipal, and the cast, orchestra, staff and crew deserve gratitude and praise for the Portuguese première of Vanessa by Samuel Barber and Gian Carlo Menotti. Vanessa holds a central position in the lexicon of twentieth-century American opera, and it was treated with reverence and passion in its Lisbon debut.