Vanessa Programme Notes — Guido Martin-Brandis

(Programme notes written for a production of Vanessa, Brickhouse Theatre, 2016)

Vanessa

Samuel Barber's opera Vanessa has had a mixed life on the stage: it enjoyed a wild success at its prestigious premiere at the Metropolitan opera house in 1958, then was met with a more rocky reception the following summer at the Salzburg festival, and since then has had only the most ephemeral hold on the stages of the world's opera houses. This is a tuneful, opulently beautiful opera with a nuanced, well crafted libretto, so why has it not prospered? One reason is surely its year of composition - in 1957 the tonal, grand opera style was seen as hopelessly outdated outside of America, but on the other hand, for much of the conservative mainstream opera going crowd, its bittersweet lyricism still sounds too modern and dissonant. In more recent years, a number of productions have been mounted in America, as part of a broader trend which has seen the renaissance of Barber's music along with many other tonal 20th century composers neglected in the post war era.

The title role was composed with Maria Callas in mind, but when Barber played it through for her, the compositional idiom was too modern for her tastes, she wasn't comfortable singing in English, and she cannily noted that the mezzo role of Erika is perhaps the true protagonist of the opera, even if her music isn't as glamorous - hers is the bigger spiritual journey that we witness on stage, as Vanessa's drama is rooted in the events that precede the opera.

The character of Vanessa and the whole gothic situation of the opening has rightly been called camp by numerous commentators, starting with Susan Sontag in her brilliant and seminal essay "Notes on camp". The fading diva haunted by her past reminds us of Bette Davis' character Margo in All About Eve, or Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire (the latter of which Barber was offered as an opera project, but rejected on the grounds that it already contained too much music in the language). But the distance between every characters' words, intentions and actions, the exploration of identity and relations between the sexes, and the depth of unconscious that is present here, makes this a fascinating psychologically complex work, and rescues it from being a trashy verismic soap opera.

Anatol, the drama's romantic interest, is a fascinating creation. Much of what he says is antithetical to fairytale operatic romance, though is delivered in a style completely congruous with operatic convention; as such he is a charming and subtle deconstruction of the operatic tenor. Though he is the opera's principal source of confusion and disarray, "villain" would be far too strong an epithet for him. His credo could only be conceived of as villainous in the context of an opera, and specifically the expectations and stereotypes he inherits from being an operatic tenor. Upset arises because he can't take seriously the operatic demands of the women that surround him - he is at all times honest about his world view and needs, and though he is certainly interested in regaining his parents' lost fortune, he is open enough to intimate this in the very first scene. Just like the doctor, he wants to bring fun to these women's lives and let them see that life doesn't need to be taken as seriously as they take it. He is however fascinated by the opera's founding myth that has preoccupied Vanessa (and evidently his own father too) for 20 years - he very consciously shrouds himself in the mythic mantle of his father ("yes I believe I shall love you"), completing what his father couldn't do and therefore besting him. Not for nothing do the women read Oedipus in the first act.

Comic relief comes in the form of the Doctor, Vanessa's oldest friend. Like all the best clowns there is a tragic element in his life that is trying to be escaped from through humour. Vanessa's mother the Baroness has instated herself as the unimpeachable moral arbiter of the house, a role she plays with such commitment that it is to the detriment of her own life. Erika, Vanessa's orphaned niece and the Baroness' granddaughter, has grown up in this stifling atmosphere of isolation and closure; commitment to and rejection of this inheritance engender the growing pains of this passionate young woman.

In the score, the librettist, Gian Carlo Menotti, writes an intriguing if ambiguous preface: "This is the story of two women, Vanessa and Erika, caught in the central dilemma which faces every human being: whether to fight for one’s ideals to the point of shutting oneself off from reality, or compromise with what life has to offer, even lying to oneself for the mere sake of living. Like a sullen Greek chorus, a third woman (the old Grandmother) condemns by her very silence the refusal first of Vanessa, then of Erika, to accept the bitter truth that life offers no solution except its own inherent struggle. When Vanessa, in her final eagerness to embrace life, realizes this truth, it is perhaps too late."

Thematically then, the opera is linked with Strauss and Hofmannsthal's Ariadne auf Naxos, which, behind all the surface buffo/seria antics and dazzle, is subtly centred around an important existential question: how do we maintain our ideals in the face of life's flux, including our own mysterious, constant and ineluctable change? How much should we compromise with what life offers us, and how long should we stand firm and wait for our ideal to materialise?

Menotti's explanation of the opera also has an interesting bearing on the relationship between Barber and Menotti. The two men met aged 17 at the Curtis institute where they studied composition together under Rosario Scalero. They became the best of friends, then lovers, then partners, a relationship which lasted several decades. Soon after Barber's death in January 1981, Menotti said in an interview "there was this quest for an ideal love that never seems to have come into Sam's life. The kind of love he would like to have had - love forever, eternal love that never changes. So that's the theme of the opera, this eternal waiting." Vanessa marked the point where their relationship began to fray at the seams and the libretto, which Barber rightly considered the finest that Menotti ever wrote, is a sort of love letter to Sam and moving testament to their relationship. Across the five principal roles, the opera is drenched in analogues of their two personality types - southern versus northern, light versus serious, pragmatic versus idealistic, sentimental versus realist.

What then of the music of Vanessa? The first thing to note is that Barber uses Wagnerian leitmotifs, that is, certain characters and ideas are represented by musical motifs that can then be altered and recombined by the composer to suit the exigencies of the dramatic situation. It's often hard to register these things fully on a first listen, but Barber's themes are exceptionally well delineated and easy to recognise: the screaming high tension plunge that opens the piece represents the legacy of Vanessa's affair; a statically fluttering theme is heard every time the servants perform household chores, and so on. Where they become most telling in the opera is where a motif reappears in a dramatically changed form - the duet 'love has a bitter core' reappearing thundering in the bass when Vanessa confronts Anatol in Act III, or Erika's sighing "anxiety" theme reappearing in a much more philosophical iteration after the household leave for chapel. The other thing to mention is that the opera is rather traditional in its use of recitative, arioso, and "set piece" arias and ensembles, which links him firmly to the Italian tradition and takes him away from the Wagner/Strauss nexus. Some of his musical gestures, such as the melodramatic aforementioned "failed affair" motif, might just as well have been found in Tosca, and are shockingly crude in the context of the pellucid lyricism of the rest of his immaculately refined oeuvre. For this reason the opera stands apart from everything else he composed, and though the mantle of hot blooded late romantic grand opera composer is worn with superb style, one does feel sometimes the effort that it requires of the composer, whose natural mode is found in the flowing, intimate poetry of the song literature, and also in the effortlessly turned, vaulting architecture of his more abstract purely instrumental music.

The arias are without exception beautifully wrought lyric creations, different in feel from his songs, but imbued with the same sensitive feeling for text and all contain passages of breathtaking beauty. Occasionally though, in what was up to that time by far his largest orchestral canvas, we feel the structure creak a little in the joins; the whiff of routine creeps in in some of the recitative and especially the very short Act 3 duet between Anatol and Vanessa - his normally fresh well of harmony becomes a little stagnant, the passion feels by rote. But no matter, when there is so much that works so brilliantly. For me, the most haunting episodes are often found in the quieter moments - the glistening parlando passage that immediately follows the doctor's heartbreaking farewell aria is worthy of the highest praise, as are the searingly intimate scenes between Erika and her grandmother, the fevered, dreamlike moments for offstage chorus and orchestra, the luminous sonorities of the Act III intermezzo, among too many others to mention. The final quintet is often remarked upon as being a particularly touching and expertly crafted set piece; the arresting choric commentary that follows the formal quintet in which each character's future is predicted, is chilling and just as powerful.

Though Barber is often seen as an arch conservative, the influence of Stravinsky's neoclassicism, Schoenberg's and (especially) Berg's atonality and serialism, and even jazz, is obvious in his music if one ventures in his oeuvre outside the handful of popular favourites. These influences make their mark even in the ultra romantic Vanessa; we also get echoes of Janacek in the eerie post quintet chorus just mentioned, and Shostakovich's demented scherzos in the party music. Unlike most American composers of his era, his music is never academic, and his impish sense of humour in life and art often showed an understated subversiveness. For instance, this much hyped "American grand opera" starts in French, on a monotone, in a reading of a dinner menu of all things. It is set in a "Northern country" which is certainly somewhere in Europe, and there are quiet hints it might even be Russia - this during the Cold War and in the immediate wake of McCarthyism! This opera has been a rare joy to work on, and we sincerely hope that you will enjoy it as much as we have enjoyed putting this show together!