Open season

SANTA FE OPERA’S 62ND SEASON

Santa Fe Opera embarks on its 62nd season this week, reeling out three new productions and two revivals over the next nine weeks. Everybody will be talking about the New Mexico premiere of Doctor Atomic, an opera by John Adams (music) and Peter Sellars (libretto) that focuses on Los Alamos during the lead-up to the explosion of the first atomic bomb. Also of unusual interest is the company’s opening-night production of Candide, the first time it has ever offered a stage-work by American music titan Leonard Bernstein, who would have turned 100 on the last night of the season. In this issue, we look at Candide and we document Bernstein’s trip to New Mexico 70 years ago this summer. On the cover is a photo of Bernstein at Frieda Lawrence’s ranch in Taos, 1948, courtesy Library of Congress.

Santa Fe Opera embarks on its 62nd season this weekend, and for the next nine weeks it will offer a full schedule of activities that includes symposia, lectures, tours (of the opera campus and beyond), a film screening, youth programs — and at the center of it all, 37 performances of five operas. It looks as if the season should prove easy to enjoy, stressing familiar favorites but also including more recent repertoire that will be new to many attendees.

The season opens Friday, June 29, and closes on Aug. 25 with Leonard Bernstein’s Candide, an amusing entertainment that delivers a philosophical message in an entirely palatable way. This is the centennial of Bernstein’s birth; in fact, the last performance of Santa Fe Opera’s season falls on the very day he would have turned 100. Bernstein was a giant among American musicians — the first Americanborn conductor to gain an international mega-career; a composer who triumphed on Broadway, on the ballet stage, and in the concert hall; the first person to truly harness television as a medium for proselytizing about classical music. The organization that tends to his legacy has joined with his publishers to engineer a worldwide centennial salute that covers not just one concert season but two, since Aug. 25 sort of straddles the 2017-2018 and 2018-2019 seasons. Recordings are pouring out, books are hitting the shelves (we’ll discuss a few as the summer unrolls), and performances are scheduled at leading orchestras, opera houses, and recital halls around the world. When it comes to opera, as opposed to musical theater, Bernstein’s catalogue doesn’t offer many choices:

Trouble in Tahiti, a one-act domestic tragicomedy from 1951; Candide (1956, with many ensuing revisions), which his publisher calls a “comic operetta” but is not infrequently given by full-fledged opera companies; and A Quiet Place (1983-1984), an affecting but despondent sequel to Trouble in Tahiti that revisits that work’s dysfunctional family at a distance of three decades and incorporates the earlier score through flashbacks. Of the three, Candide was the most logical for Santa Fe Opera to produce, and this is certainly the right time, given the centennial and the surprising fact that the company has never before offered a work of Bernstein’s.

Then, too, the flavor of Candide seems appropriate to our fractious times. The operetta is based on the famous novella by Voltaire, a freethinking rabblerouser of the 18th-century Enlightenment whose liberal, anti-clerical polemics kept landing him in jail — where he would busy himself preparing his next attack on “the establishment.” His particular target in Candide was an idea promulgated by the slightly earlier German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, a brilliant thinker but one with whom Voltaire could not agree concerning the proposition that, since the world was created by a perfect God, it must reflect his perfection, and that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Earlier in his career, Voltaire would have eviscerated that idea through a philosophical essay; but at the age of sixty-five, he

took a different approach and wrote a madcap tale of a young man who encounters nothing but certifiable awfulness during his travels through a world that is clearly far from perfect. Voltaire advises us not to delude ourselves into pretending that bad things are really good, but rather to recognize them for what they are, respond to them as we will, and not forget to find fulfillment where we can.

When Bernstein and his original librettist, Lillian Hellman, wrote Candide, they felt it was relevant to the then-current outrages of McCarthyism. But, as Voltaire demonstrates, if it’s not one thing, it’s another. Candide was premiered in 1956 — by coincidence, the same year Santa Fe Opera was founded — and 62 years later we are faced with a different array of problems. Candide’s inherent cynicism may seem custom-made for our time, just as it seemed to Bernstein’s; and a good production can elevate even an overburdened soul. One eyes the cast list with eager anticipation; tenor Alek Shrader holds great potential as the wide-eyed hero (perhaps building on his winning portrayal of naïve Albert Herring eight seasons back), last summer’s Lucia di Lammermoor suggests that Brenda Rae may also make memories as his girlfriend Cunegonde, and chief conductor Harry Bicket possesses a light touch that could really bring Bernstein’s score alive.

Doctor Atomic could hardly be more different from Candide, but again it will tap into the resonance of current events, pondering the ethics of nuclear warfare.

The most hotly anticipated opera this season opens July 14: Doctor Atomic, the 2005 work by composer John Adams and librettist Peter Sellars. Its subject is the lead-up to the detonation of the first atomic bomb, a test carried out at New Mexico’s Trinity Site on July 16, 1945 — so almost exactly 73 years before this production opens. The action takes place in Los Alamos, distantly in view when the back of Santa Fe Opera’s stage is open, as it will certainly be, at least sometimes, in this staging. People fascinated with the history of the Manhattan Project (and there are many hereabouts) will be particularly excited to see famous figures of that incentive portrayed on stage, including Los Alamos Laboratory director J. Robert Oppenheimer and his wife, Kitty; Manhattan Project director Gen. Leslie Groves; physicists Edward Teller and Robert Wilson; and meteorologist Jack Hubbard. The piece could hardly be more different from Candide, but again it will tap into the resonance of current events, pondering the ethics of nuclear warfare. Sellars directed the premiere in 2005, and then a 2007 revival that incorporated significant changes in both words and music. He will direct this one, too, but it is to be an entirely new production, crafted for the specialness of the site. This should be a must-see for New Mexicans. It is “our opera.”

The other three operas are well known here. The operas of Richard Strauss were represented almost every year when John Crosby oversaw the company (which is to say, through 2000). In fact, Strauss went unperformed in only seven of Crosby’s seasons, and one year he gave two Strauss operas. The composer’s presence has receded slightly since then, but he’s still a house staple. This year we have his Ariadne

auf Naxos (opening July 28), which figured in the company’s very first season (1957) and returned in 1990 and 1997. Strauss and his librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal were fond of stories based on aesthetic conflicts. In this case, the piece focuses on the friction between “high art” and “low art” when a schedule mishap causes a serious opera and a comic stage piece to be performed simultaneously in a mansion in Vienna.

Puccini’s perennially popular Madama Butterfly also figured in the company’s first year. This will be its 11th season on the boards here, now in a revival of a strikingly beautiful production the company unveiled in 2010. (It opens on June 30.) The original director, Lee Blakeley, died suddenly last August at the age of forty-five; this revival will be a testament to his abundant talent. As with most revivals, this one will incorporate some alterations, in this case overseen by director Matthew Ozawa. Rounding out the season is another revival, Rossini’s delightful comic opera L’italiana in Algeri (opening July 21). It, too, was fashioned by a director now gone, Santa Fe’s own Edward Hastings; he set this lighthearted romp in the early 20th century and made the title character a feisty aviatrix in a personal-size aeroplane, navigating societal tensions between the cultures of Europe and North Africa. Since Santa Fe introduced it in 2002, it has been rented by 15 opera companies in Seattle, Toronto, Vancouver, Dallas, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, and Kansas City, among other cities, making it the most widely traveled of any Santa Fe Opera production. This year, the staging is entrusted to Shawna Lucey.

This will be the final summer of Charles MacKay’s decade-long tenure as general director. There are countless reasons to applaud his achievements beyond the many successful productions, including several world premieres, that have taken place during his time. He leaves the company in what appears to be robust financial health, and he has transformed the opera house itself through major renovations that greatly enhance the company’s technical possibilities and make the opera-going experience ever more pleasant for the audience. At the end of this summer, he will hand the reins to a troika consisting of Robert Meya as general director (ascending from his position as the company’s director of external affairs), Alexander Neef as artistic director (who will continue in his position as general director of the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto), and Harry Bicket, elevated to the position of music director (he continues as artistic director of the English Concert). It is a new management concept for Santa Fe Opera, and the three will have to balance their responsibilities in a way that allows sufficient elbow room for each while serving the greater good of the company.

Major arts organizations always have challenges to deal with. For Santa Fe Opera, the most worrisome at this moment would seem to be the fact that Tesuque Pueblo is developing a casino and hotel on its border with the Opera. The project is likely to generate a good deal of light and noise, both of which would likely impinge on the dark and relatively quiet environment on which the Opera depends. This summer, many audience members will be peering northward to see what the future may look like.