If things were getting unbearably nasty onstage, they were
also heading in that direction offstage. We were in the second scene of Lucia di Lammermoor , which tells of a
Scottish damsel driven mad by a feud between her brother and her lover, when
the wind began howling and the rain began blowing into the Santa Fe Opera
House, whose sides are open to the surrounding sierras. Plastic head coverings
were put on; jackets were pulled tighter; and yet nobody stirred to leave. A
riveting young German soprano named Alexandra von der Weth was making her
American debut in the title role, and as she sang to her maid about
premonitions of doom, the typically volatile weather conditions on an August
night in the mountains of northern New Mexico
and Donizetti’s relentlessly soaring and crashing music seemed to spur each other
on. In the end, of course, it was no contest. The wind and the rain came and
went and came again. But nobody gave it a thought. All around me were cold,
damp people oblivious to everything except the playing out of Lucia’s
forebodings. Once again an opera, performed to the hilt, had rid the universe
of everything but itself.
This has been an exceptional summer for opera in the
elements. In Cooperstown, N.Y., on the shores of Lake Otsego, the Glimmerglass
Festival has had its most artistically satisfying season in years, producing four operas of widely different periods and styles
with invigorating panache: Chabrier’s 19th-century French farce, L’Étoile ; Mozart’s Enlightenment
masterpiece, Le Nozze di Figaro ;
Britten’s World War II reworking of classic tragedy, The Rape of Lucretia ; and Handel’s comic Baroque extravaganza, Agrippina . For me, the high
point was Britten’s first mature, seldom-performed
opera, a musically patchy but powerful work that revisits an ancient tale of
macho violence from the perspective of a war-battered couple in mid-century England.
Christopher Alden’s production neatly merged past and
present with a set divided between bleak Notting Hill domesticity and stark,
golden-lit Roman pomp, and a staging that allowed the strong principal players-Michelle
De Young in the title role; Nathan Gunn as her predatory abuser, Tarquinius;
and William Burden and Christine Goerke as the modern-day Chorus-to show
themselves as standard-bearers for the next generation of keenly committed
American opera stars. Afterward, the work’s descent into Christian moralizing
provoked considerable heat between those who found it offensive (why are so
many members of the American culturati put off by references to God?) and those
(myself among them) who replied, “Why can’t we let Britten, who was a Christian
conscientious objector of unimpeachable conviction, be Britten?” In any case,
we had all been struck once again by the lightning bolt of an opera that would
not let us go untouched into the night.
A couple of weeks later, I found myself in Santa Fe, N.M.,
where there is an older-and far more heavily financed-adherence to the
seductions of summer opera. The Santa Fe Opera, which has been instrumental in
this once-sleepy hamlet’s well-managed evolution into a mecca for sophisticated
tourists, getaway homeowners and art lovers, has entered a new phase in its
distinguished history. Having rebuilt the auditorium’s seating area a few years
ago such that there is now a billowing canopy over the heads of everyone in
attendance, the company has acquired a new general director, Richard Gaddes,
who replaced his old boss, S.F.O. founder John Crosby.
For more than 40 years, Mr. Crosby, who recently turned 75,
had run the summer festival pretty much according to his own highly cultivated
tastes-an opera by Richard Strauss, his favorite composer, was obligatory-and
the loss of control has not been easy for him. During lunch one day at the
company’s 50-acre complex a few miles out of town, I saw him sitting by himself
on the terrace outside the cafeteria, staring morosely into space and looking
like Napoleon on Elba. It was a sad sight, especially
since he has every reason to be gratified by the triumphs of his chosen
successor’s first season.
I saw four of this summer’s five productions-missing only Mitridate , one of Mozart’s earliest
forays into opera seria -and three of
the four were exemplary stagings of well-established masterworks. (Despite
wonderfully assured conducting by John Crosby himself, the Strauss offering, Die Ägyptische Helena [ The Egyptian Helen ], was understaged and
badly cast, with a vocally and physically unalluring Helen in the soprano
Christine Brewer and an unmusical, bellowing Menelas in John Horton Murray.)
The summer’s great crowd-pleasers have been Thor Steingraber’s
uncluttered direction of Lucia and
Jonathan Miller’s robust staging of Falstaff .
The former, vigorously conducted by Richard Buckley, was memorable for the
striking Ms. von der Weth, who has some of Joan Sutherland’s chalky timbre in
her wildly uneven soprano, and the sterling Edgardo of Frank Lopardo, a veteran
tenor whose good looks, ringing tone and solid-if somewhat aggressive-command
of the bel canto style has, mysteriously, not translated into major stardom. Falstaff was distinguished chiefly by
the excellence in the title role of Andrew
Shore, an English baritone of
tremendous stage presence, who turned the old rogue into the wiliest sweetheart
imaginable, and the conducting of Alan Gilbert. Verdi’s final masterpiece has a
score to challenge even the most experienced opera conductor-it must project a
personality of its own and yet be all of a piece with the vocal ensemble-but
Mr. Gilbert, who has had relatively little experience in the trade, kept
everything beautifully and incisively in play. The son of parents who are both
violinists in the New York Philharmonic, he is a young American maestro to
watch.
Of the half-dozen or so Wozzecks
that I have seen over the years, none has surpassed the Santa
Fe production, which was directed by an Englishman,
Daniel Slater, who was making his American debut, and conducted by Vladimir
Jurowski, a young Russian from St. Petersburg
who has been named music director of the Glyndebourne Festival. Despite its
reputation for “difficult” atonal music, Berg’s adaptation of the brutally
stark play by Georg Büchner, about a hapless soldier who murders his faithless
common-law wife Marie, has proven to be a sure-fire stage vehicle since its
tumultuous premiere in 1925. Wozzeck is
opera in its most undiluted form: utterly direct in its emotional rawness,
unambiguous in its depiction of good and evil, and as immediately imprinting on
the ear and mind as a Goya cartoon.
This was a Wozzeck in
which everything worked. The production’s visual inspiration seemed to be the
cruelly scarred, deep-perspective canvases of Anselm Kiefer: a light-shafted
barracks that transfigured itself into the settings of Wozzeck’s downward
spiral-the doctor’s experimental laboratory, Marie’s dismal flat, the forest
pond where the fatal stabbing takes place. The faultless cast was led by the
Swedish baritone Hakan Hagegard, whose Wozzeck was a
deeply disoriented Everyman with an untouchable core of nobility, and Anne
Schwanewilms, a German soprano with the sexuality and searing vocal colors
ofayoungHildegard Behrens, who made a sensational American debut as Marie. Mr.
Jurowski’s taut, surely paced conducting gave the kaleidoscopic density of
Berg’s score a lunar transparency: If this music hurt, as it must, there was
always the sense that it was happening in a dancing light. Most memorable of
all were the details of Mr. Slater’s inventive stage directions: When Marie
read the Bible to her illegitimate little son (Austin Allen),
the boy hid himself under the bed. It was as vivid a depiction of an innocent’s
awareness of how good entwines with evil as I have ever seen.
