Richard Bratby

Great expectations | 9 August 2018

A beautiful, thought-provoking production of an opera that toys cat-like with your intellect even as it tears at your heart

‘Outside this house the world has changed. Life is swifter than before; there is no time for idle gestures.’ Anatol, in Samuel Barber’s opera Vanessa, doesn’t pretend to be a romantic hero. The son of Vanessa’s old flame, he’s arrived by night at the remote mansion where she’s waited for 20 years with her elderly mother and niece Erika. He seduces the niece, beguiles the aunt and alienates the grandmother, but at no point is he anything less than honest. ‘I cannot offer you eternal love, for we have learned today such words are lies’, he sings, and Barber, remarkably, takes him at face value. Anatol’s music is lyrical and open; a shaft of light in Barber and his librettist Menotti’s claustrophobic world. It won’t be remotely enough to carry the day.

Nothing in Vanessa is quite as predictable as its lustrous surface suggests. It was premièred at the New York Metropolitan Opera in 1958, and won a Pulitzer Prize. But outside that house the world really had changed. Transferred with fanfare to the Salzburg Festival, Vanessa was frozen out by local critics in a spasm of anti-Americanism. It’s never had a full production in the UK, though when Alexandra Coghlan saw it at Wexford in 2016 she judged it ‘the real deal’, and I’ve been excited all summer by the prospect of Keith Warner’s new production at Glyndebourne — effectively its UK première.

The good news is that it’s magnificent. Barber’s music defines the whole thing, and imagine the sonic equivalent of a painting by John Piper — the angular ink outlines overlaid with sudden, lurid washes of lemon-yellow or blood-red, and behind it all those lowering, storm-swept skies. It’s as brazenly jagged and mid-century modern as you like; but it can clear in an instant.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in