Samuel Barber, Vanessa (1958)

I want to watch more American operas. This is because--as is well-known--I am extremely patriotic, and it's interesting to see how my own dang country (RIGHT OR WRONG) has treated this artform that I love. So here's one of our better-known examples. Apparently it was neglected for a long time, but it's coming back into fashion a bit these days.

So it takes place in "a northern country" which seems like it has to be the UK, but which is not specified. In a manor house there live in seclusion Vanessa, her mother the baroness, and her niece Erika. She's been endlessly pining for her twenty-years-past lover, Anatol. It turns out he's dead, but never fear! His son, also named Anatol, shows up instead. He has a one-night stand with Erika but then starts a romance with Vanessa. What will be the fallout from this?

The characters are complicated, and somewhat opaque. It's often unclear what they're thinking or what they really want--which, to be clear, is the point; it's not a criticism. You really see how a good libretto can help bump an opera up a notch (though it's sometimes hard for me to tell how "good" a foreign-language libretto is, in literary terms). This one is by Gian Carlo Menotti, Barber's husband and a composer in his own right of numerous short operas that are still performed (probably the most notable being the charming Christmas piece Amahl and the Night Visitors). It's poetic and adds a lot of mystery and intrigue. This production imagines the opera's vague setting as a fifties-Hollywood-style thing (though there's stuff here that would never have flown in post-Code Hollywood) (All the female roles are played by statuesque blondes, eg.), which to me seems just perfect: even though there aren't any crimes here per se, it has that Hitchcock feel to it.

The music: I like it a lot. There are only a few parts that really stand out (most notably the last-act quintet ("To leave, to break," MY GOODNESS), but it all serves the story and thus works. I think this deserves to be performed more often. Alas, Barber only wrote two other operas: the even-rarelier-performed Antony and Cleopatra(which was considered a huge disaster at its premier) and the nine-minute A Hand of Bridge (which you can watch in a bunch of different performances on youtube--look it up; it's good).