The Mating Game

By Michael Walsh

From Mozart's Don Giovanni to Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress, the figure of the libertine, that politically incorrect swine, has swaggered provocatively through 200 years of operatic history. Cads, bounders and rakehells abound onstage: one thinks not only of the lecherous Don and Tom Rakewell but of Nerone, Pinkerton and Eugene Onegin as well -- moral reprobates who give hardly a second thought to the consequences of their actions.

Now comes the composer-librettist team of Conrad Susa and Philip Littell, who have seized upon Pierre Choderlos de Laclos's 18th century epistolary novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses as a fitting subject for an opera. It is an inspired choice: in the machinating Marquise de Merteuil and the voluptuary Vicomte de Valmont the composer has two soulless soul mates whose knowledge of the ways of love make The Art of War look like a kindergarten training manual. What Susa and Littell have created in The Dangerous Liaisons, now getting its world premiere at the San Francisco Opera, is nothing short of wonderful: a finely wrought near masterpiece that ennobles its characters with music that comes not from the head but from the heart -- hating the sin of licentiousness, but loving the sinner, as all good operas do.

Familiar from its various stage and cinematic incarnations, Liaisons, sung in English, is an extravagant chess match of check and mate -- and mate and mate. The Marquise (mezzo Frederica von Stade, in top form) is an archmanipulator who wields her sensual allure like a double-edged sword, encouraging her lover's worst instincts as she wreaks her revenge on society. Her foil, the unapologetic knave Valmont (the splendid baritone Thomas Hampson), is a cynical womanizer who makes the fatal mistake of falling in love with one of his victims, unwisely and too well. Who is worse? The amoral rake who seduces and abandons without remorse? Or the wily temptress who sends her dark knight on errant missions of the heart? In this telling, the two protagonists not only are equally responsible, they deserve each other, and their fate.

Susa, 59, a painstaking composer probably best known for his delightful 1973 opera Transformations, was delivering orchestrations right up to the dress rehearsal, but the seams don't show. From first note to last, Liaisons is a finely polished work that achieves a French transparency, sparingly invoking Debussy (not Pelleas but Images pour Orchestre). Unabashedly tonal, although hardly reactionary, the score glows with a luminescence too long absent from modern opera, and especially opera in English; for an equal, one must go back to Britten's Death in Venice (1973), which Liaisons resembles musically in many small ways.

The biggest deficiency, and it is a serious one, is that Susa never quite delivers the musical climax that the material demands. It is quite canny to stage simultaneously the death of Valmont and his inamorata, Madame de Tourvel, aptly illustrating their bond beyond the grave. But here, and in the final scene, when Merteuil is snubbed, shunned and ruined by the pox, the music needs to be bolder, richer; the composer must make clear exactly how he feels about what has happened to his characters as, say, Berg does at the end of Wozzeck.

Colin Graham's production, which will be telecast nationally over PBS on Oct. 17, is simple but handsome, relying on mirrors and projections to make its effects. Notable performances by the mostly American cast include Renee Fleming's poignant Tourvel, Mary Mills' tender Cecile (the 15-year-old girl "ruined" by Valmont's depredations) and Johanna Meier's stately Madame de Rosemonde, Valmont's doting aunt. In the pit, Scottish-born Donald Runnicles leads with authority.

In sum, this is another in a series of strong American opera premieres during the past few years, which has also included Philip Glass's The Voyage and William Bolcom's McTeague. San Francisco Opera general director Lotfi Mansouri speaks of sharing Liaisons with the Lyric Opera of Chicago and taking McTeague in return; it is an excellent idea, for both works merit second and third productions, and not just in this country.

American composers, it seems, have rediscovered a few simple principles that their European counterparts, still symbolically poking their fingers in the eye of audiences while happily enjoying their government subsidies, have forgotten. The human voice is attached to a living being; it is not a mechanical instrument. It has a well-defined range within which it (and the listener) is most comfortable; and it is best suited to singing stepwise melodies rather than tunes that leap crazily all over the scale, except for dramatic effect. Honoring these principles is not pandering; it is professionalism, and The Dangerous Liaisons is its glorious expression.