UK Edition
Samuel Barber's opera Vanessa: from Pulitzer to obscurity… and beyond
The prize-winning opera fell out of favour. Now it is getting a second chance at Glyndebourne, says Rupert Christiansen
Since its first performance in 1938, Samuel Barber’s meditative elegy Adagio for Strings has gradually established itself as one of the most familiar and accessible works in the modern orchestral repertoire. It was played at the funerals of John F Kennedy and Albert Einstein and it commemorated the victims of 9/11 at the Last Night of the BBC Proms in 2001. It is a favourite on the Classic FM charts, and has cropped up repeatedly in films – in David Lynch’s The Elephant Man and Oliver Stone’s Platoon, for example – as well as in the background score of too many television series to mention.
And yet, despite The New York Times estimating in its obituary of Barber in 1981, that “no other American composer has ever enjoyed such early, such persistent and such long-lasting acclaim”, the survival of much of his mature post-war work has hung in the balance.
Take his first opera, Vanessa. Composed by Barber to a libretto by his partner Gian Carlo Menotti, its opening was greeted ecstatically at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in January 1958, acclaimed by the critic Winthrop Sargeant as “the finest and most truly ‘operatic’ opera ever written by an American”. A Pulitzer Prize ensued, and Maria Callas must have kicked herself for turning down an offer to create the title role (it went instead to Sena Jurinac, who withdrew after becoming sick in rehearsal, the chalice passing finally to the magnificent Eleanor Steber).
But that summer its fortunes began to wane. At the Salzburg Festival, the European press, freshly infatuated with the more rigorous challenges posed by Stockhausen and Boulez, lambasted it as a piece of reactionary schlock and ascribed its success to partisan Americans filling the stalls. Vanessa wilted, but since the turn of the millennium it has slowly mounted a recovery, fuelled by a recording made in 2004 (conducted by Leonard Slatkin, with Christine Brewer and Susan Graham) as well as stagings in Wexford, Santa Fe, Berlin and Frankfurt.
In this country, however – aside from student and reduced versions and a concert performance at the Barbican – the production that opened at Glyndebourne this month will constitute its first fully professional British staging. Has Vanessa’s moment come at last?
The plot is original to Menotti. Vanessa, a grand middle-aged lady, has been living in isolation with her mother, and niece Erika, in a remote northern country house. She awaits the return, after 20 years’ absence, of her former lover Anatol. But Anatol is dead, and the young man who appears is his son and spitting image, also called Anatol and a bounder. Vanessa is shocked but fascinated and infatuated. Young Anatol secretly seduces and impregnates Erika; distrusting him, she turns down his offer of marriage. Instead he agrees to marry Vanessa. Erika is appalled and aborts the baby. Vanessa, uncomprehending, leaves for Paris with Anatol. Erika is left waiting.
It is a scenario full of resonances. One can sense Ibsen’s influence. Menotti acknowledged that Isak Dinesen’s Seven Gothic Tales made an amorphous contribution to the pervading atmosphere of mystery, gloom and ennui. Daphne du Maurier’s novel Rebecca and Miss Havisham’s hold over Estella in Great Expectations are further points of reference, as is the voyeuristic exploration of women’s emotional psychology that male dramatists such as Tennessee Williams and film directors such as Douglas Sirk and Alfred Hitchcock made during the Fifties. Much is left ambiguous. Could Erika be Vanessa’s daughter, or Anatol her son? What future can there be for Vanessa with Anatol? Is something deeply encoded within, or is a point being made – and if so, what is it?
To shed any light on such questions, one must look to Menotti and Barber’s own lives – their relationship being a nexus in a tight network of homosexuals that extended throughout the mid-20th-century classical music scene and embraced Leonard Bernstein, Marc Blitzstein, Virgil Thomson, Aaron Copland, Ned Rorem, John Cage and Dimitri Mitropoulos.
Barber and Menotti had met as students at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. Music was their only bond, because neither their backgrounds nor their personalities were well matched. Menotti came from a leisured, hedonistic Italian background – he may have drawn on his family home in Cadegliano Viconago on the Alpine Swiss border when imagining the setting of Vanessa. Exuberant, convivial and charming, he was attracted to his opposite in the shy, serious, orderly Samuel Barber, son of a New England doctor and reared in a solemnly puritanical environment.
Although the pair remained some sort of couple for more than 30 years, building and inhabiting a rather marvellous house in upstate New York called Capricorn, theirs was a turbulent and conflicted union. Broadly speaking, Menotti played around, Barber stayed at home. Barber composed slowly and meticulously, whereas Menotti was facile, prolific and adept at self-promotion; crucially, he had written eight operas – including the hugely popular Amahl and the Night Visitors – before Barber had written so much as a note of Vanessa, and Barber was fiercely resentful of his instant éclat.
Part of Barber’s problem was his failure to find a librettist – he variously negotiated with Dylan Thomas, Stephen Spender and James Agee and even pondered an adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire. Finally he turned to his partner, who came up with a story that almost tauntingly refracted explosive tensions in the Capricorn ménage caused by Menotti’s philanderings and in particular the disruptive effect of a bisexual young poet called Robert “Kinch” Horan.
It appears both Menotti and Barber were in love with Horan, who took to the bottle before disappearing, making demands for money, then reappearing. Barber was also jealous of Menotti’s infatuation with the conductor Thomas Schippers, who in the Sixties would edge him out of Menotti’s affections.
All this confusion finds its way into Vanessa, where so much is unspoken and secretive relationships lack a clear moral compass, against a background of loneliness, disappointment and frustration. Yet Barber’s score is scarcely enervated or morose: instead it has a late romantic intensity sometimes reminiscent of Richard Strauss (the final reflective quintet is clearly a homage to Der Rosenkavalier’s trio), offering grandly scaled arias for both Vanessa (“Do not utter a word”) and Erika (“Must the winter come so soon?”) as well as some fetching dance music for a ballroom scene. Charged with lush melody and a richly chromatic orchestration, this is music that communicates immediately without aggressive modernisms.
Barber’s end was miserable; with the failure of his second major opera Antony and Cleopatra and Vanessa sinking into obscurity, he became a depressive alcoholic and died in 1981 at the age of 70. Menotti decamped to Scotland, where he set up home with an actor and figure skater Chip Phelan and his wife, dying in 2007, aged 95.
But the wheel of fortune continues to turn. Menotti’s once ubiquitous music is now seldom heard, whereas several of Barber’s works – for example, the Violin Concerto and the cantata Knoxville: Summer of 1915 as well as Adagio for Strings – have established themselves as classics of the American repertory. Sixty years after its premiere, we have finally been given a chance to judge Vanessa fairly.