Barber at the Met

In a nameless northern country, in a mansion like a padded hearse, a "lady of great beauty" sat winter after snowy winter waiting for the man she loved. The great gates were barred, the chandeliers were dimmed, and all through the drafty house the mirrors were draped against the reflected evidence of her advancing age.

This faded Victorian dreamscape is the setting of Vanessa, first opera by Symphonist (Adagio for Strings] Samuel Barber and the first new American work produced by the Metropolitan Opera in a decade.*

With last week's opening-night audience, at least, it was a direct hit. Composer Barber's Vanessa failed to be intensely moving or to spring any musical or dramatic surprises, but it could still lay claim to being the best U.S. opera yet staged at the Metropolitan.

Living Death. The results might have been even more impressive if the librettist had written the score instead of the book. The librettist (and stage director): Composer Gian Carlo (The Saint of Bleecker Street) Menotti, who writes the words for his own rousing operas, this time undertook to serve as librettist to his longtime friend Sam Barber. Menotti's yarn is like a pulse-bumping 19th century melodrama that lacks the courage of its afflictions. The lover, when he finally arrives, is not the man Vanessa was waiting for, but his son Anatol, a fatally charming young man who promptly seduces Vanessa's niece Erika. From there on the plot seems to thunder toward a traditional deathbed climax: Vanessa falls in love with Anatol, they announce their engagement, and pregnant Erika rushes out into the bitter, stormy night. Yet death and destruction are sidetracked. Though Erika has a miscarriage, she survives her night in the snow; Anatol and the unsuspecting Vanessa depart for a new life in Paris. In a familiar living-death type of ending (recalling Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra and Henry James's Washington Square), the big house is shut again, the mirrors are covered once more, and Erika sits brooding before the fire: "Now it is my turn to wait."

In addition to providing fine flashes of humor and plenty of surefire scenes. Librettist Menotti seems intent on making the point that as soon as a dream is realized it is destroyed; waiting and hoping are the whole of life. Composer Barber, 47, had to do a good deal of waiting himself. Menotti wrote the libretto in intermittent stretches over an 18-month period ("At one point," says Barber, "he left Anatol standing in a drafty doorway in deep winter for months"). Barber himself named the leading character after scanning a What-to-call-your-baby book entitled Name This Child.

Soaring Intensity. To Menotti's tale, Composer Barber fitted a polished, luxuriant score, long on technique but short on fresh ideas. Its chief merits are showy orchestration and dazzling vocal writing, owing much to the knowledge of singing that Barber picked up as a onetime voice student (baritone) at Philadelphia's Curtis Institute. The opera's vocal line is sometimes pale and fragile (Erika's Must the Winter Come So Soon?), sometimes sweetly melodic (Under the Willow Tree), sometimes flaring in a soaring intensity that lifts the characters out of the Gothic web of the plot. For the parting scene in Act IV, Composer Barber wrote a gorgeously colored quintet (To Leave, To Break), as fine as anything in contemporary opera.

The Met's lavish production of Vanessa is wrapped up in a velvet-tufted, purple-and-crimson package by Designer Cecil Beaton, is immensely aided by Dimitri Mitropoulos' luminous conducting. The first-rate cast: Eleanor Steber, who was hurriedly called on several weeks ago to substitute for ailing Soprano Sena Jurinac in the title role; Tenor Nicolai Gedda as Anatol; Baritone Giorgio Tozzi as the old doctor friend of the family; Contralto Regina Resnik as Vanessa's mother. Surprise of the cast: Massachusetts-born, 25-year-old Mezzo-Soprano Rosalind Elias as Erika, who made her Metropolitan Opera debut as one of the Walkueren in 1954, now turns in the production's most moving performance.

Vanessa will be recorded by RCA Victor, will make its next stop at the Salzburg Festival. The work may achieve the even rarer distinction of becoming the first American opera to go into the regular repertory.

*The last one was Bernard Rogers' The Warrior (1947). The Met has produced 19 other U.S. works, none of which has gone into the repertory. The three most successful: Deems Taylor's The King's Henchman (1927) and Peter Ibbetson (1931), and Louis Gruenberg's Emperor Jones (1933).

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