Lyric Opera, which had never performed any Berlioz stage work in the five and a half decades of its existence, chose to leap into Berlioz by creating an ambitious new production.  That production was the conception of English stage director Stephen Langridge, the talented son of the famous Britten tenor Peter Langridge (who died at age 70 during the seven performance run of son Stephen’s work in Chicago).

Stephen Langridge assembled a team, some of whom, like him, had not worked in the United States previously. The team new to Chicago consisted of the Cypriot-born British set and costume designer George Souglides and the German lighting designer Wolfgang Goebbel. Among the team’s veterans with prior Lyric Opera experience were Projection Designer John Boesche, Choreographer Philippe Giraudeau and Ballet Mistress August Tye.

Berlioz created a musical masterpiece that is so unconventional that to describe it, he created a unique category that he called a legende dramatique. (To the best of my knowledge, the only other artist to use that term was Maurice Pottecher, who competed for France in the Arts Competition at the 1912 Stockholm Olympic games. Whatever his talents at creating a legende dramatique, Pottecher, like the more famous Italian competitor, Gabriele d’Annunzio, failed to win the 1912 Gold Medal, and the sport eventually disappeared from the Olympic games.)

Although Berlioz clearly wished to mount his legende dramatique as an opera, it presented production problems from its earliest days, that defied even his expansive imagination as to how it could be staged. Yet, its music was so irresistible that performances defaulted to oratorio format, with its soloists and chorus statically singing with a symphony orchestra. No matter how suboptimal, experiencing “Damnation” performed as an oratorio was preferable to it remaining an unperformed opera.

(”Damnation” gets little attention as an influence on the development of the standard repertory in opera. But it was Berlioz (who with the assistance of writer Almire Gandonniere) who selected and strung together the episodes that form “Damnation’s” plot (and would gives some hints to librettist Jules Barbier and composer Charles Gounod to the story line that could be mined from Goethe’s sprawling work. Barbier and Gounod would find elements both within its dramatic and melodic structure to create their own revolution in French opera. There is insufficient appreciation for just how different Gounod’s “Faust” was from the operatic conventions of its time.)

Even so, the relationship (while on Earth) between the title character and Mephistopheles in the Berlioz version differs from their equivalents in the Gounod version. Berlioz’ Faust is a rational thinker who is disillusioned about his intellectual work. The realities of war are an affront to him. At first merely a voyeur to earth’s sensual life, he comes under the spell of Satan, who introduces him to the vision of Marguerite and simultaneously the vision of Faust to Marguerite.

Desirous of spending time alone with Faust, Marguerite inadvertently overdoses her mother with sleeping bills, and she is arrested for murder. Satan gives Faust the option to save Marguerite from execution in exchange for his soul.  Faust agrees to this bargain and, signing away his soul in blood, is taken by Mephistopheles to Hell.

Obviously, Faust’s string of experiences had meaning to Berlioz, but what those experiences mean was to an extent lost in the translation of Goethe’s unorthodox literary creation to Berlioz’ unorthodox musical ideas. Berlioz, who is a closely identified with the Romantic movement as Lord Byron and Berlioz’ friend, painter Eugene Delacroix, was first attracted to Goethe in the 1820s,  But nearly two centuries have passed since then and the Europe to which Goethe’s writings relate is no longer recognizable.

Thus, Langridge the production designer created a backstory, with a more contemporary relevance, to explain Faust’s intellectual quest and disillusionment. His Faust is a mathematician, whose mathematical speculations are aided by modern computer technology.

Mathematics is a discipline that is constructed by humans, but consists of abstractions that exist independently of human social interactions and concerns.  Yet every mathematician not only works in that world of abstractions but, as a human, also exists in a particular space at a particular time. Where to place Faust in time and space is the choice of production designer Langridge.

There are three geographic reference points in “Damnation”, one specific – a particular tavern that Goethe frequented as a medical student at Leipzig University – and two more general  – the plains of Hungary and the banks of the Elbe River.

Langridge uses these geographic reference points to invent a quite specific time and place to fix our Faust – at a the bulky monitor of a desktop personal computer in East Germany, prior to the Fall of the Berlin Wall.

Modern stage directors, particularly those of British heritage, seem fascinated by the five-decade period in the 20th century, when the Soviet bloc of police states held much of the population of the Eurasian continent in its thrall.

Time-shifting operas from previous centuries to 20th century “Iron Curtain” countries – real or imagined – often seems contrived, as one may discern from my recent reviews of productions of Wagner’s “Lohengrin” located in an imaginary Soviet Bloc Brabant (see: Summers Leads Sumptiously Sung “Lohengrin”: Houston Grand Opera, November 13, 2009) or Handel’s “Tamerlano” located in a Soviet Bloc Samarkand (see: Domingo’s Towering “Tamerlano” Bajazet: Los Angeles Opera – November 22, 2009).

But for “Damnation”, not only does the time-shift to a police state work, but, as will be argued below, it connects many of the dots in a libretto whose elements many find difficult to rationalize.

Notes on the Performance

Sir Andrew Davis leads the Lyric Opera Orchestra in the beautiful first passages of “Damnation”. Faust appears is a small rectangular room that is several feet above the stage floor. The room is enclosed by the stage curtains so that the image we see is like a framed picture, or the screen of a television set. Here we see the first of John Boesche’s projections, that flash first mathematical formulas, then streams of light. Paul Groves sings Berlioz’ Faust in the classical French style, including the use of head tones. [For my review of another Paul Groves performance in a French opera, see: Christine Brewer, Paul Groves Lead Elegantly Sung “Alceste”: Santa Fe – August 1, 2009.]

[Below: the mathematician Faust (Paul Groves) using his PC to expand the horizons of  his profession; edited image, based on a Robert Kusel photograph, courtesy of the Lyric Opera.]

After Faust contemplates nature in his monologue Le vieil hiver, Faust’s computer cubicle is lowered to the stage floor where the chorus, spreading red and white checkered tablecloths for their picnic lunches, represents the townfolk.

The dancers have several distinct roles as non-singing actors. The men dancers are soldiers in their camouflage fatigues, the women are in cheerleader outfits. Occasionally, cheerleaders will cross the stage pushing baby buggies. Later in the performance we understand that the townsfolk engaged in the bucolic picnic, the soldiers and cheerleaders are all agents of infernal forces.

I had previously discussed the inspired work of the choreographers Giraudeau and Tye at the San Francisco Opera (See: Night at the Museum: “Iphigenie en Tauride” Springs to Life in S. F. – June 17, 2007), a production, in which Susan Graham and Paul Groves starred, that was later seen at Lyric Opera. But production designer Robert Carsen’s concept for staging Gluck’s “Iphigenie” emphasized movements en masse of the dancers onstage, while the chorus sang seated in the orchestra pit behind the orchestra’s musicians.

By contrast, Langridge’s concept integrates Giraudeau’s dance team and the Lyric Opera chorus onstage in ways that I found to be spectacular (and, yes, fantastic in the adjective’s original sense).

It is this picnic scene, and the immediately following scenes of the advancing Hungarian army and church service that we experience the true genius of Langridge’s production. Langridge has devised a way to connect these seemingly disparate scenes (whose sequence and rapidity baffled would-be production designers for a century and a half). He integrates the large Lyric Opera chorus under Donald Nally with the work of 20 solo dancers, choreographed by Giraudeau and Tye. (Chorus and dancers were further augmented by the children of the Anima-Young Singers of Greater Chicago, and by actors and supernumeraries.)

He uses central themes to integrate those elements. The townspeople act as a mob, the soldiers and police perform their official duties, the soldiers’ wives and lovers bear children and participate in memorial ceremonies for their fallen spouses. Yet, all these police state citizens double as demons from hell engaged in securing the one soul whose intellectual pursuits had until then allowed him to be impervious to what was happening in the society around him – that of the mathematician Faust.

Those themes fit any police state (and some would extend the metaphor to whichever democracy with whose domestic or foreign policies they might differ at a point in time). But Langridge has chosen the DDR, the former East German socialist republic, as the symbol of the police state. It is one whose former flag is deliciously theatrical and it is one that has conveniently disappeared from Earth (perhaps resurrected in Mephistopheles’ Hell).

[Below: the flag of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR); resized image of a Jaume Olle design.]

Although I enjoyed the Giraudeau-Tye choreography for “Iphigenie”, I found their work with “Damnation” to be particularly ingenious. Most of the male dancers attend the picnic in Army camouflage fatigues. Their “girls back home” appear in the cheerleader/”song girl” outfits associated with American high schools. Faust, his computer cubicle having descended into the picnic grounds, sits on a park bench where one of the town’s young men is making out with his special song girl.

Faust exclaims that the sons of the Danube are preparing for combat (Ah! les fils du Danube aux combats se preparent!) Suddenly, soldiers in camouflage grab the lover boy. His hair is shaved into a military buzz cut, and he is stripped to his tidy whites, dressed in his own camouflage fatigue uniform, then joins the other soldiers into the dance routines that represent training for military ground maneuvers.

Thus the picnic is transformed into the Rakoczy March scene (a Berlioz invention, not present in Goethe’s work) with the symbols of the militaristic DDR dominating the scene. The song girls lead cheers for the soldiers and help them don facial paint to complete their camouflage for battle. The projections utilize the electronic gun site targeting that is essential to computer-assisted modern warfare.

[Below: the soldiers who serve both the police state and the legions of Hell; edited image, based on a Robert Kusel photograph, courtesy of the Lyric Opera.]

Then seven coffins, each draped with the DDR flag, are brought on stage by the soldiers in their omnipresent fatigues. Widowed (and pregnant) song girls receive the flags of their fallen soldier spouses in ceremonies that observe the precision of solemn military funerals, with their choreographed “about faces” and other rituals of soldiers honoring their dead.

We are now in the church scene where a monkish figure is in evidence among the congregation singing its hosannas. He stands near a tall pole in center stage. We come to be aware that the monk is Mephistopheles (John Relyea), and, in time he discards his robe, revealing a shimmering blue-violet coat like that of a Las Vegas lounge singer. He stands behind Faust, his hands tracing the shape of Faust’s head, as if staking his claim to Faust’s soul. He enters into a conditional agreement with Faust to show him the worldly delights his life of scholarship has denied him, without any obligation on Faust’s part. Trust the Devil that there are no strings attached!

Mephisto has a succession of arias that includes some of the most interesting (and often hauntingly beautiful) of French vocal music. Bass-baritone John Relyea, who is increasingly associated with the diabolical roles, was superb as Mephistopheles, with a beautiful sound throughout the range of the role.

[Below: Mephistopheles (John Relyea) determines to earn the soul of Faust (Paul Groves); edited image, based on a Dan Rest photograph, courtesy of the Lyric Opera.]

Two of the coffins have been opened to reveal two voluptuous maidens in rat costumes. The scene transforms to Auerbach’s tavern in Leipzig, where a Tim Burtonish Brander (Christian Van Horn) is host, who sings a rousing “Song of the Rat”.

[Below: Christian Van Horn as Brander, host of a popular Leipzig night spot; edited image, based on a Dan Rest photograph, courtesy of the Lyric Opera.]

Once the University students begin their revels one of the rat ladies begins a pole dance on the very pole that the monk Mephistopheles stood near in the church scene.

[Below: a pole-dancing rat enlivens the entertainment at Auerbach's Keller in Leipzig; edited image, based on a photograph, from stephenlangridge.com.]

As the University students begin the “Requiescat in pace” the rat ladies return to their coffins. Mephistopheles, of course aware that Faust finds no happiness in the bar scene and pines for a long term relationship, has offered him the vision of Marguerite, who is first seen briefly pushing her mother in a wheelchair. As Relyea’s satan sings the magical Voici des roses, Faust’s dreams of Marguerite (Susan Graham) become more vivid.

[Below: Marguerite (Susan Graham) sits in her apartment; edited image, based on a Dan Rest photograph, courtesy of the Lyric Opera.]

In another of this production’s truly inspired elements, the characters that represent the Gnomes and Sylphs that sing that most magically beautiful of Berlioz choruses Dors! heureux Faust (Sleep, happy Faust!), repeat the symbology that will continue throughout the production. We become aware that the townspeople, the soldiers in camouflage, the song-girls, and the students at Auerbach’s tavern are as much part of the forces of evil as Brander’s diabolical coterie, the rat girls and the chorus of demons. All these recurring images represent for us the wide-ranging imaginations of Berlioz and Langridge.

But, as the second part of the evening commences after the intermission, the dancers and chorus have another assignment – as Mephistopheles’ agents to bring about Faust’s seduction and disgrace of Marguerite. A stage above the stage is divided into three parts. Two are the adjoining rooms of Marguerite (in the center) and her mother (to the audience’s right). On the other side is a balcony terrace that Marguerite uses for fresh air and for her trysts with the Fausts, both real and in her fantasies.

As we drift into the entangled dream worlds of Faust and Marguerite, pairs of dancers portray Faust and Marguerite in increasingly complex interactions, at times with Groves and Graham acting as themselves, at other times, when they are sleeping, with their avatars acting for them in their dreams.

Marguerite brings a cup of tea to her mother, who sits in her room watching television. Soon the dream images make us aware that the tea contains the contents of a prescription drug bottle (the “sleeping potion” of Goethe’s play) and Marguerite’s avatars continue to bring her mother more cups. Satan is at work, with Relyea’s Mephistopheles passing through the wall between the apartments, at one point watching TV with Marguerite’s mother.

[Below: Marguerite (Susan Graham) listens for her mother, while Mephistopheles (John Relyea) lurks in her mother's room; edited image, based on a Robert Kusel photograph, courtesy of the Lyric Opera.]

Although Graham appears in the first half as the mute vision, she is a dominant presence in the second half of the evening, beginning with the enchanting recitative Que l’Air est Etouffaint and the first of her two great arias, Autrefois un Roi de Thule. Of her performance, the highest tribute possible is that it was consistent with her reputation as an incomparable artist. She met my high expectations of her. [For my review of another Susan Graham performance, see: Graham, Swenson, Prina Luminous in S. F.’s Stellar “Ariodante” – June 15, 2008.]

Graham’s Marguerite is joined on her balcony by Groves’ Faust. Her ecstasy at being with her dream lover in person, causes her to dose her mother with increasing amounts of the sleeping pill-laced tea.

From this point in the opera, Mephistopheles takes charge. In a grand coup de theatre, impressively singing what is probably the most famous aria from the opera, Devant la maison, he enlists Wills o’ the Wisp and other infernal forces (of course the now familiar Langridge images)  to confuse and destroy Marguerite. Marguerite’s vigilant neighbors, suspicious of the goings on, crowd into her mother’s apartment to determine if there is foul play.

[Below:  at right, a group of neighbors enter Marguerite's mother room to check on her, in the center Mephistopheles communicates with townspeople milling below from Marguerite's bedroom, and, at left, Faust and Marguerite are together on her balcony; edited image, based on a Robert Kusel photograph, courtesy of the Lyric Opera.]

Finally, in a chilling succession of scenes, Graham’s Marguerite sings her second aria, L’amour l’ardente flamme. The neighbors have reported a crime to their local police, who now have crime scene investigators determining the cause of the mother’s death. A police matron stands ready to arrest Marguerite, and does so as soon as the CSI team has confirmed that criminal evidence implicates her.

Marguerite has been convicted of murder and is to be executed. Mephistopheles, who has promised Faust that he can determine his own fate, gives Faust the choice to save Marguerite in exchange for agreeing to serve him in Hell. Faust signs the document in his own blood (Mephistopheles having the instrument for a blood draw handy, as if it were a ballpoint pen). Then the terrifying Ride to the Abyss takes place, in which Faust’s eternal fate is sealed.

Personal observations

There are many elements to praise in this production. First, the trio of principals are deservedly recognized as performers of the first rank in each of these roles, and the chorus and orchestra performed excellently. Langridge’s ideas consistently made sense and brought a unifying theme to a work of genius so sophisticated that successful realizations of it have eluded many who have tried to mount it.

I, myself, was so impressed by the 20 solo dancers that I believe each of the – Kurt Adametz, Victor Alexander, Leah Barsky, Andrea Beasom, Melissa Bloch, Karen Castleman, Paul Christiano, Kari Gregg, Veronica Guadalupe, Jessie Gutierrez, Jarrett Kelly, Hogan McLauglin, Dmitri Peskov, Todd Rhoades, John Ross, Yael Levitin Saban, James Monroe Stevko, J. P. Tenuta, Nefertiti Thomas and Tiffany Vann – should be separately identified in this review.

In my judgment, the Langridge production has advanced the cause of  presenting “Damnation of Faust” as an opera. The integration of music and dance, the classical ideal of the great 18th century composer Gluck, is achieved, in a reading of Berlioz’ libretto and score that has relevance to our century.

Its revival may be limited to opera companies with the stage equipment to handle complex sets that appear to be suspended in air and to assemble a large cast of dancers and chorus to support the four principals. But for a company with the resources to mount it, this is a production that I would not hesitate to recommend for revival in Chicago and for presentation elsewhere in future seasons.

This is partly because the philanthropists’ contributions included some significant percentage from an unsustainable economic expansion, and partly because wider societal needs are cutting into the philanthropic revenue base on which the arts are dependent. This opinion is not my own, but appears to be a consensus among opera company administrations that I have interviewed in several parts of the United States.

*****

[Below: Tosca (Adrienne Pieczonka) seeks to comfort the tortured Mario Cavaradossi (Carlo Ventre) as Spoletta (Joel Sorensen) looks on; edited image, based on a Cory Weaver photograph, courtesy of the San Francisco Opera.]

[For my performance review, see: House of Puccini: Striking San Francisco Opera “Tosca” with Pieczonka, Ataneli and Ventre – June 14, 2009.]

*****

Nor do I believe that the opera companies in some European countries that are used to generous governmental subsidies  are necessarily immune from the consequences of economic forces impacting their social systems. However, to paraphrase San Francisco Opera’s David Gockley, American opera company general directors would probably prefer to be dealing with the issue of large, but declining governmental subsidies, rather than the American situation of having (if at all) only small, though, of course, very welcome, government support (while competing for the “name” singers and other artists in the international marketplace for their services).

Thus, around the world, but particularly in the United States, I believe that the resources at the disposal of producers of grand opera will be much more constrained for the indefinite future than has been the case in the recent past. If, indeed, my supposition is correct, it is a worthwhile to discuss where these constraints may be most in evidence.

*****

[Below: although engaged to another, Gerald (Bryan Griffin) falls in love with Lakme (Leah Partridge); edited image, based on a Deborah Gray Mitchell photograph, courtesy of the Florida Grand Opera.]

[For my performance reviews, see: Leah Partridge’s Splendid “Lakme” – Florida Grand Opera, Miami: February 27, 2009 and  Evelyn Pollock, Chad A. Johnson in Revelatory Florida Grand Opera “Lakme” – Miami, February 28, 2009.]

*****

The Subscriber Pushback

There is a consequence of the decline in philanthropy, and of the absence of generous governmental subsidies. Every opera company’s subscribers have become ever more important. It is a remarkable group in every city. I doubt if any company can be said to have taken their subscribers for granted, but as resources decline or fail to increase, what this group thinks and does is (or unquestionably should be) an increasingly important concern to opera managements.

I think many opera company general directors would accept a church analogy as not inappropriate. (The reader may substitute whatever religious entity is preferred.) The subscribers are the core congregation, as opposed to those who come to church only for the “high” religious holidays (their metaphorical equivalent are those who will only buy the “hot ticket” to see a world famous superstar in a popular opera) or who visit the church from another area.

You, as the church leader, may want to lead your congregation into new directions, and expose them to some different ideas about how to do things. Because there is almost always a degree of trust in any church’s leadership in the early days, you can expect the core congregation to support you, for a while at least. But you will know when the congregation is beginning to become unhappy, and  the unhappier they get, the more uncomfortable will be life for you as the church leader.

If you no longer can depend on the congregation’s support, it doesn’t help much if you get accolades from all over the world at how brilliant you are or how “in the right” you are. If your congregation is split, or, even worse, is pretty well in agreement that what you are doing is wrong, it’s time to change course. You leave, or you take significant and maybe painful steps to reconcile your ways of doing things with the preferences of the core congregation.

As instructive as this metaphor may be, there is one part of it that doesn’t work so well. In a church, the leader may be preparing for the weekly service on a week by week basis, so that directions can be changed very quickly. Conversely, an opera company may make decisions several years ahead of time and find itself trapped in commitments that prove to be unpopular with the subscribers, or far more costly than expected, or both.

It is probable that in such a situation, one of two things will happen. The director whose artistic choices ultimately proved to be unpopular will have to leave, or signal that the future will be much different from the past, and the company will find itself concentrating its energies for several seasons on producing operas that they are certain the subscribers will wish to see.

[Below: the Rhine Maidens plead with Siegfried to return the Ring in Seattle's "Goetterdaemmerung"; edited image, based on a Rozarii Lynch photograph, courtesy of the Seattle Opera.]

[For my performance review, see: Astonishing End to Seattle Opera’s “Goetterdaemmerung” – August 14, 2009.]

(The company, of course, will be grateful if the critics are happy, and, as well, the standees, and the people who help buy the tickets that sell out the house when there is a superstar. But you cannot survive as an opera company, absent a giant, predictable subsidy from somewhere, on the good will of critics, standees and a superstar’s affluent fans. They alone don’t generate enough of a revenue base.)

Possibly the most obvious area where “subscriber pushbacks” have made the lives of opera managements very, very uncomfortable, has been the mounting of operatic productions that make no sense to the opera’s subscribers, or, even worse, offend them. One can lecture subscribers on why they should not regard opera as a “trophy art for the middle class”, and that a company should not shy from enlisting production designers that set out to offend that “middle class” and make fun of the traditional ways of presenting the operas they like.

But unless most of the company’s revenues are derived from sources other than subscribers (who in the United States are both the principal ticket buyers and the philanthropists), the operatic management that feels that tradition-shredding “shock and awe” is the proper way to produce opera should be certain that their subscribers are unanimously with them.

*****

[Below: Tamerlano (Placido Domingo) consoles his daughter Asteria (Sarah Coburn); edited image, based on a Robert Millard phtograph, courtesy of the Los Angeles Opera.]

[For my performance review, see: Domingo’s Towering “Tamerlano” Bajazet: Los Angeles Opera – November 22, 2009.]

*****

Ticket Price Inflation

When, in the 1960s, a year before beginning college, I bought my first ticket for an orchestra seat at the San Francisco Opera, it was only $10 to see an opera starring Renata Tebaldi and Tito Gobbi. (Tebaldi didn’t show, but the experience convinced me that the San Francisco War Memorial Opera House “orchestra section” is a great place to watch opera.) My subscription seats have been there ever since. No one will be surprised that the tickets are priced quite a bit higher now.

I am unaware of any company anywhere that has been able to hold cost increases for subscriptions in line with the per capita income growth for their community over any substantial period of time. One could object that it is the opera’s cost increases that should determine the increase in ticket prices rather than the increase in the community’s per capita income, but, it seems to me that ultimately economic forces will prevail. Increases in opera production costs cannot outstrip increases in a community’s wealth indefinitely.

Any long term opera company subscriber anywhere has seen ticket prices soar, even as that subscriber’s opera company has seen the percentage of revenues raised from ticket sales decrease over time. Although some subscribers have substantial personal wealth, it is likely more typical that most opera season subscribers, like persons who hold season tickets to, say, the home games of a National Football League team, must devote an ever greater portion of their income each year to be able to hold onto a prized possession.

Therefore, most opera managements, certainly in the United States, have reconciled to the reality, even with some brilliant marketing and popular offerings, their revenue bases will likely be constrained, and, where there may be new growth, it will be wise to devote much of that to replenishing and augmenting depleted endowments. The hope for the future is in reining in and substantially decreasing costs.

Perhaps the non-subsidized opera companies are the operatic canaries in a coal mine. What happens to opera in the United States could well become a model for opera companies everywhere in the future.

I argue that there are several areas where there is hope for bringing costs in lines with the new economic realities: 1) a better use of the world’s existing operatic physical resources, and 2) a better appreciation of the world’s current abundance of first rate opera singers and the other artists that support them.

*****

[Below: Production Designer Achim Freyer's disk for Wagner's "Das Rheingold"; edited image, based on a Monika Rittershaus photograph, courtesy of the Los Angeles Opera.]

[For my performance review, see: Achim Freyer’s Fascinating “Rheingold” Begins L. A. “Ring” – March 11, 2009.]

*****

What should be better appreciated: operatic singers and orchestras

My reviews on this website have made the point that most of the singers that are hired in principal roles (and many in small roles) are extraordinarily good – and I have attended live performances of most of the major opera singers of the past half century. There are more good opera singers than there are opportunities for them to sing.

In fact, it is my opinion that it is now becoming rarer to see a bad performance of a principal in an operatic role than it used to be to see a very good performance. I also believe that the orchestras in those cases where my experience with them covers several decades, are consistently better than they ever were.

I suspect that quite a few critics would disagree with me on this, although many of them will not have attended performances of reigning superstars in the late 195os and the 1960s, as I have, and will not have the same basis for making a comparative evaluation, just as I cannot speak for performances that took place in the 1930s and 1940s.

Some critics will have criteria that can be explained, and respected (”Baritone X doesn’t pronounce his French covered vowels correctly”), even if I have  a different perspective on what constitutes a world class operatic performance. But there are some critics, and I suspect many of this website’s readers will concede this, that just don’t seem to know what they are talking about.

There is a point to be made about the emergence of great operatic talent that is readily available to all major and many smaller companies. As opera patrons begin to appreciate how good the contemporary singers are, and how many deserve to be regarded as “world class”, the worry that one is going to spend a fortune on a ticket for a substandard vocal performance  may not be justified. Things can always go wrong, of course, but confidence in the casting decisions of most of the major operatic managements is probably well placed.

And some of these voices you’ve not heard of may become famous later on. Consider some of the artists that I saw at San Francisco Opera in their 20s or early 30s when their fees were still relatively low: Luciano Pavarotti, Leontyne Price, Birgit Nilsson, Leonie Rysanek, Placido Domingo and Jose Carreras are a few that come to mind without even researching the subject.

One likes to see artists that have had great successes elsewhere in the world at the home company, but I suspect the top ten artists in fees charged per performance at any given time are almost never the top ten best voices at that moment. If one has confidence in your opera management’s ability to engage wonderful voices (particularly those of artists with a great stage presence and acting skills), then assume that they will find people you have never heard of (and whose fees are not now exorbitant) who will really impress you.

What is Deplorable: Throw-away Art – Opera Sets and Costumes

Opera productions used in performance suffer wear and tear. The more popular the opera, the more damage to sets and costumes is suffered. In addition, there are new operas, and there is renewed interest in operas that have not been performed for a while, so there are good reasons for new productions. Even musicology can suggest new productions. We now have quite different ideas of how Offenbach’s “Tales of Hoffman”, or Bizet’s “The Pearl Fishers” or Verdi’s “Don Carlos” should be performed than, say, 30 years ago.

For most opera companies, there is an ongoing expense to store old productions. There are  examples of newly installed opera company intendants arriving and destroying many (in one famous case, it is reported almost all) of the existing productions, giving them free rein to work with their favorite concept directors to create new productions.

However, once one has made all the qualifying statements, too much of the operatic heritage has been deliberately destroyed – for some discarded productions, I suspect there is not even a photographic record of what has been lost.

Opera sets are utilitarian things. If a great artist has created them, that does not seem to matter much. It’s like the monastery in Milan where Leonardo da Vinci painted the “Last Supper”. The monks need a wider door to the kitchen? Just cut a wider opening in the current door below Leonardo’s mural, even if you have to cut off the feet of Leonardo’s image of Jesus Christ. (At least they saved most of the monastery wall that Leonardo used for his painting, which is more than can be said for the Jean-Pierre Ponnelle productions of Wagner’s “Fliegende Hollaender” or Verdi’s “Rigoletto”.)

There should be an international movement to secure the remaining productions of Ponnelle, and Franco Zefferelli, and Ezio Frigerio, and other production designers of the first rank. (What “secure” might mean obviously can be the subject of more webposts. Intellectual property laws and customs surely have a bearing here. But as a point of principle, no work of art should be destroyed as a consequence of striving to preserve intellectual property, just as none should be destroyed simply to balance one institution’s budget or to clear the way for a  new production desired by management.)

My guess is that at least David Hockney’s productions in the hands of the Los Angeles Opera and San Francisco Opera are safe, but Hockney is one of the very few opera production designers whose recognition as a great artist so transcends the opera realm that one could imagine his physical sets being housed for display in an art museum.

There is a history of sharing great productions between major companies, and increasing sophistication in building sets that can fit the stages of several companies, greatly reducing the costs. (I will begin a series of website articles on this surprisingly complex subject soon.) But another area is just in its infancy – production “makeovers” where a production for one opera, when there is no longer need for the sets, are not discarded, but are converted into something else.

When this June, San Francisco Opera audiences see Robert Perdziola’s attractive sets for Gounod’s “Faust”, they are seeing a production that originally was designed for Marilyn Horne to perform Rossini’s “Tancredi” at Lyric Opera in Chicago. Perdziola reconstructed the sets to house Frank Corsaro’s concept of how to stage “Faust”, but when they appear in San Francisco, stage director Jose Maria Condemi will have reworked the sets again to bring us his own ideas.

“Makeover” productions can, in the right hands (resourceful stage directors working with inventive production construction crews) have the promise of significantly reducing costs, without diminishing the audience’s operatic experience.

These are my thoughts and assessments ending 2009. I will have more to say on each of these subjects. As always, anyone who wishes to comment upon, or associate or disagree with these thoughts, should contact me, through the now old-fashioned mechanism of e-mail, at the address operawarhorses@yahoo.com.

Wm: How did you become interested in opera?

RA: It’s a funny answer. I grew up in Brunswick Ohio, outside of Cleveland. I went to Brunswick High School, where I  was in the band and choir and also sang in a rock band. I have a collection of guitars. I determined that I would pursue music in college.

[Below: Basso Cantante Raymond Aceto; edited image, based on a Dan Rest photograph, courtesy of the Lyric Opera of Chicago.]

I was admitted to the Bowling Green State University (near Toledo) and took the music courses. There, I had  a wonderful voice teacher, Andreas Poulimenos, who helped me discover that I  have more voice than I thought I had. Bowling Green offers extensive training in both music and the performing arts.  I switched into a performance major and fell in love with the idea of operatic performance. I was then accepted into the Metropolitan Opera’s Lindemann Young Artists Development Program.

Wm: When did you establish that you are a basso?

RA: It was obvious as soon as my voice changed. When I was 13 and 14, I was singing lead vocals in a rock music band. However, at age 15, I was relegated to singing backup vocals. Bassos do not sing lead vocals in rock bands.

Wm. Possibly to the annoyance of some baritones with empty weeks in their schedules, you continue to perform not only Scarpia but Escamillo as well. For a role that has such familiar music, Escamillo has always seemed to me to be a tricky role to sing. Obviously, you believe the role lies in your voice. Do you believe that having a voice that lies lower than most baritones brings advantages to singing Escamillo?

RA: Escamillo’s part has a high tessitura, but also much of it lies low. A lot of baritones handle the high parts well, but cannot make the low sections of, say, the Toreador Song, sound good. A basso who has the ability to negotiate the top, can, in my opinion, get better coverage of the role throughout its range.

[Below: Escamillo (Raymond Aceto) has become the new lover of Carmen (Victoria Vizin); edited image, based on a Robert Millard photograph, courtesy of the Los Angeles Opera.]

Wm. With the Puccini sesquicentennial behind us and casting for operas during the Wagner and Verdi bicentennials currently in progress, you have amassed a significant repertory of roles for all three composers. To begin with Puccini, you have sung smaller basso roles in “Tosca”, but there are relatively few bassos historically that have assayed the role of Scarpia. Were you inspired on those occasions when you sang those comprimario roles in “Tosca” to consider Scarpia as a future role? What attracts you to the part?

RA: I have been attracted to the role of Scarpia since I was 17 or 18. I always thought it was a great role, I studied it and always wanted to sing it. Conductor Patrick Summers approached me in 2006 when I was performing the role of Fiesco in Verdi’s “Simon Boccanegra” in Houston.

[Below: Fiesco Grimaldi (Raymond Aceto, left) threatens the life of Boccanegra, the pirate, (Dmitri Hvorostovsky) in the 2006 Houston Grand Opera production of Verdi's "Simon Boccanegra"; edited image, based on a Brett Coomer photograph, courtesy of the Houston Grand Opera.]

I love singing Puccini, but he did not write that much for the basso voice. I do sing Timur in “Turandot” and  Colline in “La Boheme”. I love these roles, but none of these are as satisfying as performing Scarpia. It is an intense, driven role. It suits my personality. I love the challenge, the danger, the intensity.

I think it can be a role that can sound wonderfully sung by a lower voice. It does take a great deal of technique and skill to get through the singing. Some baritones that I have heard bark some of the passages, but I cannot do that physically or vocally. Since I find Scarpia calculated and sinister, I have a smile on my face masking the calculating demeanor. (For the performance review, see: A New “Tosca” for Houston Grand Opera – January 30, 2010.)

Wm: Although it’s rare to hear a basso cantante sing the role, a few have done so. I saw Giorgio Tozzi perform the role opposite the Tosca of Magda Olivero at San Francisco Opera.

RA: Giorgio Tozzi is one of the basso cantantes I most admire.

Wm. My website reviews have characterized you among the leading basso cantantes of our day. Do you believe that basso cantante describes your voice, even though you also sing Escamillo and Scarpia?

RA: I think basso cantante describes what I am always striving to do. At every point that I am singing, I am driving to produce the most beautiful sound that I can sing.

Wm: As we move into the Verdi bicentennial you are singing such basso roles as Zaccaria, Banquo, Fiesco and Ramfis. Even though you are not particularly associated with the bel canto repertory, it seems possible that Zaccaria could become one of your signature roles. “Nabucco” was an opera that Gaetano Donizetti actually conducted, and of which he very much approved. Does performing Zaccaria appeal to your inner bel canto?

RA: Most definitely. Even though I have been singing Escamillo and Scarpia, I truly do feel my soul and my voice is in bel canto, particularly Verdi. I find nothing so rewarding as a good legato line to make the voice feel right at home for me.

Wm: One can hear how Verdi’s use of the basso sound evolved over his career. Do you as an artist find that you approach singing, say, the role of Zaccaria differently from Fiesco or Ramfis?

RA: Well, I think that Fiesco is written in the same vocal style as some of Zaccaria’s music, whereas Ramfis is declamatory, except for the Temple Scene.

Zaccaria’s three arias are each written in a different style. The first aria, D’Egitto la sui lidi , represents Verdi’s very early style. However, the second act Preghiera, Tu sul labbro de’ veggenti, reminds me of the later Verdi that you encounter in “Don Carlo”. (For the performance review of Aceto’s Zaccaria, see: Fink, Valayre and Aceto in San Diego Opera’s Exceptional “Nabucco” – February 20, 2010.)

[Below: Raymond Aceto is Zaccaria in San Diego Opera's production of Verdi's "Nabucco"; edited image, based on a Cory Weaver photograph, courtesy of the San Diego Opera.]

My ultimate Verdi goal is Filippo in “Don Carlo”. Because, there are five superstar roles, it is rarely done these days. Once I was the Filippo to Jerome Hines’ Inquisitor. He won by the way.

Wm: You are scheduled to sing in Hunding in Francesca Zambello’s production of “Die Walkuere” in San Francisco. In that production, Hunding seems to be a particularly lively part, not the “stand with a spear and sing” stage direction still sometimes seen. In a production such as Zambello’s do you begin to prepare for it in any particular way prior to your arrival in San Francisco for rehearsals?

RA: My preparation for every role is pretty much the same. I am meticulous in preparing the text and music. However, I want to be open to what the conductor and the stage director want from me. Also, I find that I am also influenced by the scenery and costume.

I try not to come in with too preconceived an interpretation. For Scarpia in Houston, I listened to no other singer in that role, wanting to find my own approach to it.

Wm: You have worked with a number of stage directors over your career. Which ones are particularly noteworthy?

RA: I think every opera singer should have the opportunity to work with David McVicar. I have done two myself. David is intense, but highly intelligent and creative. Those who work with him have a tight feel of support and camaraderie. He will get directly into your face one second, then he puts his arm around you the next moment.

[Below: The Comte des Grieux (Raymond Aceto) expresses his concerns to Manon (Natalie Dessay) in David McVicar's production of Massenet's "Manon"; edited image, based on a Dan Rest photograph, courtesy of the Lyric Opera of Chicago]

I was the assassin Sparafucile in McVicar’s production of Verdi’s “Rigoletto” at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden in London, and his interpretation emphasizes the considerable debauchery of the characters. I also was in his production of Massenet’s “Manon” at the Lyric Opera in Chicago. (For the performance review, see: Kaufmann Astonishes, Dessay Enraptures, in McVicar “Manon”: Lyric Opera of Chicago – October 15, 2008.)

The production of Puccini’s “Tosca” that I just completed with Director John Caird was wonderful. Caird, who comes to opera from theater and film had a completely fresh perspective on staging the opera. He was so wonderful, so intelligent, so into the whole process. As it turned out all the principals, myself as Scarpia, Patricia Racette as Tosca and Alexei Dolgov as Cavaradossi were each performing the role for the first time. We all took great pains to be as good actors as we could be.

Besides McVicar and Caird, I was impressed working with Franco Zefferelli, and also enjoyed Christopher Alden staging Verdi’s “Aida”. It is always a great experience to work with a great director personally. Unfortunately, many of the productions are revivals or remounts and one ends up with assistants without the ability to approach the production as creatively as the person who conceptualized the production.

However, an opera singer has to stay focussed  when they move from opera house to opera house into a variety of productions.

Wm: And which conductors do you look forward to working with?

RA: There are so many I like working with. I have worked a lot with Patrick Summers, and appreciate his sensibility, his accuracy and support. I like to work a lot with Nicola Luisotti. (We call each the bass brothers, because both of us have low-pitched speaking voices.) I have found both Emmanuel Villaume and  Stephen Lord to be very close supporters of mine. Another conductor who is sensitive to the needs of singers is Marco Armiliato.

Wm: I understand that the first “Tosca” of your career was an especially memorable experience.

RA: Yes, as a 23 year old, I played the Jailer in “Tosca’s” third act. Luciano Pavarotti was the Cavaradossi. In my whole life., he is the best voice I have ever heard. One day, as I was standing in the wings, Pavarotti said to me “beautiful voice, have a good time”. Then, after I sang the Jailer’s words, I had to cross the stage in front of him to exit, and Luciano said “bravo”. It was amazing.

Wm: Besides Pavarotti, what artists do you admire?

RA: I have worked with Bryn Terfel, Susan Graham, Placido Domingo, Paul Groves and Renee Fleming. In May, I will celebrate my 20th year performing opera. It has been wonderful working with my friends in the community of bassos. Sam Ramey and I have become very good friends, and so it is also with James Morris. Ramey and Morris have established their presence in the generation before me, and there are younger guys than me who will do their thing. I have nothing but respect for all of them and their careers.

The production, owned by the San Francisco Opera, was first presented by the opera company that co-sponsored, with S. F. Opera, the production’s creation - the Opera of Monte Carlo in Monaco.

The premise of the opera, of course, is a wager between an older gentleman and two young men about what betrothed women would do if aggressively courted by other men. Mozart and his librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte, advanced a pessimistic view of this aspect of human relationships, and that view’s dissonance with contemporary moral teachings assured that the opera would disappear from most opera houses throughout the 19th century, and from many houses during the first half of the 20th, as well. (For a discussion of the first year that “Cosi” was ever performed at the San Francisco Opera, see: Cosi Fan Tutte – October 25, 1956.)

In Mozart’s “Abduction from the Seraglio” the pairs of lovers are open to suspicion of their mates’ possible infidelity. In “Cosi” only the agreement among the wagering men that “women, indeed, are like that” and, therefore, that Don Alfonso has won his bet, prevents the situation from getting even further out of hand.

[Below: Guglielmo (Michael Todd Simpson, left) and Ferrando (Brian Anderson, right) make a wager with Don Alfonso (Sir Thomas Allen) on the fidelity of their fiancees; edited image, based on a Karen Almond photograph, courtesy of the Dallas Opera.]

Since the production’s premiere was in Monaco, it seems quite fitting for the production to incorporate the idea of high-end gambling by the upper classes. There was likely another consideration as well. Since the set designer, Robert Perdziola, is one of the most talented of costume designers working today, locating the story in a fashionable, exotic place, such as the Cote d’Azur as near to the Roaring 20s as possible, would unleash his imagination in designing classical haute couture for the women of Mozart’s comedy.

Whether or not Perdziola was influenced in any way by the 1990’s British TV drama about fashion design, “The House of Elliot”, the costumes he designed, and in this cast, that were worn by Liza van den Heever (Fiordiligi) and Jennifer Holloway (Dorabella), are as spectacular as the high fashion dresses that were associated with that series. (Fans of “Elliot” may agree that Holloway’s Dorabella looks strikingly like actress Stella Gonet’s Beatrice Elliot.)

Although Perdziola has constructed a unit set, the use of interior curtains permits scene changes from a small casino with roulette wheel to elegant rooms overlooking a seashore teeming with beach umbrellas that adjoins a boat harbor.

[Below: the sisters Dorabella (Jennifer Holloway, left) and Fiordiligi (Elza van den Heever) enjoy the Cote d'Azur; edited image, based on a Karen Almond photograph, courtesy of the Dallas Opera.]

It’s Mozart’s music and da Ponte’s (and Mozart’s) wit, that connects with us in “Cosi”. And it’s Perdziola’s sets and costumes and Cox’ always interesting staging that connects us with this production. British conductor Grahame Jenkins presided over the performance. The swirling overture was brilliantly played by the Dallas Opera orchestra (the Winspear acoustics enhancing the experience).

The first scene introduces us to Sir Thomas Allen’s Don Alfonso, whose solid vocal technique is matched by an impish humor. The two men whose faith in women Alfonso derides, were both effective in their roles. Michael Todd Simpson was an impressive Guglielmo, with a rich, dark lyric baritone. Brian Anderson reflected the practice of casting a leggiero tenor as Ferrando. Anderson, a former San Francisco Opera Center Adler Fellow, showed style and vocal versatility that compensated for a slightly lighter vocal weight than that possessed by his colleagues.

I have been blessed by having seen world class pairings of the siblings Fiordiligi and Dorabella over the years, but was particularly impressed by the combination of van den Heever and Holloway in these roles. Each is a formidable artist, with secure technique and full, creamy voices. Singing together (as Fiordiligi and Dorabella often do, usually an interval of a third apart) they were a striking pair.

Nor did Dallas Opera disappoint on the casting of Despina. Nuccia Focile is one of the world’s most impressive lyric sopranos, and she proved to be a sprightly, arrestingly likeable soubrette.

[Below: Nuccia Focile as Despina; edited image, based on a Karen Almond photograph, courtesy of the Dallas Opera.]

The settings, even if separated in time from us by nearly a century, are glorious and have the sweep of a technicolor movie – so realistic, in fact, that companions demanded that I ( who has defended the plots of such operas as Bellini’s “Norma” or Donizetti’s “Lucrezia Borgia” or Verdi’s “Il Trovatore” or Delibes’ “Lakme” as rather more plausible, if properly staged, than they initially appear) to similarly defend the plot of “Cosi”.

Classical comedies, whether spoken or sung, often require audiences to suspend belief for the gags to work. In “Cosi” we are asked to accept the idea that two soldiers engaged to sisters with whom they apparently constantly double date, could change into the uniform of a foreign country, put on fake facial hair, switch sisters, and, not only get away with it, but would demoralize each other with the proof that  ”their women are like that”.

[Below: Dorabella (Jennifer Holloway) begins to find Guglielmo (Michael Todd Simpson), disguised as an Albanian sailor, to be a person who interests her; edited image, based on a Karen Almond photograph, courtesy of the Dallas Opera.]

When originally conceived, Cox wanted to weave a subtle antiwar message into an opera that no one ever had associated with wartime. (See my review of a previous mounting: Warhorse Warriors: John Cox’ ‘Cosi Fan Tutte’ in S. F. – July 2, 2005, which includes an extensive discussion of Cox’ work in San Francisco and elsewhere.) In fact, when the men return as themselves in the final scene, they show battlefield injuries and are accompanied by other war veterans, and in the opera’s middle, the two women are enlisted as Red Cross nurses, as the casino resort makes room for the wounded. Such features simultaneously add both to the realism and the surreality of the production.

[Below, from left to right: Guglielmo (Michael Todd Simpson) and Ferrando (Brian Anderson), disguised as Albanian sailors, have conspired with Don Alfonso (Sir Thomas Allen) and Despina (Nuccia Focile) to make the sisters, Nurse Fiordiligi (Elza van den Heever) and Nurse Dorabella (Jennifer Holloway), believe the sailors have consumed arsenic; edited image, based on a Karen Almond photograph, courtesy of the Dallas Opera.]

Of course, “Cosi” is not a documentary about human experiences, nor is even a verismo opera (which composer Ferruccio Busoni pointed out is a nonsensical term, since people in real life do not communicate with each other exclusively through song.) Sometimes, confronted with the task of staging improbable behavior, some stage directors will require, or perhaps unleash, their singers to present their characters farcically – providing bizarre and incomprehensible sight gags they hope the audience will like.

John Cox clearly believes that, excepting some latitude for the character of the free spirited maid Despina (Nuccia Focile), none of the “Cosi” characters should be presented with even a hint of farce. In conversations I had with van den Heever, the only one of the six cast members in a role debut, she said that Cox insisted that, regardless of her natural tendency towards energetic movement when on the operatic stage, that  she stand perfectly still and, with great dignity, let the music flow through her character. (See Rising Stars: An Interview with Elza van den Heever.)

[Below: Dorabella (Jennifer Holloway, seated left) and Fiordiligi (Elza van den Heever, seated right) are beginning to like the idea of a little infidelity while their fiancees are away, to the encouragement of Despina (Nuccia Focile, standing left) and Don Alfonso (Sir Thomas Allen.]

“Cosi” is a succession of glorious Mozartean arias, duets and ensembles. The most famous solo pieces are those for Fiordiligi – the infamous Come Scoglio, from a technical standpoint one of the most taxing of all soprano arias and the serenely beautiful Per pieta, ben mio, which van den Heever points out has all of the technical requirements of Fiordiligi’s first aria, with even greater requirements for breath control and expressiveness. (For my reviews of van den Heever’s performances as Mozart’s Donna Anna, see: Kwiecien Excels in McVicar’s Dark Side “Don Giovanni” – S. F. June 2, 2007 and The Man Who Loved Women: Lucas Meachem’s Empathetic Don Giovanni – Santa Fe, July 31, 2009.)

But Dorabella, Despina, Ferrand0 and Guglielmo all  have two or more beautifully constructed arias each. Holloway’s Smanie implacabili (this being a Cox production, of course played straight) was as affecting as her E amor un ladroncello was light-hearted and amusing. Anderson’s Un aura amorosa was beautifully sung, as were his two later arias, and Simpson’s Guglielmo was impressive throughout the performance.

[Below: Guglielmo (Michael Todd Simpson) as the Albanian sailor dressed for his wedding, delights Ferrando's fiancee, Dorabella (Jennifer Holloway); edited image, based on a Karen Almond photograph, courtesy of the Dallas Opera.]

Don Alfonso, even without the kinds of arias the other five possess, provides the grounding and is the center of attention for most of the ten ensembles in which he participates. At this point in Sir Thomas Allen’s career, he brings a lifetime of experience, unfailing musicianship, and a brilliant comic technique, to the mature comic roles in the operatic repertory. (See my review of a recent performance at: Woody Allen’s L. A. “Gianni Schicchi”: Spoofing Italian Films – September 6, 2008.)

Mozart, da Ponte, Cox, Perdziola, Graeme Jenkins, the production’s excellent cast, and the Winspear acoustics made this a memorable “Cosi fan Tutte”.

In this view of the art form’s history, both music and plots of bel canto operas are formulaic, the latter not particularly comprehensible, with the music organized to maximize the exposition of the singer’s technique. To reform opera, Verdi struggled against these old ways of composing and created a new style that lasted for decades until Puccini and the verismo composers developed even newer styles for singing and presenting the drama.

There is a reason why many  people who like opera tend to believe the statements in the above paragraphs as fact. It’s the view that prevailed in the early 20th century as to how the standard repertory came to be. Because most operas of the the three bel canto composers had disappeared from the repertory – save Rossini’s “Barber of Seville” (which never was in danger of disappearing) and star turn performances of Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor” and rarely Bellini’s “Norma” and Donizetti’s “L’Elisir d’Amore” –  much of the rest of the output of these three composers, with only the most sporadic exceptions, was never performed. Similarly, the operas of Verdi composed before his “Rigoletto” were considered antique curiosities.

Current scholarship, and the experience from multiple productions in recent decades of many major bel canto and early Verdi works,  has revised the understanding of  Italian operas from the first half of the 19th century. These revisionist ideas are reflected on this website.  It’s appropriate now to have a different impression of early 19th century opera, and of the transitional times between “eras”.

We can now see Rossini as a revolutionary innovator, whose changes in the art form quickly became formulas that other composers were expected to observe. We can also appreciate that Bellini and Donizetti, two men who tragically died early in their careers, each struggled to improve the dramatic content and flow of operas, and, especially in the latter’s case, to a considerable extent achieved that goal. And one can now see the great influence that Donizetti’s achievements had on Verdi. It’s hard to imagine the creation of what we think of as Verdian opera if the operas of, say, the last 15 years of Donizetti’s prodigious output never existed.

What is not appreciated, even by some of the people who produce operas, is the extent that Donizetti and Verdi were friends and collaborators. It was instructive for this reviewer to see Donizetti’s “Don Pasquale” on a Friday night at the Dallas Opera (See my review at Spirited, Beautifully Sung “Don Pasquale” at Dallas Opera – February 19, 2010) and Verdi’s “Nabucco” the next night at the San Diego opera.

[Below: the Assyrian court in Michael Yeargan's sets for "Nabucco"; edited image, based on a Cory Weaver photograph, courtesy of the San Diego Opera.]

The two operas are written in different styles, of course. No part of “Nabucco” is intended to be funny. Most of “Don Pasquale”, excepting perhaps the scene in which Pasquale expresses his despair at his humiliation, is meant to be serious. But both “Nabucco” and “Don Pasquale” were Donizetti artistic products that occupied his time during the years 1842 and 1843. He himself wrote “Pasquale”. But he also took on the task of assisting Verdi in the diffusion of “Nabucco” to Austria after its successful premiere in Milan.

Donizetti was 16 years older than Verdi. The two men had both lost their wives to tragic illnesses. Donizetti seemed at the height of his artistic powers, although he soon would begin to suffer the debilitation of the third stage syphilis that infected him.

Verdi had experienced a fiasco in his second opera, “Un Giorno di Regno”, a comic opera, that he had to complete and stage during a time of grief. He was finally coaxed into writing “Nabucco”. Donizetti, who now is recognized as a great composer in both the comic and tragic genres, obviously liked Verdi’s new opera, and agreed to take on the musical preparation and to conduct it for its Vienna premiere.

Donizetti’s encouragement (and perhaps his demonstration that the elder master could still write comic operas of the quality of “Don Pasquale” – considerably superior to Verdi’s “Giorno di Regno”) –  set Verdi on his path of concentrating on improving the dramatic content and style of Italian opera, and not returning to comic opera for nearly half a century. In “Nabucco”  one grasps the genius of the future Verdi, in the extraordinary writing of Nabucco’s  part and Zaccaria’s Preghiera, while seeing the incorporation of elements influenced by Donizetti’s mature style.

The San Diego Opera Cast

San Diego Opera assembled an important cast to mount the work. (Oddly, two of the three principals – Fink and Aceto – were not the artists originally expected to appear, but it is inconceivable that the results could have been any better than that of the team that San Diego Opera’s General Director Ian Campbell had in place for the production’s opening night.)

Richard Paul Fink  has become one of the world’s most impressive Alberichs for the three operas in Wagner’s “The Ring of the Nibelungs” in which the character appears. In Nabucco’s title role, he demonstrated that he is also a great Verdi baritone, in an impeccably sung, and aggressively acted. performance. One of the attractions of the role is its opportunity to demonstrate one’s histrionic talents, with scenes in which the Assyrian monarch is alternatively mentally deranged and lucid.

“Mad scenes” are an extraordinary opportunity for a brilliant singer who is also a good actor to astonish and connect with an audience. Although there are several such opportunities for bel canto sopranos, they are almost non-existent for Verdian baritones, who generally play the solid, even stolid, fathers, brothers, and counselors whose emotions (other than cries for vengeance) are not so vividly displayed.

[Below: Nabucco (Richard Paul Fink) in a state of mental distress; edited image, based on a Cory Weaver photograph, courtesy of the San Diego Opera.]

San Diego Opera used Michael Yeargan’s “Nabucco” sets from the Lyric Opera in Chicago. It is a unit set which serves as both the Hebrew Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem and as the throne room, hanging gardens and royal apartments that the Assyrians occupy in Babylon. To help  clarify the demarcation between what is Hebrew space and Assyrian, the San Diego Opera added a series of projections that were developed by the San Diego Opera Scenic Studios. (I personally would have encouraged them to project the bright blue Babylonian walls that one sees in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, but do believe the projections were mostly effective.)

The plot is a bit less complex than it at first seems. The Israeli ambassador to the Assyrians, the tenor Ismaele (nicely sung by Arthur Shen) has caught the eye of two women raised as sisters and as the daughters of King Nabucco. The king has decided to invade Jerusalem and found a pretext to imprison Ismaele, but the younger daughter, Fenena, has helped him escape back to Jerusalem. Ismaele and Fenena have fallen in love and she wishes to convert to Juadaism.

The older daughter, Abigaille, has suffered two blows – rejection by her would-be lover Ismaele, and being passed over as regent in favor of her younger sister, Fenena, while her father, Nabucco, is on his campaign to subject the Jews to his suzerainty. Nabucco, Fenena, and Abigaille, all with quite different motivations, travel from Babylon to Jerusalem.

[Below: the Assyrian king Nabucco (Richard Paul Fink, right back) has defiled and looted the Jewish Temple,to the dismay of his daughter Fenena (Susana Poretsky, left) who loves the Jewish ambassador Ismaele (Arthur  Shen, foreground); edited image, based on a Cory Weaver photograph, courtesy of the San Diego Opera.]

Abigaille, investigating why she was passed over for the regency, discovers that she is illegitimate, the daughter of a slave. At once, she takes part in intrigues with Assyrian priests of the god Baal, to remove Nabucco from power and install herself as monarch.

The role of Abigaille is one of the most treacherous in Italian opera, with extraordinary cadenzas that descend into the chest voice and then leap into the top of the soprano range . French soprano Sylvie Valayre is one of the few sopranos in history to make Abigaille a signature role.

Valayre has become a specialist in this role as well as that of Lady Macbeth (see my review of her Lady at  Power Verdi: Stoyanov, Valayre Mesmerizing in Berlin Staatsoper “Macbeth” – April 24, 2009.)

[Below: Abigaille (Sylvie Valayre), discovering that she is the illegitimate daughter of a slave, determines to lead a coup to seize the Assyrian throne; edited image, based on a Cory Weaver photograph, courtesy of the San Diego Opera.]

She portrayed the character’s vulnerability, particularly in the beautiful aria Anch’io dischiuso un giorno, humanizing this rather unsympathetic character in a way one rarely sees. What Valayre shows us is that, with all its pyrotechnics, the music of Abigaille is fundamentally beautiful and the role can be made really interesting in the right hands. Those in the San Diego Opera audience heard an incredible performance of a role that takes survival skills to perform.

[Below: the regent Abigaille (Sylvie Valayre) refuses to permit Nabucco (Richard Paul Fink) to recover his throne; edited image, based on a Cory Weaver photograph, courtesy of the San Diego Opera.]

The third principal was Raymond Aceto, a favorite basso cantante of this website. Originally, the great basso Ferruccio Furlanetto had agreed to do the part of Zaccaria, but, having recently tried out the role (having not performed it for many years), asked the San Diego Opera to release him from a commitment that he felt was no longer right for his voice. He recommended Aceto to the San Diego Opera, who agreed to sign him for the role. (When I mentioned Furlanetto’s recommendation to Aceto, he was surprised and appeared deeply affected to learn that a distinguished colleague had been behind San Diego Opera requesting him to be their Zaccaria.)

Aceto had sung the part of the High Priest of Baal when this production was mounted in Chicago, but his voice is clearly able to handle Zaccaria’s three quite different major arias, each of which is a masterpiece in its own right. Two of the arias are in the bel canto style. The third, the Preghiera, heralds Verdi’s new directions for the basso voice, exemplified in such roles as Banquo in “Macbeth”, Fiesco in “Simon Boccanegra” and similar roles of his more mature style.

A significant feature of most bel canto and of Verdi’s operas through “Il Trovatore” is the double aria, particularly those that follow the cavatina-cabaletta convention. In the cabalettas there are two verses (each with the same words), the first followed by a transitional stretta and then the  second verse. In the middle of the 19th century, with Verdi’s support for the convention’s elimination, they began to be considered unfashionable.

This website has supported the restoration of the strettas and second cabaletta verses, especially when there are artists that have the stamina and technical skill to sing the second cabaletta verse in the way they were intended to be sung. Conductor Edoardo Mueller indeed restored the strettas and permitted both Aceto and Valayre to sing both verses of their major cabalettas. Both artists, of course, added additional vocal ornamentation to the second cabaletta verse as the tradition dictates.

The high quality of singing of the three principals, and of Shen as Ismaele, were complemented by fine performances by Susana Poretsky as Fenena, Alfred Walker as the High Priest of Baal, Joseph Hu as Abdallo and Priti Gandhi as Zaccaria’s sister Anna. Additionally, the chorus master, Timothy Todd Simmons, and Lighting Designer Michael Whitfield both deserve special recognition.

[Below: the Jewish high priest Zaccaria (Raymond Aceto) comforts the convert Fenena (Susana Poretsky) as the High Priest of Baal (Alfred Walker ) looks on; edited image, based on a Cory Weaver photograph, courtesy of the San Diego Opera.]

The stage director for the San Diego performances is Lotfi Mansouri,  recently honored as one of the early recipients of the National Endowment of the Arts Honors in Opera. Mansouri staging observes the traditions of bel canto opera, in which there are key moments when the composer expects both audience and singer to concentrate on what is being sung, and how it is being sung,  rather than on what the singers are doing.

A supreme example in “Nabucco” is the concert piece, S’appresan gl’istanti, in which Nabucco, who had been reported as dead, suddenly appears, and, in the form of a round or canon, Abigaille, then Ismaele, then Fenena, and then Zaccaria and the chorus join in the melody, each character expressing her or his astonishment. A stage director who tries to have these characters doing anything other than standing in place silently until their part requires them to sing, misses the point of the bel canto set piece, where the music, rather than the stage movements, provides the drama. Sometimes opera singers are expected to stand and sing.

“Nabucco” is an opera in which the chorus plays an active part, and Mansouri was effective in incorporating the chorus into the drama. The most famous moment in “Nabucco”, the chorus of the captive Jews, was memorably staged and superbly sung by the San Diego Opera Chorus.

[Below: the condemned Jews, on the Banks of the Euphrates River, sing their prayer of salvation; edited image, based on a Cory Weaver photograph, courtesy of the San Diego Opera.]

However, with much to praise in every part of the production,  the stunning performance of Fink was its most remarkable feature. When he came forward at opera’s end for his curtain call, he received a spontaneous standing ovation from the large and vociferous San Diego Opera crowd.

[Below: Nabucco (Richard Paul Fink) engages the attention of Abdallo (Joseph Hu); edited image, based on a Cory Weaver photograph, courtesy of the San Diego Opera. ]

As Verdi’s bicentennial year approaches in 2013, the performances of Fink, Valayre and Aceto suggest that great performances of “Nabucco” will continue to occur.

Written for four world-class voices, the Dallas Opera chose a cast that deftly handled Donizetti’s melodious score.  Donato DiStefano, internationally renowned for the basso buffo roles in Rossini and Donizetti operas, is Pasquale. Like DiStefano a master of the tongue-twisting “patter song”, Nathan Gunn is Doctor Malatesta, a role that showcases his comedic skills. Cast as Ernesto, the intended of Kucerova’s Norina, is Norman Shankle.

Ranzani led the Dallas Opera Orchestra in a skillful performance of the overture, testing the superb acoustics of the recently opened Margot and Bill Winspear Opera House.

The Ponnelle sets are based on a “stage within a stage” concept. A proscenium arches over doorways at stage left and right, each with a latticed window above it. Within the area that frames the doorways and proscenium is a large red stage curtain, that opens to reveal three sets:  the interior of Don Pasquale’s house, a rooftop terrace that adjoins Norina’s home, and Pasquale’s garden.

Candace Evans, the stage director, obviously has absorbed the spirit of the piece, as it is defined by Donizetti’s music and Ponnelle’s sets and costumes (with additional set features and costumes created by the Dallas Opera’s technical departments).

Representing Don Pasquale’s house (or at least its imposing entrance hall), we see an upper floor and two descending staircases to the main floor. Marble busts decorate the walls of the upper staircase. An easel holds Ernesto’s latest oil painting. In this permutation, the set represents a drably dignified interior space, reflecting both Pasquale’s taste and lack of appetite for major renovations or other big ticket expenditures. (That is the “before”; Norina will see to the “after” in the next act.)

Adversarial exchanges take place between Pasquale and his artist nephew, Ernesto (impressively sung by Norman Shankle). The latter refuses to marry the woman of property whom the Don believes to be a better choice than Ernesto’s chosen Norina, so Pasquale announces his intention for himself to remarry and thus to disinherit his nephew. But Malatesta already has developed a strategy to intervene in this generational impasse. Without informing Ernesto, Malatesta offers Pasquale his sister Sophronia (whom Pasquale knows to be a student at a convent) to become his new bride, then proceeds to convince Norina to masquerade as that sibling.

The second scene, taking place on Norina’s terrace, was the first opportunity for American audiences to hear Kucerova, who has had great success in the comic coloratura and light lyric soprano roles in Europe. She proved the indomitable wily vixen in Quel guardo, il cavalier, heralding an important new singing actress in the bel canto repertory.

Kucerova’s Norina quickly enters into the conspiracy with Gunn’s Malatesta. In this production John Sauvey plays Malatesta’s cousin, who will be the fake Notary that produces the fake documents that convinces Pasquale he has actually married Sophronia. The would-be Notary has accompanied Malatesta to Norina’s home, as a mute character in this scene.

[Below: Norina (Adriana Kucerova) agrees to a scheme devised by Doctor Malatesta (Nathan Gunn); edited image, based on a Karen Almond photograph, courtesy of the Dallas Opera.]

(Were anything like this to transpire in my home state of California in the present day, Norina, Malatesta and his cousin all would become entangled in the State’s conspiracy to defraud and elder abuse laws, but, of course, Malatesta explains that all of this is merely to show Pasquale what can happen when a wealthy, elderly man takes on a young gold-digging wife, rather than engaging in proper estate planning with his legal heir).

Norina is a quintessential soubrette role, and is a stock character of the comic stage, whether that character’s lines are spoken or sung. But imbued with the sophisticated vocal line of the mature Donizetti, the role glistens in the hand of a singing actress with the charm, comic timing and physical attractiveness that Kucerova personifies.

Similarly, Pasquale is a prototypical basso buffo role, but one with a streak of likeability and charm, beneath that impulsive decision to teach his disobedient nephew a lesson. It is a plum role for the veteran basso with comedic skills, able to sing the rapid Italian chatter expected of a buffo. To this role, DiStefano brings a rich, deep voice, and his masterful bel canto phrasing.

[Below: Don Pasquale (Donato DiStefano, left) is charmed by the seemingly demure, obedient and frugal Sophronia (Adriana Kucerova), introduced to him as the sister of Doctor Malatesta (Nathan Gunn); edited image, based on a Karen Almond photograph, courtesy of the Dallas Opera.]

The core of the plot revolves around Sophronia/Norina’s change from penurious sweet young thing to spendthrift termagant the instant that both she and Pasquale sign the marriage contract. The drab household is instantly placed into the hands of decorators with instructions that no expense be spared. In addition, Pasquale’s existing staff of three servants is augmented by dozens of additional employees, including coachmen with teams of horses. This production’s Sophronia becomes an art patron as well, and Ernesto’s paintings become a prominent decorative touch.

[Below: a large staff is now required for Don Pasquale's home to complement Sophronia's expensive decorative enhancements; edited image, based on a Karen Almond photograph, courtesy of the Dallas Opera.]

However, the most destructive element to Pasquale’s ego is Sophronia’s rejection of Don Pasquale as the head of household or even as a person, including her professed intention to have Pasquale’s nephew Ernesto, rather than Pasquale, accompany her on the nightly party  and theater circuit. When he tries to put his foot down, she slaps him. No place in comic opera does a buffo character engender such audience sympathy than the crestfallen, emotionally defeated Pasquale does at this point.

[Below: Norina as Sophronia (Adriana Kucerova) announces her determination to do whatever she pleases, regardless of the emotional impact on Don Pasquale (Donato DiStefano); edited image, based on a Karen Almond photograph, courtesy of the Dallas Opera.]

But for all to be set right, there is one more seeming outrage meted out to the Don’s persona. Sophronia deliberately drops a note that seems to implicate her in an affair with another man in Pasquale’s garden that evening. This sets up one of the most famous and most hilarious buffo duets in all of opera – Cheti, cheti, immantimente between Pasquale and Malatesta (staged in this production before the red curtain).  DiStefano and Gunn received the evening’s greatest applause for this tour de force. Audience approval of the raucous duet invariably occurs in “Don Pasquale” performances, but there was special justification for this superb pair’s dueling patter.

If the opera were to end there, it would have been a evening filled with invariably melodious music, including two beautiful arias for Ernesto, the second of which is preceded by a hauntingly beautiful trumpet solo. But the opera moves into a third act, with Ernesto’s third aria, the enchanting serenade Com’e gentil, with its barcarole rhythms.

The part of Ernesto spends more time in the upper third of a tenor’s range than any other Italian opera in the standard repertory. Shankle, a former San Francisco Opera Adler Fellow, was impressive in his handling of the aria’s treacherous tessitura. (Curiously, the Dallas Opera audience seemed not to know where the aria ended, so the traditional break for applause was not observed, and Shankle’s Ernesto and Kucerova’s Norina went immediately into the divine duet Tornami dir che m’ami.)

Prior to the opera’s happy denouement, there is the set-up for a situation that could have ended much differently if the opera, rather than being a romantic comedy, were a verismo tragedy like Leoncavallo’s “I Pagliacci” a half-century later. Two men, one of whom is married, come upon that husband’s wife with a lover, and the lover escapes.

But in this opera all’s well that ends well. Pasquale follows Malatesta’s plan to disentangle himself from his horrid nuptial mistake. He becomes reconciled with his nephew Ernesto’s marriage to Norina (whom he thinks he has not yet met), and even promises the happy couple a generous income and a bountiful future inheritance. And, even when the fraud has been admitted, he has been so frightened at the unintended consequences of his previous marital decision, that he concedes that sometimes fraud is justifiable.

[Below: Ernesto (Norman Shankle) marries his beloved Norina (Adriana Kucerova); edited image, based on a Karen Almond photograph, courtesy of the Dallas Opera.]

This is a wonderful opera for both the veteran aficionado, who will delight in the performances of DiStefano, Kucerova, Gunn and Shankle, and the newcomer to opera, seeking sprightly, melodious music encased in a story that is fun to watch. The Dallas Opera has produced a great “Don Pasquale”.

For a review of a less successful performance of this opera, see: No Norina: A “Don Pasquale” Showstopper in Zurich – September 23, 2007

However, a librettist who particularly interests me is nowhere near as well known as da Ponte, or Boito, or Hofmannsthal, but in his own way is worth getting to know better. He is Jules Barbier, whose name nowadays is seen most often in the context of being Gounod’s co-librettist for “Faust”, but who was a major figure in mid-19th century Parisian opera. (In France of that century, what went on in Paris really mattered to French opera.) Sometimes Barbier teamed with his colleague Michel Carre, or sometimes he worked with an opera composer alone, but he was always a brilliant presence in any collaboration.

Several operas to whom Barbier is important are being mounted in the United States over the next several months. It is my plan to get to at least one production of all five of these operas.

[Below: Dramatist, librettist and bon vivant Jules Barbier.]

Damnation of Faust (Berlioz), Lyric Opera of Chicago, February 20, 24, March 2, 5, 8, 13(m) and 17, 2010

Even though Barbier did not personally have a hand in the creation of Berlioz’ “La Damnation de Faust”, this uncompromisingly melodic masterpiece profoundly influenced Barbier and Gounod in their development of the most successful adaptation of Goethe’s “Faust” in any medium.

The careers of Berlioz, Gounod and Barbier are entwined with Paris’ Theatre Lyrique where Berlioz’ great opera “Les Troyens” (or at least half of it) received its only performances during Berlioz’ lifetime.

Many of the episodes in “La Damnation” have parallels in Gounod’s “Faust”, but its greatest influence on Gounod was Berlioz’ seductive use of melody, that led Gounod in “Faust”  to perfect the erotic “sweet melody” sound that influenced French opera for the next half century.

[Below: Faust (Paul Groves) unexpectedly appears in the room of Marguerite (Susan Graham); edited image, based on a Dan Rest photograph, courtesy of the Lyric Opera of Chicago.]

British stage director Stephen Langridge creates a new production for Lyric Opera, with sets by George Souglides and lighting by Wolfgang Goebbel, all Lyric Opera debuts.

The lovers Faust and Marguerite are played respectively by Paul Groves and Susan Graham. The Mephistopheles will be John Relyea, who is accumulating an impressive repertory of diabolical roles. Christian Van Horn is Brander. Sir Andrew Davis conducts.

[For the performance review, see: Berlioz’ Faust Fantastique: Lyric Opera Does “Damnation” – Chicago, March 8, 2010.]

Romeo et Juliette (Gounod), San Diego Opera, March 13, 16, 19 and 21(m), 2010

The success of  Gounod’s “Faust”, particularly the Garden Scene and nuit d’amour of Faust and Marguerite, caused “Faust” to move past Verdi’s “Il Trovatore” as the most popular opera in the world (until Bizet’s “Carmen” and then Puccini’s “La Boheme” established their own adoring fan bases). The management of the Theatre Lyrique put considerable pressure on Gounod and Barbier to turn their attentions back to opportunities for sweet, erotic melody. Thus, nearly a decade later, as a lustrous addition to the latest Paris world exposition, the Bard’s “Romeo and Juliet” became a new vehicle for the Gounod-Barbier magic.

[Below: a promotional photograph for the San Diego Opera's "Romeo et Juliette"; edited image, based on a photograph, courtesy of the San Diego Opera.]

Curiously, Gounod’s is the first major opera on this subject, French or Italian, to write the part of Romeo for a male voice, rather than having it sung by a mezzo-soprano in men’s clothing. With tenor testosterone in the mix, Gounod lavished the score with multiple, melodious love duets. (Much more happens in the opera than these high risk lovers’ sentiments about their mutual attraction, but Gounod pulls out all the melodic stops whenever the lead tenor and soprano are within a few feet of each other.)

San Diego Opera, who in 2008 brought together a soprano and tenor married in real life to sing Leila and Nadir in Bizet’s “Pearl Fishers”, has mounted “Romeo and Juliet” for Stephen Costello and Allyn Perez, another soprano-tenor married couple. They are joined by David Adam Moore as Mercutio, Joel Sorensen as Tybalt and Kevin Langan as Tybalt, with a luminous supporting cast that includes Malcolm MacKenzie, Susanna Guzman, Phillip Skinner, Joseph Hu and Scott Sikon. Cynthia Stokes directs and Karen Keltner conducts.

Hamlet (Thomas), Metropolitan Opera, New York City, March 16, 20, 24, 27(m), 30, April 2, 5 and 9, 2010

Many opera goers (and opera managements) have a prejudice against this gloriously melodic work, even when they’ve never seen or heard it. Perhaps they have taken to heart the famous epigram by a sour 19th century British critic that only a Barbarian or a Frenchman could have made such an opera out of the Bard’s greatest work.

It was, of course, the work of the very non-Barbarian, but very French, Jules Barbier, working with the composer Ambroise Thomas, who like Berlioz, Gounod and Bizet (and later Massenet and Debussy), was a Grand Prix de Rome laureate.

[Below: Simon Keenlyside is Hamlet; edited image, based on a Simon Fowler photograph.]

Even though it was banished from the Metropolitan Opera’s repertory for the entire 20th century, one should not go to this opera to seek insights into the Bard’s play (whose plot it quite significantly changes), but instead one should surrender to the opera’s beauties. After all, the British play’s reputation remains intact, totally unscathed by this Parisian operatic “adaptation”.

The Met welcomes Simon Keenlyside as Hamlet and Marlis Pedersen as Ophelie, joined by Jennifer Larmore (Gertrude), Toby Spence (Laertes) and James Morris (Claudius). Louis Langree conducts. The Royal Opera House Covent Garden’s production, directed by the team of Patrice Caurier and Moshe Leiser, will be used to re-introduce Thomas’ work to the Met, after its 113 year break.

For those unable to get to New York City during the run, there is the option of attending the March 27, 2010 “Live in HD” performance in theaters that carry that Met’s telecasts. (Some theaters will repeat the showing on April 14, 2010.)

Hamlet (Thomas), Washington National Opera, May 19, 22, 24, 27, 30(m), June 1 and 4, 2010

Hamlet the Opera, that will be 150 years old later this decade, is having a new lease on life. It regales audiences in luscious music, romance and drama. Not insignificantly, it provides a tour de force and title role for superstar dramatic baritones, and also contains the stellar coloratura part of Ophelie (complete with mad scene).

Washington National Opera has enlisted baritone Carlos Alvarez as Hamlet and Diana Damrau as Ophelie, with Samuel Ramey as Claudius and Elizabeth Bishop as Gertrude.

[Below: a scene from the Thaddeus Strassberger production of "Hamlet" for the Kansas City Lyric Opera; edited image, based on a photograph from www.strassberger1.com.)]

The production, from the imagination of Thaddeus Strassberger, was seen previously at Kansas City Lyric Opera. The work’s conductor, Placido Domingo, contributes his knowledge of and rapport with Second Empire French Opera and his celebrity status to the enterprise.

Faust (Gounod), San Francisco Opera, June 5, 8, 11, 16, 20(m), 26(m) and July 1, 2010

There is only one French opera that is more popular than Gounod’s “Faust” and that one, on a Spanish theme by a French novelist, was composed by Gounod’s younger Theatre Lyrique colleague and fellow Grand Prix winner, Georges Bizet.

[Below: the Kermesse scene in the Robert Perdziola sets and costumes for Gounod's "Faust", promotional photograph, from the Lyric Opera of Chicago.]

Robert Perdziola’s striking, often beauteous sets were seen last Fall in Chicago at Lyric Opera. They will be revived at San Francisco Opera this June, with former Adler fellow Jose Maria Condemi, as stage director, promising a different take on the opera from Chicago’s Frank Corsaro. (See my review of the Corsaro-Perdziola production at Lyric Opera Revives Inventive Corsaro-Perdziola “Faust”: Chicago November 3, 2009 and my interview with Condemi at Rising Stars: An Interview with Stage Director Jose Maria Condemi, Part One.)

Stefano Secco makes his San Francisco Opera stage debut. Patricia Racette is Marguerite and John Relyea the devil-may-care Mephistopheles. Catherine Cook is Marthe, Daniela Mack is Siebel and Brian Mulligan will be the Valentin.

Tales of Hoffman (Offenbach), Santa Fe Opera, July 17, 21, 30, August 3, 7, 11, 24 and 28, 2010

Offenbach’s regrettably unfinished grand opera “Les Contes d’Hoffman” was based on a play by Barbier and Carre. Barbier, the go-to librettist for the French operatic elite, also wrote the opera’s lyrics.

This will be the opera’s debut season at the Santa Fe Opera. Paul Groves will be Hoffman;  Erin Wall will perform the four roles of Antonia, Giulietta, Olympia and Stella; and Gidon Saks will play all four villains.  Kate Lindsey will be Nicklausse and Jill Grove, the voice of Antonia’s mother. Character tenors David Cangelosi and Anthony Laciura are also in the cast.

[Below: the promotional poster for Offenbach's "Tales of Hoffman", courtesy of the Santa Fe Opera.]

A new production is being developed by Christopher Alden, with sets by Allen Moyer. Stephen Lord will conduct.

Wm: How did you become interested in opera performance?

SG: Originally, I had planned to attend medical school, and was geared to take the pre-med science requirements. My father taught physics and chemisty and my mother was involved in science teaching as well. I thought that is where I belonged.

[Below: Sheri Greenawald; edited image, based on a Kristen Loken Ansteg photograph, courtesy of the San Francisco Opera.]

But I happened to attend a band camp at the University of Northern Iowa with a string player.  At the camp, I signed up for voice. When an instructor heard me sing, I was asked “what are you planning to do for the rest of your life?”.

Wm: I saw you in all seven of the leading roles you performed at the San Francisco Opera between 1978 and 1986. This was a period when many of the great recording artists of the stereo era also performed here – Leontyne Price, THE THREE TENORS, Sutherland, Sills, Scotto, Caballe.

[Below: Sheri Greenawald is Lauretta to the Schicchi of Giuseppe Taddei in San Francisco Opera's 1979 production of Puccini's "Gianni Schicchi"; edited image, based on a photograph, courtesy of the San Francisco Opera.]

One does not speak of any of these artists as being “over recorded” and yet there were many artists, yourself included, who ARE described as “under-recorded”.  Do you agree with my personal observation that today there are as many great voices as performed in the 1960s and 1970s, but that the catalogues of studio opera recordings do not reflect this?

SG: Actually, I think that your position is easily defensible. The big recording studios have to make business decisions. They know that Renee Fleming’s CDs will sell, so they go with her and a few other artists simply to stay alive. It is sad. People should have more recordings available from artists like Sondra Radvanovsky. Now one has to go to YouTube even to hear some singers.

[Below: Sheri Greenawald in the title role of Massenet's "Manon" in a 1986 performance at the San Francisco Opera; edited image, based on a photograph, courtesy of the San Francisco Opera.]

Wm: As head of the San Francisco Opera Center you oversaw three somewhat different approaches to training young artists. How do you describe the differences between the Merola program and the Adler Fellowships? And how did these differ from the former touring company, the Western Opera Theater?

SG: Unfortunately, the Western Opera Theater died my second year here, because the financial complications that the San Francisco Opera has faced this millennium has made it necessary to make deep programmatic cuts. I am not sure that any American opera company can afford a significant touring component anymore.

The Merola program differs from the Adler fellowships in regards to their legal status. The Merola program is owned by a non-profit Internal Revenue Service Section 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization. It contracts with me to be its artistic and music director.

How is it different? I think training is training. I do not think my approach differs from one to another. However, the Adler fellows are resident artists, who live in the area for the duration of their fellowship.  That’s the only difference. When they become “Adlers” we can really “get to the bone” on things.

Wm: The relatively short periods of ”vocal prime” of some of the most famous opera stars - including Maria Callas – became obvious at the time when such educational interventions as American collegiate vocal curricula and major opera company “young artists” programs were expanding.  How is the phenomenon of the rapid vocal decline of such artists leading to new techniques in your training programs and in American vocal programs in general to lengthen vocal careers?

SG: Well, you still have people that come in and have a meteoric shot but a short career. That will happen all the time. You can teach technique to an artist, but whether they will use the technique is another story. There will always be diverse human personalities.

Additionally, I believe that almost all artists have vocal crises at times in their careers. Although our San Francisco Opera Center alumni leave with the tools they need at the time, many will find the need to return for additional assistance. For instance, a somewhat famous baritone, who is a former Adler fellow and now is launching an international career, recently came back to us for some additional work coaching, as he knew he needed some scrubbing and polishing still.

When I was a performer, I had teachers in London that I would check in with from time to time. If you are to be an artist with an international career, you will spend so much time on the road, that it is absolutely critical to have someone somewhere who knows your voice and whom you trust to advise you.

One of the realities is that the voice is affected by physical changes in a singer’s body over time. Sopranos between ages 30 and 35 will often experience a physical change, and a huge shift in their 40s and another in their 50s. Pregnancies and menopause will often have a major impact on one’s singing. One usually adjusts, but here the expertise of a teacher in helping one cope with physical changes can be critical.

And it is not just physical change. An emotional experience, such as the unexpected death of a person close to you, can be so traumatic that it affects the voice. Although one hopes an artist adjusts, many of these physical or emotional crises can be career killers.

Wm: To me, the most welcome change over the past decade or so has been the emergence of what I call “bel canto Wagnerian singing” – a power voice that is able to sing each of Wagner’s phrases with a beautiful sound, such as we associate with Regine Crespin in the previous generation. The most famous current example to me is Placido Domingo, but all of these “Rings” we are seeing on the West Coast are filled with such singers.  Do you agree that Wagnerian singing is getting prettier? Are there some aspects of Domingo’s training, as opposed to just genetics, that has allowed him to sing Wagnerian tenor roles so beautifully in his late 60s?

SG: I think that Domingo is phenomenal. Not everyone can sing so beautifully, and yet be older than anyone else on the stage. The way he sings Wagner, is what Wagner wanted us to hear. The beautiful Wagnerian singing that one can hear now fulfills Wagner’s dreams.

That he is able to have such a long career means, to a great extent, that he has retained the athletic ability to produce the quantities of breath to sustain that great artistry that we associate with his singing. The production of breath is an athletic activity. What causes an opera singer’s voice to fade out is the aging of the “breath” muscles. After a certain age, one simply does not have the athletic ability to provide enough breath to sustain the voice for the long periods of time that an operatic singer must. I could probably even now sing well enough for a while, but not for an extended period.

Wm: Yet having a lot of breath does not assure that the music is beautifully sung. Why is that Domingo and so many of the new generation of American artists sing Wagner so sweetly?

SG: I believe that what you hear are properly functioning vocal chords, and is a result of artists being trained to employ correct techniques. As to other Wagnerian singers whose sound you may not have liked so well, there is a certain Germanic technique that I believe is anathema to the vocal chords. I myself  do not understand how it is taught, but the result is a breath compression that is too low for my taste.

Wm: David Holloway, in an interview on the Santa Fe Opera summer apprentice program, that will be posted as part of this series on young artists programs, stresses the point that selections to that program are based on the company’s needs for covers and smaller roles for the five operas of each Santa Fe Opera summer season, and that they often pass over what they regard as a wonderful voice that they would otherwise want to have, because that voice does not fit with their needs for that season.

When you choose the Adler fellows, are the company’s needs for particular covers and smaller roles a consideration, or do you go for the voices that you have ranked highest, irrespective of the specific roles you would expect them to sing?

SG: The Merola program produces operatic performances, so, like David Holloway, I have to recruit singers to fill out the casts of those shows. However, I am also able to recruit a group of singers that I call my “wild card group”, selected regardless of whether there is an obvious part for them, and out of that group many of the Adler Fellows are chosen. Recent examples include Leah Crocetto and Heidi Melton. Elza van den Heever, whom you have interviewed (See Rising Stars: An Interview with Elza van den Heever) was a “wild card”.

With the Adler  Fellows, General Director David Gockley is still looking for the best singers, regardless of near term repertory needs. Within the two years of a typical Adler Fellowship, there will be something for that fellow’s voice. We still are looking for those young artists with obvious career potential. This includes counter-tenors, who may not normally find a position in a Young Artists programs, and those with obvious big Wagnerian voices, such as Daveda Karenas (who will sing Brangaene with a major North American company within the near future).

Wm: In the recent interview I did of Elza van den Heever, she credited the two years of her Adler fellowship working with you as launching her international career as a soprano. How do you approach the task of convincing a mezzo to refocus her voice? What specific techniques did you teach her that prepared her to sing Mozart, Donizetti, Verdi, Puccini and Wagner roles, as she now does?

SG: Again, the technique remains the same. How you apply it is how you make the difference between the styles. I am here to make the voice function. I am not here to create the singer’s sound. I try to make sure their vocal chords are developing.

[Below: Cendrillon (Sheri Greenawald, right) is now united with her Prince Charming (Delia Wallis) while her Fairy Godmother (Ruth Welting) look on, during a 1982 San Francisco Opera performance of Massenet's "Cendrillon"; edited image, based on a photograph, courtesy of the San Francisco Opera.]

As to the issue of switching voices, it was my belief that she was a soprano who was being trained as a mezzo. However it would be irresponsible to advise a student to make the shift from training as a mezzo to training as a soprano without justification, so I am very careful not to suggest such a change unless there is  good evidence that my opinion is sound. In Elza’s case her strength was not in the middle of her voice, it was in the top of her range.

Wm: Is it sometimes not so obvious where the strength of the voice lies?

SG: Yes that’s true.  Currently I have a 24 year old private student and we had been undecided about whether she is a mezzo or a soprano. We asked Dolora Zajic, who concluded that the way her voice breaks suggests that she is a lyric soprano. There actually is very little difference between a lyric mezzo and a lyric soprano. If you are a mezzo, there is a certain color to the voice between F2 and C3, but that timbre does not show up for a while.

The same issues come up for men as well. It takes awhile to really know whether a singer is a light lyric baritone or a tenor. With the bass voice especially, one needs time for the voice to settle.

Wm: Would you explain to the website’s readers the difference between a singer having a healthy vibrato and not?

SG: A properly functioning voice will have an even vibrato. If you have damaged your vocal chords you have problems maintaining that evenness and you get an unpleasant tone.  You can tell when it is working correctly. It is balancing the “overtones” and “undertones”. If there is tension in the chords, they do not work properly. If the breath is not produced evenly, the vibrato is too slow and spreads.

Wm: And may sound like Burt Lahr as the Cowardly Lion in “The Wizard of Oz”.

SG: That can happen as a singer ages, but also whenever in a career that the vocal chords are not functioning properly.

The “straight”, vibrato-less tone that some people like, including some teachers, is caused by clamping down on the vocal chords, but this is not a technique that I would wish my pupils to adopt.

Frank Sinatra would produce a vibrato-less tone for the main part of his songs, then would add a flourish of vibrato at the end. This technique may have worked for Sinatra, but this is not a proper way to sing opera.

Wm: Dolora Zajic is not only  a superstar mezzo, but is an important resource for other singers, is she not?

SG: Dolora is very interested in young singers who have the larger voices. She believes that young singers who are obvious Wagnerians or Verdians can be tremendously misunderstood by their teachers. She is getting wonderful results in working with them.

Wm: As the print media consolidate and evaporate, the classical music “beats” increasingly are merged into “entertainment and the arts” sections so that a writer might be expected to cover films, rock concerts, ice shows and rodeos as well as opera.

You have been quoted as decrying the tendency of some of the electronic sites as being too absorbed with the physical appearance of the artists, particularly the men, rather than the vocal performance. Have you considered creating a course to teach opera critics how to do a better job on reporting on the quality of the singing in an opera they are reviewing?

SG: Oh goodness, no! But I do fell sorry for those people. I did meet a reviewer for a Midwestern newspaper, who was that paper’s sports editor. I can understand them wanting guidance.

Wm: What advice would you give a young singer, seeking a career in opera?

SG: The business has been complicated by the economic downturn. Opera companies are looking for safe casting, because the lifeblood of the company comes from filling the seats.

A young singer must really understand how critical it is to have a solid technique, that will withstand the stress and strain of all the other particulates that come into the making of a singer. You have to be an actor. With singers like Natalie Dessay currently performing, a “stand and sing” singer will not excite people.

Singers need to be solid musicians, who can learn music by themselves, but they also should have coaches whom they can access when they are are on the road. Acting is critical, but a singer must have the vocal technique.

Some of the things that voice teachers have students do, I regard as “unvocal”. A young soprano may be asked constantly to sing Fiordiligi’s Come scoglio from Mozart’s “Cosi fan Tutte”, that should only be tackled by the mature voice.

Artists have to ask two questions about their voice teacher: (1) When you finish your lesson, does it hurt? and (2)  Do you run out of voice at the end of the lesson?

If the answer is yes to either question, consider finding another teacher. Then ask the question: does the teacher’s advice work consistently? When the teacher is not there, can you recreate the sound for yourself? In other words, does the product you paid for work?  If not, what is the point of taking lessons from that person?  If you do not see and hear evidence of progress, find another teacher!

Wm: What artists have you admired over the course of your career singing and teaching?

SG: First, among the teachers, the former Wagnerian soprano Margaret Harshaw, who was the teacher of soprano Carol Vaness. My favorites of the past include Claudia Muzio, and, of the more recent past, Renata Scotto, Magda Olivero, Eleanor Steber, Joan Sutherland, Luciano Pavarotti, Alfredo Kraus and Nicolai Gedda. All of these artists had long careers. Dame Gwyneth Jones had a very big voice. It takes a ton of breath to fill the chest cavity to create the sounds she did.

Wm: When performing at San Francisco Opera, you alternated between highly melodic operas of Beethoven, Massenet and Puccini and later 20th century works by Tippett and Reimann. What are your thoughts on the role of melody in opera.

SG: I think that the human ear longs for melody, and  to  recognize melody in what is heard. I think that many of the 20th century works are beautifully written. I especially love Britten and how his vocal lines are accompanied by his orchestration.

Some composers understand the human voice, and some do not. You can write atonal music and still write music that fits the human voice. Among the contemporary composers, I believe that Thomas Pasatieri, Daniel Catan, Jack Heggie and Dominic Argento are examples of composers that truly understand the human voice.

Wm: Thank you, Sheri.

[Below: A Paris Christmas eve; the second act sets for "La Boheme", edited image, based on a Cory Weaver photograph, courtesy of the San Diego Opera.]

San Diego Opera opened its 2010 International Season with this sublime masterpiece – but the 2010 Season itself is a masterpiece of opera selections featuring Verdi’s majestic, epochal “Nabucco”, the lushly passionate love-in of Gounod’s “Romeo and Juliet”, and ending with Verdi’s sensational “La Traviata”.

Tying together this Season (dubbed The Season of Desire), the heroines in three of these operas share their destiny in common. In each, the heroine expires at the end in dramatically overwhelming dramatic pathos in the arms of her lover. This Season ends with “La Traviata” as our heroine collapses after singing with her lover in perhaps the most riveting final duet in all Italian opera as the curtain falls on this wondrous opera – and the 2010 San Diego Season. Lots to look forward to indeed – particularly in a season short one opera due to the tough economy out there in the Real World – but not short on quality!

Thirty-five years ago the San Diego Opera launched itself as an opera company with “La Boheme”, repeating it in 1968, then in 1975 bringing this glorious crowd-pleaser back every five years since then. Many luminaries in the opera world have graced San Diego Opera’s stage in these productions – certainly in 1980 with the late, great Luciano Pavarotti as Rodolfo (a performance I saw!).

[Below: the Bohemian's garrett, seen in Act I and IV of the San Diego Opera John Conklin production of "La Boheme"; edited image, based on a Cory Weaver photograph, courtesy of the San Diego Opera.]

The wonderful scene/sets/ambience/atmosphere of this production is the work of San Diego Opera veteran (with some 12 productions since 1980) John Conklin. He is no newcomer in designing stage smash-hits not just here but in San Francisco, Santa Fe, the Met, Washington National Opera, English National Opera, Chicago Lyric Opera, et al, etc. This is a very traditional, very comfortable overview of this cherished-by-all piece.

[Below: the Bohemians in conversation, with Schaunard (Malcolm MacKenzie) standing and, seated from left, Rodolfo (Piotr Beczala), Marcello (Jeff Matsey) and Colline (Alfred Walker), edited image, based on a Cory Weaver photograph, courtesy of the San Diego Opera.]

Without any doubt, Polish tenor Piotr Beczala was the MVP in this brilliant, sparkling production as Rodolfo - not acting the role, but living it – creamy, silken smooth, utterly effortless, tear-jerking singing sending chills up my spine and the audience to their feet at final curtain call. All of us who have grown up in the joy of the greatest (and expensive) show on Earth – opera – were very much aware of seeing a rising super-star!!

Living (again not playing) the all-important role of Mimi was Ellie Dehn – like Beczala making her house debut here – who arrives on the scene as Act 1 reaches its climax knocking at the door, losing her key. Dehn came off as one of the most demure, feminine, shy, arresting Mimis that I’ve seen (not telling the world how great she is) presenting rich, resonant, soaring notes very much up to the splendor of Piotr Beczala.

Ellie Dehn replaced the orginally scheduled Anja Harteros, came with experience as Musetta at the Met and Freia in the Los Angeles Opera production of Wagner’s “Das Rheingold”, and will be the Countess in the forthcoming San Francisco Opera production of Mozart’s “Marriage of Figaro”.

[Below: Rodolfo (Piotr Beczala) warms the hands of Mimi (Ellie Dehn); edited image, based on a photograph, courtesy of the San Diego Opera.]

Most particularly lush, colorful and terrific was the Act II Cafe’ Momus scene for sheer operatic joy. The Act opened with the stage crammed – jugglers, musicians, kids, cops, all the town out in Paris on Christmas Eve with huge, spectacular posters of the fabled Moulin Rouge show-posters by French artist extraordinaire Toulouse Lautrec forming the background (San Diego Museum of Art features a giant retrospective of his work later this year).

The Musetta - fabulously presented by Priti Gandhi who lives part-time next door in Del Mar – stole this act. Dressed in a stunning, bright-yellow show-stopper gitup, she dominated the act all the way to the end when the French tricolor is marched out to the cheering mob scene when it ends with Musetta’s portly, antique, top-hat sporting sugar-daddy, Alcindoro (Scott Sikon), being stuck with the bill for the bohemian frolic to the roaring delight of the audience. Bluntly,  I know of no Act in all Italian opera more festively joyous than this!!

[Below: Musetta (Priti Gandhi) is carried on the shoulders of  Colline (Alfred Walker, left) and Schaunard (Malcolm MacKenzie) as Marcello (Jeff Mattsey) follows; edited image, based on a photograph, courtesy of the San Diego Opera.]

The evening’s Marcello was Jeff Mattsey, whose San Diego Opera debut had been in 1995 in the other Bohemian baritone role of Schaunard. Filling out this cast in the delicious, fun roles, are Matthew MacKenzie (Zurga in San Diego Opera’s 2008 production of Bizet’s “Pearl Fishers” and Sharpless in Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly” in 2009, both performances reviewed on this website) as Schaunard, and  Alfred Walker as Colline. Walker debuted here in 2006 in the marvellous production of Handel’s “Julius Caesar” (I go for Baroque .   .   . ), who was Porgy in L. A. ’s wonderful production of Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess”.

Our Musetta, Priti Gandhi, has appeared here in Mozart’s “Magic Flute”, Verdi’s “Otello” and “Aida”, and most recently, in last season’s gritty (and fabulous) showing of Britten’s “Peter Grimes”. She was also seen recently in the Los Angeles Opera production of Weill’s “Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny” (now available on a terrific L. A. Opera DVD).

Besides singing the role of Alcindoro in Act II, Scott Sikon earlier played the soon-to-be-drunk landlord Benoit. Sikon debuted here in Britten’s “Albert Herring” in 1991, having graced San Diego Opera’s stage in 20+ roles, as well as the stages at Houston Grand Opera, New York City Opera, et al.

[Below: Alcindoro (Scott Sikon, left) is annoyed that his mistress, Musetta (Priti Gandhi) is carrying on a raucous conversation with her former lover Marcello (Jeff Mattsey) at the next table; edited image, based on a photograph, courtesy of the San Diego Opera.]

E. Loren Meeker made her San Diego Opera stage director debut. But she is hardly a rookie here, having been Assistant Director at San Diego Opera between 2005 and 2007, and  with similar staffing assignments at Chicago Lyric Opera and Houston Grand Opera.

Presiding over the orchestra with distinction was Conductor Karen Keltner, whose spirited performance  won tumultuous applause at opera’s end.

We’ve all seen many reviews of “La Boheme”, but one of the most famous – and my favorite – is that by Puccini’s long-time publisher G Ricordi – collaborator, critic, helper, etc who worked with Puccini in the three years of “La Boheme’s” gestation as well as Puccini’s prior operas, writing, “Dear Puccini, if this time you have not succeeded in hitting the nail squarely on the head, I will change my profession and sell salami.”  No, he  didn’t change professions .   .     .  !!

[Below: the lovers Mimi (Ellie Dehn) and Rodolfo (Piotr Beczala), reconciled at the end of Act III, leave together; edited image, based on a Cory Weaver photograph, courtesy of the San Diego Opera.]

This Trio – Beczala, Dehn and Gandhi – were nothing short of fabulous. What a Season starter!!

Just a final factoid of interest to California opera-lovers:La Boheme’s first American debut (April 1897) was in (envelope please .  .   . ) - Los Angeles! I confirmed this with Puccini’s granddaughter in Santa Barbara last year at a Santa Barbara Opera gala in her honor!! (See: Puccini’s 150th Birthday Party Takes Place as Santa Barbara Firestorm Rages – November 15, 2008.)

For William’s reviews of Piotr Beczala’s Tamino and Rodolfo at San Francisco Opera, see: The Magic Scarfe: “Zauberfloete” in San Francisco – October 13, 2007 and The Luisotti “Boheme” in San Francisco – November 22, 2008.

The “Tosca” production was clearly one championed by its conductor Patrick Summers.  It was another triumph for the successful team of Conductor Summers and soprano Patricia Racette, who appeared together for Santa Fe Opera’s summer season in Morevac’s “The Letter” (See 21st Century Maugham: Morevac, Racette Reopen “The Letter” in Santa Fe – July 29, 2009) and were colleagues again in September for all three operas of Puccini’s Trittico.

(For the first of the triple bill of operas, see: Gavanelli, Racette, Jovanovich In Rousing “Tabarro” at San Francisco Opera – September 15, 2009, for the second see: Racette, Podles in San Francisco Opera’s Musically Compelling “Suor Angelica” – September 15, 2009, and for the third, see: Gavanelli’s Commanding Presence as San Francisco Opera’s Gianni Schicchi – September 15, 2009).

Racette has an extraordinarily varied repertory of roles, but has lately spent much time with the Puccini heroines, for which her spinto voice and stellar acting talents make her a natural. Some of her achievements with the Tuscan maestro’s music have been chronicled here (three separate reviews of her Butterfly can be accessed through hyperlinks at Racette, Ventre Impress in Zambello-Inspired “Butterfly” at San Diego Opera- May 20, 2009 and a review of her Magda is at Marta Domingo’s Reconceptualization of “Rondine” Returns to L. A. – June 7, 2008).

Now that her Tosca has been added to her Puccini collection of characters (Musetta in “La Boheme” is also in her current repertory), and she has prepared Manon Lescaut (although the opera company where she was to make her role debut had to withdraw the opera when the economy forced a reduced season), the most obviously missing of the high energy Puccini characters written for the soprano voice – Minnie in “Fanciulla del West” –  has to be under consideration.

Those who had the fortune to see the great soprano Dorothy Kirsten performing Puccini will know it is a compliment to suggest that Racette is perhaps the contemporary artist most obviously carrying on the Puccini legacy that Kirsten and her mentor, Grace Moore, exemplified in the early- and mid- 20th century.

[Below: Patricia Racette is Tosca; edited image, based on a Felix Sanchez photograph, courtesy of the Houston Grand Opera.]

The new production abounds with eccentricities, even though it successfully presented Puccini’s story. With Bunny Chirstie’s sets and costumes (including Tosca in a second act gown with bustle), it proved to be a striking theatrical experience.

The most obvious departure from Puccini’s stage directions is the use of what I call a “puzzle box” unit set – one that attempts to use a single unit set for several different scenes, even though the composer expected that each scene would have its own unique sets. Sometimes this works well enough (Charismatic S. F. “Tannhauser” – October 12, 2007.) Sometimes its results invite ridicule (See Vargas, Podles Brilliant in Puzzle Box “Ballo”: Houston – November 2, 2007 and Hampson Transcends Quirky “Macbeth” in S. F. – November 18, 2007.)

That unit set is obscured at the beginning of each act by one of three forecurtains, successively stained by blood pools and spatter of increasing amounts each act. At the beginning of each act the character who sings that act’s first line runs onstage in front of the forecurtain and in the audience’s view, pulls it down. (Who the characters are might make an interesting opera trivia question, with the answers being, successively, Angelotti, Scarpia and the young shepherd – or, in another departure by this production from tradition – a mysterious spirit assigned the shepherd’s vocal lines.)

The unit set consists of the same spacious room for each act, one that uses the vertical spaces of the Houston Grand Opera’s Brown Theater stage, with a row of clerestory windows ringing the three visible walls.  Of course, since the three scenes are supposed to be a cathedral, the headquarters of Rome’s chief of police, and a place of execution atop the Castel Sant’Angelo, the set is dressed differently for each act. The room has a very high ceiling with a hole it, whose purpose we will understand in the third act.

The first act has a particularly striking vertical feature – Cavaradossi’s scaffolding. His portrait of Mary Magdalene is both massive and in fragments – the lips at one level and each eye on a different one. Until Angelotti arrives, the painting is covered at each level.

Some productions of Tosca have been criticized for de-emphasizing or eliminating such religious features as Tosca’s ritual of arranging candles and a crucifix around Scarpia’s body to close the second act. But Caird moves in the other direction, adding some religious elements, including religious mysticism, beyond those Puccini expected.

Summers arrival in the pit conjured the famous chords of Scarpia’s theme, while Robert Gleadow’s Angelotti ran in front of the footlights to tear down the first act forecurtain, to remove the cloths covering Cavaradossi’s painting (of his sister) and to find his pre-arranged hiding place in the Attavanti chapel.

In the first aria of the piece, Alexei Dolgov sang Recondita armonia with a beautifully toned lyric tenor voice, with enough vocal weight to impress as Cavaradossi, but the flexibility and expressiveness that makes one look forward to hearing Dolgov’s Donizetti heroes. Dolgov’s Cavaradossi becomes aware of Angelotti’s presence and makes the fatal decision (ultimately resulting in an assassination, an execution and two suicides) to help him.

[Below: Mario Cavaradossi (Alexey Dolgov, left) assists the fugitive Angelotti (Robert Gleadow); edited image, based on a Felix Sanchez photograph, courtesy of the Houston Grand Opera.]

Racette exhibited some obvious vocal discomfort following her entrance (no longer noticeable as the act progressed), but charmingly portrayed a youthful, coquettish lover, as well as an art critic (Cavaradossi’s paper sketch for the larger portrait of Marie Magdalene is soon ripped into shreds).

Then Aceto’s Scarpia arrives in a long black coat and white shirt, surrounded by his operatives (Shon Sims earning his induction into the fraternity of sinister Spolettas). In an arresting image, Scarpia ascends to the highest level of Cavaradossi’s scaffolding where he shares his lustful thoughts with the audience while the church processional sings the Te Deum.

[Below: Baron Scarpia (Raymond Aceto, at the top landing of scaffolding at left) sings the Te Deum as the church processional begins in the first act of Tosca in Houston Grand Opera's John Caird-Bunny Christie unit set for "Tosca"; edited image, based on a Felix Sanchez photograph, courtesy of the Houston Grand Opera.]

Aceto, whom this website regards as one of the best of the current generation of basso cantantes has, with the encouragement of Conductor Patrick Summers, taken on a role that lies higher than what a basso would be expected to sing. Although not without precedent (I saw Giorgio Tozzi perform the role to the Tosca of Magda Olivero in 1978), Scarpia’s high tessitura is unusual terrain for a bass voice.

Aceto is an effective actor and he connected well with the Houston audience. But, as I noted in a review of his Escamillo (see: Impressive Debuts in L. A. Opera “Carmen” – December 6, 2008), I believe performances in basso roles will be his destiny, rather than his excursions into the baritone repertory. (My recent interview with Raymond Aceto will be published on the website later this month.).

Skipping the step of confessing contrition for his sins, Aceto’s Scarpia then takes communion at the hands of an archbishop, then dons his black hat and leaves.

[Below: Baron Scarpia (Raymond Aceto) takes communion; edited image, based on a Felix Sanchez photograph, courtesy of the San Francisco Opera.]

Aceto’s Scarpia, returning to the footlights for Act II, pulls down another forecurtain to reveal his offices, which, according to Caird’s notes, are supposed to reflect Scarpia’s interest in collecting (stealing) Roman artwork. Crates are everywhere, giving one the impression that we are in a warehouse room adjoining the loading dock of a Wal-Mart-supermarket complex. One of the large statues reminds one of the Castel Sant’Angelo’s Avenging Angel, which, as we will find, is nowhere to be seen in this production’s Act III.

No one plays Scarpia as a nice guy, but Aceto’s police chief was a bit more of a thug than the debonair aristocrat one often sees. When Spoletta arrives with news of his pursuit of Angelotti to Cavaradossi’s villa, Scarpia offers him wine, but when he reveals that Angelotti could not be found, Scarpia knocks the wine out of his hand and cold-cocks him.

Scarpia’s torture chamber, unlike other productions, is not hidden in an adjoining room, but is set up right in the middle of his offices, where the movements of both the torturers and tortured are visible through its slatted walls. The tortured Cavaradossi, returned to the main office to be a pawn in Scarpia’s mind-game with Tosca, overhears Sciarrone’s disconcerting news that previous reports that the Austrian General Melas had defeated Napoleon at Marengo were premature, and that the defeated Austrians were conceding much of Northern Italy to the French.

Cavaradossi’s “Vittoria, vittoria” is, in the Rome of the restored monarchy, treasonous, and gives Scarpia the justification to execute him immediately.

[Below: the prisoner Cavaradossi (Alexey Dolgov) celebrates Napoleon's victory in Lombardy; edited image, based on a Felix Sanchez photograph, courtesy of the Houston Grand Opera.]

Clearly, the opportunity – even the obligation for a Roman chief of police in a counter-revolutionary state – to immediately conduct Cavaradossi’s summary execution, provides Scarpia with a strategic advantage in his seduction of Tosca. There is a another element of the Aceto Scarpia. All of of Scarpia’s phrases are sung lyrically. When he sings that he has waited for Tosca always, it is sung as passionately and as beautifully as any Italian love song.

Lyricism is a feature that permeates this “Tosca”. In the moment that an incensed Tosca realizes that she is being propositioned by Scarpia, most Toscas snarl “Quanto?”, as Maria Callas did, but Racette sings it at the pitch (C above middle C) that Puccini designated. Of course, what follows is one of the greatest of the Puccini soprano arias, Vissi d’arte, and Racette sang it spectacularly.

[Below: Floria Tosca (Patricia Racette) pleads for Baron Scarpia (Raymond Aceto) to save her lover's life; edited image, based on a Felix Sanchez photograph, courtesy of the Houston Grand Opera. ]

Many “Tosca” watchers look to see at which point soprano and stage director determine that Tosca realizes that Scarpia’s dinner knife is within her reach. Racette and Caird make it a last minute, impulsive act, as she is refilling a glass of wine to calm her nerves. If Racette is showing her to be impulsive, she is also thorough, stabbing Aceto’s Scarpia in the neck as well as in the torso. Nor do Caird and Racette ignore the religious images at the end. Scarpia dies with arms outstretched in a cross. She takes a crucifix from around her neck and places it on his body, and collects some offertory candles to place alongside his body.

As the room darkens, one of the statues high atop the crates and boxes begins to glow. It is a representation of the Virgin who appears to beckon her through the doors that lead from the scene of the police chief’s assassination.

The third act begins with the ritual of pulling down the forecurtain, this time by Eliza Masewicz as the “Young Girl”, who in this production replaces the shepherd. She goes to the far wall of the unit set, where a large square opening is visible. The hole in the set’s ceiling is the aperture through which a half dozen hangmen’s nooses have been dropped, one of which stretches all the way to the set’s floor.

Since shepherds would not normally wander around a prison courtyard, which this set will soon appear to represent, one soon realizes that this is no shepherd. (Masewicz, who is indeed a young girl with a bright voice, was Peaseblossom in Houston Grand Opera’s 2009 production of Britten’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream.)

Cavaradossi is led onstage, and then also a group of a half dozen companion prisoners, many of whom he knows and greets with affection. We see that they have been assembled to watch the hanging of Angelotti’s body (that Scarpia ordered in Act II), and it is pulled upward all the way to the ceiling, where it swings back and forth (a bit distractingly). That ceremony completed, all of the other prisoners are led away.

Dolgov’s Cavaradossi sings E lucevan le stelle, one of the tenor anthems. Dolgov’s expressiveness and soft, luscious sound made it clear that here is yet another great operatic talent. When Tosca arrives and explains how the “mock execution” is to work, Dolgov straightens out his fingers, clearly signalling the audience of his skepticism. The firing squad having left, Tosca discovers the grim truth.

[Below: Tosca (Patricia Racette) weeps over the body of Mario Cavaradossi (Alexey Dolgov); edited image, based on a Felix Sanchez photograph, courtesy of the Houston Grand Opera.]

Scarpia’s death discovered, as Spoletta and company attempt to corner Tosca, the Young Girl reappears in the large square opening in the back wall, and beckons Tosca to join her. Tosca kills herself with a blood-spurting knife wound to the neck and the orchestra, intoning a principal theme of E lucevan le stelle, signals Tosca’s reunification with her lover Mario.

“Tosca” is great theater, and the Caird staging was insightful and illuminating, even though one suspects that much of his innovative thinking about how to present the piece will be confined to this production. The singing of Racette and Dolgov was superb, and the cantante Scarpia another of Aceto’s impressive gallery of characterizations.

All performances of the Houston Grand Opera “Tosca” are completely sold out, and deservedly so.