Gothic romance ‘Vanessa’ opens at Santa Fe Opera
Lush music accompanies tale full of secrets and lies
“Vanessa” shrouds the Santa Fe Opera in a Hitchcock-ian world of shadows and light. Samuel Barber’s Gothic tale opens on Saturday, July 30.
The staging casts a spell of secrets and lies. The title character covers the mirrors in black cloth to avoid her aging face; the clocks are stopped, as they have been since her lover abandoned her 20 years ago. Her mother, the Baroness, hasn’t spoken in 20 years. Then a handsome stranger appears, and another delusion unfurls.
Vanessa’s niece, Erika, falls in love with the stranger, Anatol. The delusional Vanessa falls for him too; convinced she is reliving her doomed affair.
Toronto-based soprano Erin Wall sings the title role.
“She’s a little nuts,” the singer acknowledged. “She’s been staying in her house for 20 years, and he never comes back. She doesn’t see what’s happening right in front of her face. We don’t know why he disappeared. We find out through his son that he was married.” He’s also dead. The younger Anatol isn’t above taking advantage of a wealthy but damaged woman.
Tenor Zach Borichevsky plays the young stranger.
“Everybody likes to describe him as a cad,” he said. “I just finished doing Pinkerton in ‘Madam Butterfly.’ They both justify it to themselves by saying they are honest.”
Pinkerton is the American naval officer who abandons the doomed geisha Butterfly for an American wife.
“Anatol never lies to anybody,” Borichevsky said. “Erika falls in love with him, and he does the noble thing by asking her to marry him because he deflowered her. She says no because she knows he’s not in love with her. His whole duet with Vanessa says love has a bitter core, so do not taste too deep.”
The music is lush and romantic, with dissonance highlighting the drama, Wall said.
To produce the film noir ambiance, Vanessa wears shoulder pads and form-fitting dresses. Anatol arrives in a fedora and overcoat.
“The colors are all light and gray,” Wall said. “The floor glows from underneath.”
Wall is playing Vanessa as desperate, but not crazy.
“In Vanessa’s eyes, when she looks at (Anatol) she sees his father. He says all the right things all the time. He’s lying by omission. She wants to keep being deluded that he’s the perfect man and that they’re going to live happily ever after.”
The internationally renowned Leonard Slatkin will conduct. Slatkin recorded the opera in 2004.
“This is exactly the kind of music he’s known for,” Wall said. “He really champions American music. I think we all used (the recording) as our bible.”
Premiered at the Metropolitan Opera in 1958, “Vanessa” won the Pulitzer Prize for music. The legendary soprano Kiri Te Kanawa sang the title role in three revivals, but since then it has been largely forgotten, with the exception of a 2007 New York City Opera staging.