Los Angeles Opera’s 2004 “Vanessa”

Review by David Gregson

Some things come late in life. I have known bits and pieces of Samuel Barber’s Vanessa seemingly forever: the concluding quintet, "To leave, to break, to find, to keep" and to whatnot; Erika’s aria, "Must the winter come so soon?"; Vanessa’s "You may not wish to stay"; and assorted other bits and pieces. I even own an audiocassette of the entire 1958 original cast recording, although I’ve rarely listened to it — and I am now, thanks to the gift shop in the LA Opera’s lobby, the proud owner of the CD version of that very same performance, and I must say it sounds fabulous, with Dimitri Mitropoulos conducting the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and Chorus, soprano Eleanor Steber as the eponymous heroine, mezzo Rosalind Elias as Erika, tenor Nicolai Gedda as Anatol, basso Giorgio Tozzi as the Old Doctor, and mezzo Regina Resnik as the Old Baroness. What a cast! All of them singing in impeccably lucid English. If only live performances in English were ever so gloriously comprehensible.

But, as I was saying, some things come late in life — and, as far as Barber’s Vanessa is concerned, those two things for me are the following: my first experience of the opera by living performers on an actual stage, and the crushing realization that the opera is not the towering American masterpiece I had always believed it to be. Oh dear! Especially since I have been madly promoting (in print!) the upcoming San Diego Opera production of Vanessa scheduled for April. Not that I would for one moment discourage anyone from going to that — or to the current LA production for that matter. The work has many astonishing pleasures to accompany its sad disappointments. And the LA Vanessa marks the LA Opera debut, believe it or not, of Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, a widely beloved soprano whom one can safely call "legendary" if only because she sang at a famous royal wedding televised to a jillion people on planet earth.

What’s wrong with Vanessa? The libretto, for starters. Its author is Gian Carlo Menotti, a mutli-talented artist of considerable stature and a man of irresistible wit and charm. (I interviewed him once and keep the photograph of that memorable occasion on display in my home.) But in his work on Vanessa, Menotti crafted an overly schematic plot in which his leading characters switch places in a dramatic design of carefully calculated symmetry. Caught up in this infernal plot-machine of despair, the aging title heroine and her niece seem incapable of any introspection. Psycho-dynamically they are frozen, doomed to a sort of spiritual immobility, virtually frozen in the unnamed far-northern land they inhabit. A third character, the Old Baroness, is the worst of the lot. She, for the larger part of the opera, cannot even bring herself to speak to anyone. Her isolation is the most extreme — and, frankly, the most psychologically incomprehensible.

Charles Dickens’ Miss Haversham is, of course, the most infamous jilted bride in literary history. She is an unforgettable figure in Great Expectations, never removing her bridal gown and living in a room with her increasingly moldy wedding cake. Nobody who loves novels can ever discuss Miss Haversham without smiling; her case is comically extreme, stretching our credulity to the breaking point. Menotti’s Vanessa seems modeled on the absurd Miss Haversham, although a character in one of Isak Dinesen’s Seven Gothic Tales is the alleged source. Stood up by her fiancé 20 years before the action of the opera begins, Vanessa has shut herself and her servants away in her ice palace, never to receive visitors again. Her mother, the baroness, is there too, but not speaking to her; and her niece, Erika, manages the gloomy household when it would make much more sense for her to get out of there. In fact, we lose sympathy for Vanessa the moment we realize the extent of her selfishness; if she were to receive visitors, perhaps Erika could find the right man and have the life Vanessa never could. Yet, despite Vanessa’s proclamations of love for her niece, when a visitor does arrive, Vanessa never imagines anybody’s happiness but her own. This results in a demented blindness amounting to stupidity. The visitor, Anatol, who is in fact the son of Vanessa’s former lover, immediately beds Erika and gets her pregnant, but Vanessa never ever figures this out. Erika, at least, can see that Anatol is a louse and is probably there to marry Vanessa to get her cash (although both Barber and Menotti conspire to create an emotional ambiguity to Anatol’s role). But the schematics of the story dictate that Erika show no common sense about getting out of her situation. After Erika has aborted her child and Vanessa and Anatol leave together for Paris, Erika resigns herself to Vanessa’s fate, draping all the mirrors and waiting for — what? The return of Anatol? Possibly. Vanessa has willed the property to Erika. But Erika has insisted she does not love this callous man. So what are we to make of the end except that it’s cheaply theatrical. It’s difficult to feel sympathy for three women unwilling to do a damn thing to change their lives, two condemning themselves to voluntary solitude, and the third, the baroness, not speaking to anybody.