There’s a chill in the air this month on NSO Showcase. It may be June, but we are featuring a January 2025 Kennedy Center performance of Samuel Barber’s wintry opera Vanessa, part of the National Symphony Orchestra’s “Opera in Concert” series. As music director Gianandrea Noseda explained, “I have a special love for Vanessa because I think that it is one of the most successfully written in the opera repertoire of the 20th century. Barber was an incredibly skilled composer--in the way he used the voices. We have a spectacular lineup of soloists... a cast that you will wish to see in any opera house in the world, we will have here on the stage of the Kennedy Center.”
Indeed, the cast features Nicole Heaston as Vanessa, J’Nai Bridges as Erika, Matthew Polenzani as Anatol, Susan Graham as the Old Baroness and Thomas Hampson as the Old Doctor. They are joined by the University of Maryland Concert Choir, Jason Max Ferdinand, Artistic Director. The concert was recorded and released on the NSO’s own recording label.
When Samuel Barber decided to write an opera, his partner, Gian Carlo Menotti, himself a veteran opera composer, volunteered to write the libretto. Menotti took inspiration from Isak Dinesen’s Seven Gothic Tales, an eerie, atmospheric collection of short stories. There’s also a suggestion of the art of Edward Gorey (think of the introduction to Mystery on PBS).
Here’s how Menotti described his concept of Vanessa:
This is the story of two women, Vanessa and Erika, caught in the central dilemma which faces every human being: whether to fight for one's ideals to the point of shutting oneself off from reality, or compromise with what life has to offer, even lying to oneself for the mere sake of living. Like a sullen Greek chorus, a third woman (the old Grandmother) condemns by her very silence the refusal first of Vanessa, then of Erika, to accept the bitter truth that life offers no solution except its own inherent struggle. When Vanessa, in her final eagerness to embrace life, realizes this truth, it is perhaps too late.
The aristocratic Vanessa, her niece Erika and her mother, the old Baroness, live together in a mansion in the barren landscape of an unnamed Northern country. The year is 1905, and Vanessa has been waiting for 20 years for her lover, Anatol, to come back to her. One day, the women receive word that Anatol is finally returning. “He has come, he has come!” sings Vanessa. It turns out that the visitor is Anatol’s son, a young fortune hunter, who has arrived following the death of his father and who manages to seduce Erika and marry Vanessa. After Vanessa and Anatol Jr. head for the excitement of Paris, Erika is left in her wintry prison to await her own deliverance.
The opera premiered at the Met in 1958, (the first American opera to appear there in 11 years) and was highly successful, earning Barber the Pulitzer Prize. European audiences were less enthusiastic. They found it too old-fashioned for the modernist era, and critics derided it “an opera for the public and not for intellectuals.”
In subject matter and music, Barber’s work is plenty modern and explores issues we are still wrestling with today. Favorite moments include Erika’s aria “Must the Winter come so Soon,” Vanessa’s “He has come, he has come!” and “Do not utter a word.” The final Quintet, “To Leave, to break” is Mozartian, with the five characters singing their individual emotions. The orchestral writing is lush, with a late Romantic sensibility and touches of cinematic splendor.
Just as Samuel Barber’s “Knoxville Summer of 1915” evokes our childhood memories of a perfect summer evening, Vanessa has us asking “must the winter come so soon?” in the midst of June. No wonder Maestro Noseda told us “Barber is a giant...I think that [he]is one of the greatest composers of the 20th century. ...he could always reach the heart and the mind of people...so I have a special love for this composer.”
NSO Showcase airs Wednesday evening, June 3rd at 9:00 and streams on demand for the rest of the month here.
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