The concert celebrated Lincoln Center’s Great Performers Series, and the top tickets went for $1,500—many of them bought by representatives of the evening’s chief sponsor, the Altria packaged-food conglomerate. This kind of event usually offers about as much nourishment as Altria’s product line, which includes Marlboro cigarettes, Kool-Aid and Velveeta macaroni-and-cheese dinners. But this gala was different: It featured a larger-than-usual Orchestra of St. Luke’s, conducted with great élan by a young Israeli maestro, Asher Fisch, and two of the finest singers in the world, the American soprano Deborah Voigt and the Canadian tenor Ben Heppner. The program of works by Beethoven, Weber and Wagner pushed indomitable to the limit.

It was disheartening to see so many empty seats after the intermission—an exodus, I imagine, of corporate minions whose capacity for great music has been diminished by too many Oreo jingles. Those who stayed were treated to an evening that combined vocal heroics with genuine musical news.

The news came on two fronts. Ever since Mr. Heppner’s triumphant opening night at the Met last season in the title role of Verdi’s Otello, he’s been widely viewed as the rightful heir to Plácido Domingo, the world’s greatest dramatic tenor. (Not that Mr. Domingo, who’s in his mid-60’s, is quite ready to abdicate.) But worries persist that Mr. Heppner’s beautiful, plangent instrument doesn’t have quite the mettle to keep him in the throne for long. Opera lovers remember the excruciating, cracked high notes in his performances in the Met’s Die Meistersinger a few years before Otello and his subsequent shocking loss of nearly 100 pounds.

Judging from his performance at Lincoln Center, Mr. Heppner’s claim to the title is secure. He’s regained much of his old weight and looked healthy and majestic, complete with a doughty sea captain’s whiskers. His keening lyricism has never sounded sweeter than it did during the Act II love duet from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. His reading of Max’s Act I aria from Weber’s Der Freischütz shone with youthful buoyancy. He sailed through the killer “Prize Song” from Meistersinger with an ease that bordered on gleefulness. The ardor he brought to the last scene of Wagner’s Siegfried suggested that he may one day take on this most punishing of tenor roles without destroying his career. Throughout the evening, his enjoyment was palpable. In the opera world, “Heppner Is Happy” is a banner headline.

Wagnerians ask themselves the perennial question: Who’s the next Brünnhilde? The heroine of Wagner’s Ring cycle is reserved for utterly fearless sopranos, a species as scarce as the ivory-billed woodpecker. In recent years, only Jane Eaglen has convincingly approached the role’s vocal and physical demands, but with her enormous girth and steely sound, the British soprano has been more impressive than bewitching in a part that requires both knock-’em-down exuberance and heart-breaking vulnerability.

For some time now, the eyes of Brünnhilde spotters have been on Ms. Voigt, whose steady rise as one of the world’s great dramatic sopranos has been accompanied by another much-publicized dramatic decrease in weight. When she sang Leonore’s great Act I aria from Beethoven’s Fidelio, “Abscheulicher, wo eilst duh hin?” (“Monster! Where are you hurrying?”), she was cheered as much for the triumph of her physical transformation (she wore a shapely black-and-white ensemble) as for her eloquent interpretation of Leonore’s passage from fury to hope.

The soprano showed where she’s heading when she reappeared to sing with Mr. Heppner the Act II love duet from Tristan und Isolde. (Watching over the illicit lovers from an upper balcony was Margaret Jane Wray’s powerfully sung Brangäne.) Isolde is the last stepping-stone to Brünnhilde, and Ms. Voigt, who sang the role with great success in Vienna in 2003, conveyed the almost demented ecstasy of the piece while maintaining a scrupulous balance between intelligibility and beauty of sound. Most Wagnerian sopranos—even the greatest postwar Isolde, Birgit Nilsson—unleash this music. With Ms. Voigt, it all comes out as naturally as though she’s a grown-up Judy Garland singing “Over the Rainbow” on the road to Oz.

For me, the qualities that distinguish the great American soprano voices from those of their foreign peers—I’m thinking of singers like Eleanor Steber, Eileen Farrell and Leontyne Price—are open-hearted healthiness and a two-feet-on-the-ground intelligence that shines in even the most tragic moments. Ms. Voigt has just released a wonderful new album entitled All My Heart (Angel/EMI), a program of American songs by Ives, Bernstein, Charles Tomlinson Griffes, Amy Beach and the contemporary American composer Ben Moore, for whose droll, deceptive simplicities she seems to have a special affinity. Her pianist is the delicately resourceful Brian Zeger, and the two of them approach this quirky, delightful play list with clear-eyed, casual elegance. After the intermission at Avery Fisher, Ms. Voigt welcomed the audience back with Elisabeth’s joyful “Dich, teure Halle” (“You, Dear Hall”) from Tannhäuser, which she sang with the celebratory directness of Kate Smith’s “God Bless America.”

Finally, she ascended to Brünnhilde’s throne when she joined Mr. Heppner in the duet from the conclusion of Siegfried. Ms. Voigt recorded opera’s most transcendent awakening scene five years ago with Plácido Domingo. At Tanglewood last summer, she unveiled another side of Brünnhilde in a concert performance of the immolation scene from Die Gotterdämmerung with James Levine and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Now, as she voiced her gratitude to Mr. Heppner’s Siegfried for braving the ring of Magic Fire, she showed that she has all the yearning feminine tenderness that also characterizes the leader of the Valkyries.

Ms. Voigt has not yet announced when she’ll tackle the whole three-evening role. But she certainly has signaled that the next Brünnhilde is here.

The tortured protagonist of Verdi’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedy is, by dint of its immense vocal and dramatic challenges, the pinnacle of the Italian tenor repertory. (Its counterpart in the German repertory is Wagner’s Tristan.) Since Otello ’s premiere at La Scala in 1887, the role has been dominated by one or two tenors in each generation—from Francesco Tamagno, the first Otello, to Giovanni Zenatello, Leo Slezak, Martinelli, Ramon Vinay, Mario del Monaco, James McCracken and Jon Vickers. In the past quarter-century, Mr. Domingo made the role virtually his own, giving well more than 200 performances all over the world as the Moor of Venice. It’s a part that plays perfectly to his strengths—stamina, a clarion upper register, a fluency with broad legato phrases and theatrical electricity.

Mr. Heppner, the leading Tristan of our time, has virtues of a different order. If the Spaniard’s voice is dark, supple leather, the Canadian’s is bright copper, less malleable but with a burnished shine that can irradiate an orchestral forest with shafts of light. He belongs to the northern camp of tenors, whose most celebrated members have been Lauritz Melchior, Jussi Bjoerling, Nicolai Gedda and Mr. Heppner’s compatriot, Jon Vickers. Mr. Domingo is in the southern line—from Caruso to Franco Corelli to Luciano Pavarotti.

On a purely theatrical level, Messrs. Domingo and Heppner are also very different animals. Onstage, Mr. Domingo moves like a tensely coiled cat, preternaturally alert to everything and everyone around him; no singer, as his films and videos attest, has ever used his eyes more eloquently. Mr. Heppner, by contrast, is a lumbering bear whose body language does not register the play of emotions with quicksilver immediacy. And yet he exudes a steady, implacable urgency—the sense that the singer is overcoming inborn frailty with titanic effort. In a review of Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape, the critic Stark Young wrote that he was moved less by the play itself than by the "cost to the dramatist." With Mr. Heppner, I have often been more stirred by what it apparently takes for him to release those commanding high notes than by the suffering of his character.

In recent years, that cost has become troubling. During a run of Die Meistersinger at the Met a few years ago, Mr. Heppner’s "Prize Songs" earned a prize for the frequency with which he cracked in the upper register. At the Lyric Opera of Chicago in 2001, I heard him in his first American Otello, and his vocal uncertainties were painfully evident. That he had become grossly overweight can only have added to his discomfort. But then Mr. Heppner (who is diabetic) went on a crash diet and dropped something like 100pounds. When he reappeared at the Met a year later in The Trojans, he looked healthier, but his voice seemed to have lost, well, meat. This year, for his first Met Otello, he’s regained much (but not all) of the weight he’d lost, and from the moment he appeared in the first scene to declare victory over that fearful storm off Cyprus, he seemed happy to be back to his old self.

With the memory of Mr. Domingo’s Otellos still fresh, it was difficult to readjust to this more towering, less kinetic figure in the Tintoretto-like chiaroscuro of Elijah Moshinsky’s production. Mr. Heppner was singing the entire part as originally written by Verdi (Mr. Domingo, in his most recent appearances, had sung the punishing high passages transposed down), and he seemed chiefly concerned with projecting a vocal authority that could tame not only that storm, but also the supercharged playing of the Met Orchestra under James Levine. Moreover, Mr. Heppner’s Desdemona (an elegant and icy Barbara Frittoli) and Iago (a generically villainous Carlo Guelfi) didn’t offer much dramatic friction. In any event, during the first two acts, which were played without an intermission, he seemed to be looking at the part rather than inhabiting it—more stunned to find himself singing Otello so handsomely than devastated by Iago’s treacherous insinuations.

During the last two acts, however, he came fully into his own. His crazy bursts of violence at his wife (a newly galvanized Ms. Frittoli now playing with an affecting dignity) escalated into a state of near-dementia that I don’t recall Mr. Domingo ever quite achieving. He committed the murder with somnambulistic intensity and expressed his anguish over the horror of what he had done with an eerily quiet acceptance that was shattering. Mr. Heppner is one of those big men who seem sensitive to the damage their heft can inflict—one hears it, too, in the grainy plaintiveness of his voice—and I have never seen him use his sheer size to such powerful, complex advantage. The applause for his triumph was as heartfelt as any I have heard at a Met opening night in years: The torch had been passed.

Mr. Domingo himself attended a gala dinner later that evening, during which he reportedly praised Mr. Heppner’s performance to Joseph Volpe, the Met’s general manager. (I am currently helping Mr. Volpe—who will be retiring in 2006 after 42 years at the Met—to write his memoirs.) Opera’s iron man is now in his mid-60’s and still singing well—and wisely enough to have relinquished his greatest role. (He’s currently singing at the Met as Siegmund in Die Walküre and next May will take the title role in Alfano’s Cyrano de Bergerac.) In his conversation with Mr. Volpe, Mr. Domingo added that he had felt relieved to be right where he was on opening night—not onstage in the throes of Verdi’s greatest Shakespearean opera, but out in the audience with the rest of us.

I had heard Ms. Graham perform the same program-Brahms' Gypsy Songs , Debussy's Proses Lyriques , Berg's Seven Early Songs and an assortment of French songs by Poulenc, Messager and Moïses Simons-at Carnegie Hall several weeks earlier and had come away feeling that this tall, open-faced 42-year-old beauty from Midland, Tex., may be the most personable performer on the recital stage today. Like Christa Ludwig, one of her mentors, Ms. Graham has the ability to turn every hall into her living room. She is the most approachable of singers, inviting her listeners to enjoy the searchlight directness of her voice as if she were opening a screen door and asking you to sit down in the kitchen over a cup of coffee. She is better at taking the artiness out of art songs than anyone I know, and at Carnegie she had the sold-out audience roaring for more.

In New Lebanon, the old tannery, which rises above a pond and looks as though it might have once been the set for Seven Brides for Seven Brothers , brought her almost into the audience's laps-a proximity that many more regal singers would find daunting. But for Ms. Graham's brand of down-home magic, the soaring, piney room was ideal: natural, bright acoustics and views of the sun setting over distant hills. She and her superlative accompanist, Brian Zeger, slipped into the distinctive atmosphere of each set of songs-Brahms' Magyar jocosity, Debussy's silky somnolence, Berg's angular rapture, Poulenc's jaunty impishness-with complete ease. I have never heard Ms. Graham use her voice with so much ranginess of expression-I had the sense that she was trying out new colors for the first time-and afterward, when I asked her how she liked singing in the tannery, she said: "Like Wigmore Hall in London, it meets you more than halfway. I hardly had to do any work at all!"

The prospect of hearing the heroic Mr. Heppner in such a setting seemed more problematic. It was raining with persistence when the newly slimmed-down Canadian tenor came out on the little stage followed by his pianist, Craig Rutenberg, and glanced around the audience with his unusually blue eyes. But with the first golden shaft of sound from his throat, the rain was banished. Mr. Heppner's opening set was Schumann's Liederkreis ( Song Garland ), and it took him a few minutes to scale his huge, meaty sound to a level that didn't drill his listeners to the back of their seats. I could have wished for more shadings and less sheer thrust in some of the songs-more terror in the hunter's encounter with the sorceress in "Waldesgesprach," more lost dreaminess in the poet's vision of his dead beloved in "In der Fremde." But by the final song, "Frühlingsnacht," Mr. Heppner was in jubilant form, holding us with the conviction of his beautifully enunciated German and the ardor of that clarion sonic heft. Mr. Heppner's power to raise the hair on the back of the neck is familiar; less so, at least to me, is the warmth and openness of his personality. The songs in the program's second half-five by the French composer Henri Duparc and five by the Italian composer Paolo Tosti-revealed that behind Mr. Heppner's intensely driven Tristans, Lohengrins and Florestans is a man of considerable charm.

In the Duparc songs, he beautifully employed the attractive nasality of his voice and capacity for the long, flowing line, which make him perhaps the peerless French tenor of our day. For the Tosti songs, he donned a bow tie and a vest suitable to the composer who had been Queen Victoria's voice teacher, and showed a side of himself that I have not heard before-an utterly idiomatic command of the Italian sentimental style. As happened to his great countryman and predecessor in many of the same roles, Jon Vickers, Mr. Heppner's supremacy as a heldentenor will probably prevent us from ever hearing him in Puccini or Verdi (other than in Otello ).Which is a great shame, because his thrilling heart-on-the-sleeve ardor in "Io ti sento!" and "Ideale" had me saying to myself, "Stop wondering about the next Pavarotti-he's here." And when he brought the audience to its feet with a molten rendition of Giordano's "Amor ti vieta," he summoned the ghost of the greatest Nordic Italian tenor of them all, Jussi Bjéerling.

At one point toward the end of the recital, Mr. Heppner glanced around the tannery and remarked on the joy of performing music in such an intimate setting. It was his way of thanking the man who had put these remarkable evenings together, Christian Steiner. A tall, white-haired man with the face and bearing of a German aristocrat, Mr. Steiner is better known as the photographer of choice for the world's top classical artists, the Annie Liebovitz for their CD jackets and posters. Mr. Steiner grew up in Berlin, where his father was the principal violist in the Deutsche Opera Orchestra and where his studies to become a concert pianist made him sufficiently accomplished to have been accepted as a pupil by the great Claudio Arrau. (The lessons, as it happened, never materialized.) Mr. Steiner has a weekend house in nearby Spencertown, N.Y., and 15 years ago he launched himself as a summer-concert presenter in that town's old Spencertown Academy, calling on the services of some of his most famous clients. When the academy's board bridled at his choice of so many outside big names, he moved his operation to the old tannery.

During the past 12 years, the Tannery Pond Concerts, which are organized by Mr. Steiner and Brenda Archer Adams, has presented pianists like Richard Goode, Alicia de Larrocha, Stephen Hough and Jean-Yves Thibaudet; chamber groups like the Emerson String Quartet, the St. Lawrence Quartet, the Beaux-Arts Trio and the Berlin Philharmonic Octet; singers like Carol Vaness, Haken Hagegard and Maureen O'Flynn, as well as numerous up-and-coming musicians of budding renown. "They are all," Mr. Steiner told me, "happy to play here for a pittance.

"We really should name the place the Jessye Norman Hall," he added. "She's an old friend, and because she agreed to sing at the first benefit here, we were able to raise enough money to pay for proper stagelights and put in a stage and a backstage toilet. We were also able to get rid of the bats. There were 3,000 of them, but now"-he glanced at this summer's program, which lists five more concerts, ending on Oct. 11-"we have this."

In all the talk about how to rebuild in the rubble of the World Trade Center, how to restore Wall Street's confidence in the economy and how, in general, to revive our faith in a brighter tomorrow, I have a suggestion: Pay heed to what's happening in our opera houses. After the New York City Opera was obliged to cancel its opening-night performance of The Flying Dutchman on the day of the terrorist attacks, the company bravely raised its curtain four days later, and it hasn't stopped since. On the following weekend, the Met injected a dose of opera power into the city's streets with a benefit preview of its opening-night Verdi gala that was shown on a big screen in Lincoln Center's plaza for thousands of passers-by. In Chicago, the Lyric Opera opened on schedule with an Otello of exceptional force. During the three opera performances that I attended over the past week or so, the passionate discipline of the sort of people who have made American opera so vital in recent years took on a heroic cast.

Perhaps the brightest indication of a healthy future, operatically speaking, was Ben Heppner's stage debut in Chicago in the most demanding tenor assignment in the Italian repertory, the title role of Verdi's Otello . In the past 20 years, the tragic Moor has been so fully inhabited by Plácido Domingo that it has seemed foolhardy for any other tenor to even think about it. On opening night, Mr. Heppner, who is the leading Tristan and Lohengrin of the day, was as moving an Otello as I have seen. His gleaming, bell-like timbre has always carried a wound in it; its straining for volume is tinged with an inborn anguish. A man of Bunyanesque heft, Mr. Heppner comes across as the most vulnerable of big men, a slightly lost giant. All these qualities were put to riveting use in a production by Sir

Peter Hall that made up in dramatic intimacy what it lacked in visual allure.

Rather than the overwhelming opulence one sees in the Met's staging, the Hall production employed a set more appropriate to the play's setting in its evocation of a somewhat rickety garrison in Cyprus. Yet the action was pointlessly updated to some vague period centuries later than the Venetian Renaissance of Shakespeare's imagination. Otello's soldiers were outfitted for the Battle of Waterloo and the ladies were dressed Empire-style, as if for a sitting with Ingres. If the events of the past several weeks have taught us the error of our indifference to historical understanding, I hope that directors will temper their misguided enthusiasm for transporting operas out of their original settings into a more familiar period that only confuses matters.

An Italian baritone of considerable swagger named Lucio Gallo made a crudely effective, if rather monochromatic Iago, but Sir Peter's work with the other two principals was stunning. Renée Fleming's Desdemona has grown over the years into one of her most richly detailed characters. At the start of her career, Ms. Fleming was a somewhat diffident actress who relied on the ravishing beauty of her voice to express emotion, without much resort to the telling physical gesture. In Chicago, she allowed all of her natural warmth and femininity to come through, not as a girlish pawn in Iago's schemes but as a burgeoning woman who literally finds herself, as she goes from yielding trust to self-protective anger to uncomprehending fear, with an ever-deepening hold on her own integrity. In the production's most remarkable bit of invention, she was hurled to the floor and nearly raped by her towering husband, whom she fended off with a series of kicks before regaining her feet and fleeing the stage; all of this she accomplished without sacrificing an ounce of vocal power. In her great "Ave Maria," she seemed to be praying for the whole world's salvation, as she inflected one of Verdi's most beneficent melodies with a wealth of caressing color.

The mood at the Met two nights later was somber: Among the women, bare skin and glitter were the exception; among the men, a preference for dark suits over black tie. But there was a standing ovation for Mayor Giuliani's before-the-curtain speech, in which he thanked the Met for having raised $2.1 million for the World Trade Center victims at the preview performance. And once the singing got underway, the evening turned out to be one of the Met's most agreeable opening nights in years.

To celebrate the centennial of Verdi's death, the program was devoted to three acts of three of his operas, a guarantee that the sum would be less than the parts. The decision to begin with Act I of Un Ballo in Maschera was unwise. This is an opera that is slow to accumulate, and though the first act is laden with hit tunes, nothing much happens of dramatic interest. Still, there was much to cheer in the exuberant Riccardo of the Met's lately returned prodigal son, Neil Shicoff, and in the Ulrica of the Russian mezzo-

soprano Larissa Diadkova, who sang the fortuneteller's dire incantations with lurid conviction. The third act of Otello produced the evening's high point (and secondstandingovation):Mr. Domingo's well-patented but still magnificent reading of his signature role, which he delivered with a clarion strength that was remarkable even for him. The evening ended with the third act of Rigoletto , in which the real excitement came, unexpectedly, from the two villains of the piece. Although the act's central business concerns the callowness of the Duke (nicely sung by Roberto Aronica) and the impending disaster that will befall Rigoletto and Gilda (ably performed by Franz Grundheber and Hei-Kyung Hong), I found myself far more interestedinthewickedallureofSergei Koptchak's Sparafucile and Daniela Barcellona's Maddalena. With evil so much in the air these days, it is perhaps inevitable that one pays greater attention to characters with murder on their minds.

The night after the Met's opening, I attended the first performance of City Opera's new production of a Bellini rarity, I Capuleti ei Montecchi , which is loosely derived from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet . Although I found much to deplore in yet another updated staging-for no discernible reason, old Verona became a never-never land of John Ford skies and turn-of-the century Merchant-Ivory whimsy-the plight of the two star-crossed lovers was gripping. As Giuletta, the fast-rising young American coloratura soprano Mary Dunleavy made her strongest showing to date, tossing off the role's bel canto by-the-yard challenges with crystalline accuracy and unflagging urgency. Even better in the less showy role of Romeo was Sarah Connolly, a young British mezzo-soprano who is new to me. Cutting a remarkably persuasive figure as a handsome, lanky youth, she sang with an unusual purity of line and a consistent richness of sound in a part that demands a daunting vocal range. In a time of fearful uncertainty, how good it feels to encounter brilliant young talent that promises to give so much pleasure in the years ahead.

When, on Nov. 22, the Met unveiled its feverishly awaited new production of Tristan und Isolde -the company's first mounting since 1983 of Wagner's (and possibly anyone's) greatest opera. According to my informal survey of the opening-night chatter during the first intermission, the chief concerns were (a) the un-damsel-like heft of Jane Eaglen as Isolde; (b) the un-knightlike heft of Ben Heppner as Tristan; and (c) the sensational lighting effects of Dieter Dorn's production, which, during the two lovers' discovery of their true feelings for each other in Act 1, succeeded in making the Met's stage go from bedroom pink to shocking scarlet-a cosmic blush that inspired titters and awe in equal measure. Whatever happened to the notion that opera is, first and foremost, about the music ?

Tristan to be sure, carries more extra-musical baggage than any other opera I can think of, written as it was out of a personal drama whose convolutions are the stuff of a 19th-century Dallas . Two months before the opera's premiere in July 1865, Wagner's mistress, Cosima von Bülow, had given birth to his daughter (whom they named Isolde), an event made especially sticky by the fact that Cosima was the wife of Hans von Bülow, one of Wagner's most faithful champions and the conductor of the first performance of Tristan . (Wagner would later marry Cosima.) In the background, or at least in the recesses of Wagner's considerable fantasy life, was another married woman, Mathilde Wesendonk, a longtime object of the composer's unfulfilled passion and the catalyst for the opera.

Wagner was one of those marvelously self-absorbed geniuses who are able to put every idea, desire and disappointment that comes their way at the service of artistic ambition. In the medieval tale of a faithful knight who betrays his loyalty to his king and surrogate father by consummating his love for the king's wife, he found the perfect vehicle for giving mythic dimension to his own unruly predicament

But to note all this is to say nothing about what gives Tristan its enduring potency, and that, of course, is its miracle of a score. Having seen a half-dozen Tristan s over the years and listened to many more of them on recordings, I could probably, if I cared to, anticipate every twist and turn in Wagner's sinuous, heaving organism of sound. But such was Wagner's mastery of his vision that no matter how familiar the music is, it always seems a little strange as it moves according to its own emotional and intellectual logic. (Perhaps only Mozart was his equal at making the predictable seem unpredictable.)

In Tristan , Wagner achieved his finest tension between fragility and grandeur-musically, the opera seems literally to walk on eggshells. At the Met, the conductor, James Levine, addressed that delicate balance with a tenderness that bordered, at times, on the precious. His treatment of the opening prelude was attenuated to the point of ponderousness, and later, especially in Act 2's love duet, he seemed to be shaping the orchestra around the singers, at the expense of the inexorable undertow that is essential to the opera's tragic power

Much of this, I suspect, was a case of opening-night jitters, particularly in the Tristan. I heard two of Ben Heppner's performances in the part at the Seattle Opera, a couple of summers ago, and, in that less imposing setting, he seemed much more focused, more dramatically involved, than he was at the Met. His shining, Björling-like tenor was never less than beautifully produced (thank God for a Wagner tenor who never bleats), but there was too much middle and not enough extremes in his emotional range. During the murderously exposed monologues of Act 3, one was gratified by Mr. Heppner's finely shaped musical lines but robbed of any sense that here was a Tristan who was going out of his mind.

As in Seattle, the Isolde was Jane Eaglen, she of the stupendous size, power and stamina. Most of the time, she was a marvel in the dead-shot precision of her intonation, the gleaming strength of her top notes and the silvery, mezza voce shadings of her love duets. Like Birgit Nilsson, her great predecessor, she brings a sheer zest to this insanely taxing role that carries all before her. But she never touched the heart. It's a deficiency that has less to do, I think, with her unromantic figure and an absence of visible mobility in the eyes and face, than it does with certain shortcomings in her formidable vocal arsenal, such as a limited range of color and uninteresting middle and lower registers.

Oddly, this Tristan might have been retitled Brangäne und Marke , in light of the vividness with which these two secondary roles were performed. As Isolde's not-quite-dutiful enough handmaiden, the Swedish mezzo-soprano Katarina Dalayman made one of the strongest Met debuts in years, projecting anguish with an almost scary voluptuousness. Nothing can halt Tristan in its tracks, but the closest thing I've seen to a show-stopper at the Met in years was the arrival in Act 2 of René Pape's King Marke. The long, relentlessly wounded monologue he delivers upon his discovery of the illicit lovers can often come across as a scolding rant of self-pity. Mr. Pape's riveting intensity of gesture, his nuanced articulation of the text and the force of his huge, burnished tone jolted the opera out of a dreamscape and into the painful here-and-now.

Coming on the heels of Robert Wilson's frozen-Kabuki staging of Lohengrin , Dieter Dorn's austerely minimal production seemed, at first, like more of the same-a mostly bare stage enclosed in a tent of sailcloth, whose steeply raked sides "disappeared" at a far vanishing point on a metaphysical horizon line. There were some debatable touches, such as toy castle, armaments and knights that littered Tristan's homeland of Kareol-a too-cute reminder of how diminished childhood artifacts and memories become as one grows older.

But Mr. Dorn, unlike Mr. Wilson, is a storyteller, and through Max Keller's color-changing lighting, the trapezoidal confines of the set became an intimate no man's land that conjured up Wagner's obsession with the shame of day and the ecstasy of night, and reinforced the lovers' solipsism. This was a staging with an emphasis on the singing, not the singers, which was just as well, given the bulkiness of the two leads. During their great duet of consummation, Ms. Eaglen and Mr. Heppner dematerialized into silhouettes against a menacingly supernal blue sky, becoming negative space out of which the delirium of Wagner's music could pour forth undiminished.

Wagner, of course, pushed the idea of opera as a transformative experience-not just esthetically but spiritually, and even politically, farther than anyone else. In Tristan , which had its premiere in Munich in 1865, he set himself the headiest challenge of his career: how to plunge the audience into the paroxysms of an illicit love affair-one inspired by his own extramarital passion for a good friend's wife-between a couple out of misty Celtic mythology who lose their hearts (and ultimately their lives) to each other because of a mistakenly imbibed magical potion. And how to do so with characters whose violent mood swings, from ecstasy to despair, run for well over four hours, requiring the services of a soprano and tenor who have the stamina, and perhaps heft, of elephants.

That Wagner pulled it off is beyond dispute. The opera he wrote and composed, after five years of painstaking work, is the culmination of the Romantic movement's wrestling with questions of freedom, fate and duty. Tristan is also the path breaker, in its musical and psychological innovations, for a great deal of what the ensuing Symbolist and modernist movements produced-in music (from Richard Strauss to Alban Berg), literature (Friedrich Nietzsche to Thomas Mann) and art (Aubrey Beardsley to Anselm Kiefer). Any new production of the opera carries with it not only the immensity of the work's musical and physical demands, but an unholy load of intellectual and cultural baggage.

Successful Tristan s are rare indeed; a great one is every Wagnerite's fondest dream. I can't say that the Seattle Opera's new production is an unqualified success-though it is unquestionably a world-class opera event and a triumph for this impressive regional company and its enterprising general director, Speight Jenkins. But it is, on many counts, as good an account of the work as we are likely to see on these shores these days-perhaps until the Metropolitan Opera unveils its new Tristan in 1999. It was for a preview of that event, which will also feature the two very large white hopes of the impoverished ranks of Wagnerian high-dramatic sopranos and heldentenors -Jane Eaglen and Ben Heppner-that I recently trekked out to the overcaffeinated metropolis in the Pacific Northwest.

The first thing to be said about the Seattle production, which was directed by Francesca Zambello, is that it is fleet, sleek and acutely sensitive to the swirling fevers of Wagner's score. Ms. Zambello and her designers-Alison Chitty (scenery and costumes) and Mimi Jordan Sherin (lighting)-have transported the story's medieval events into a no man's period of the sort that is typical of today's stir-fried postmodernists: Tristan and his shipmates wear greatcoats out of one of Patrick O'Brian's Napoleonic sea yarns; Isolde and her faithful Brangäne are swathed in Pre-Raphaelite muumuus.

The sets combine techie minimalism with stripped-down sweetness: Picture, in Act III, Philip Johnson's Glass House plunked down in a Hallmark card dunescape. The highly active lighting segues very effectively from amber twilight (for passion) to pastel twilight (for yearning) to ashen twilight (for desolation), framed occasionally by Wilsonian bands of light that would not be inappropriate for a Busby Berkeley dream sequence. Except for several glimpses in Act I involving bare-chested galley slaves imported from Muscle Beach doing rowing calisthenics-beefcake is becoming a staple of Ms. Zambello's productions-this Tristan is, mercifully, free of kitsch.

Ms. Zambello's greatest strength as a director has always been her understanding that operatic performance requires an elevated naturalism that will allow the singers to move like recognizable human beings who are having the sort of bad day that would flatten Bill Clinton. (I'm afraid that, pathetic though our President and his Oval Office squeeze are by comparison, I couldn't help but think of Bill and Monica as Wagner's doomed lovers were ascending the heights of vocal orgasm.) In Jane Eaglen and Ben Heppner, Ms. Zambello was confronted with two singers whose ampleness of size, to put it kindly, scarcely conforms to traditional notions of chivalrous knights and damsels in distress. I was happy to note, though, that Mr. Heppner has shed more than a few pounds since I last saw him, lumbering gingerly through Robert Wilson's Lohengrin at the Met this past spring.

Ms. Zambello handled her charges beautifully, framing them in their love-and-death scenes in a Mies van der Rohe-esque cube, which evoked their isolation and entrapment without making them look like caged bears. At their most rapturous, they simply faced the audience, held hands and sang, leaving the more visible signs of agitation to their handsomely sung and acted stalwarts, Michelle DeYoung's Brangäne and Greer Grimsley's Kurwenal. (Peter Rose, as King Marke, was also moving and impressive.) Physical contact between Ms. Eaglen and Mr. Heppner was kept to a minimum, which made their final moment before heading off into legendary oblivion especially powerful. As Ms. Eaglen lowered her head onto the prostrate Mr.

Heppner, the two seemed to melt indistinguishably into each other. And in the evening's single most effective-and surprising-directorial stroke, this Tristan, whom we had presumed dead, raised a fallen arm and placed the hand over his heart: He, too, had been ravished by Isolde's "Liebestod."

But we go to hear Tristan , not to see it. For, more than is the case with any other opera, this one takes place in the music-in the orchestra's great soundscapes of nature and emotion, and, above all, in the voices of the title characters. Under the old-hand leadership of the Swiss conductor Armin Jordan, the Seattle Symphony players were terrific; incisive and transparent in the heaven-shaking climaxes, sensitive and expressive in the moments of quietude. Given the fact that this was Ms. Eaglen's first Isolde and Mr. Heppner's first Tristan, their performances were astonishing.

Until now, I have not shared in the general euphoria over Ms. Eaglen's prowess, which critics are likening to that of the supreme Wagner soprano in our time, Birgit Nilsson. The power not only to sail over but cut through the loudest, thickest orchestral textures is there-though Ms. Eaglen's lower register has notably less force than the middle and top ones, and when she tries to sing softly, the voice becomes perilously thin. And the British soprano's bel canto line is impressive: She doesn't hoot, she spins. But as yet, there isn't much variety of color in the voice, and although her understanding of the text is thoughtful and nuanced, she tends to drive the part, rather than puzzle out its most psychologically revealing moments. Still, drive she can-with an unflagging ease, and a zest, that promises an even more exhilarating Isolde in the years to come.

Mr. Heppner, for me, was the heart and soul of this Tristan . Using in several places the trimmed-down monologues that even the century's most celebrated heldentenor , Lauritz Melchior, was not too proud to adopt, he reveled in the sort of Italianate lyricism that Wagner wanted for his singers. Mr. Heppner lacks the visceral magnetism that his great predecessor and fellow Canadian, Jon Vickers, brought to Tristan, but he also lacks the older singer's tendency to overemote. There is a natural, reedy pathos in Mr. Heppner's voice-a yearning-that recalls the lost-in-the-mountains nobility of Jussi Björling. And there is something else that, on this occasion, I found especially compelling: In numerous small ways, vocally and physically, Mr. Heppner showed us the living man inside this insanely racked, metaphysically muddled hero out of musty lore. This is one heldentenor who is utterly without airs. It has nothing to do with nonchalance-Mr. Heppner sings with everything he has, beautifully-but he leaves you with the feeling that, when all is said and done, he could walk away from all this glorious nonsense to become happily lost in those mountains.