It is barely possible to conceive of a singingactress of genius who might persuade us of the existence of a woman who is passionate and impulsive; who swings vertiginously from one emotional extreme to another telling herself that sexual intoxication is “love;” who has been, perhaps by reason of a restricted and restrictive upbringing, both sexually pent-up and bereft of any means of assessing possible male partners; and who with her natural “feline” female endowment is capable of carrying out all of Fedora’s actions (including an ongoing attract/repel ensnarement with no residue of conscience until much too late)—and who might find some means of disclosing all this to us without much help at all from her music . . .  and still gain our basic sympathy. Not likely, but never say never. Loris, despite his knack for carrying on cheerfully while a murderer on the lam, has an easier time of it, only because most of his music is emotionally potent enough if sung well. He can benefit from the “If it’s Nilsson and Corelli, I don’t care” exculpation we noted in the case of Calaf v. our moral sensibilities, though heard here in a lower court. Still, we note that one thing that happened in the time of verismo is that violent passion, passionate violence, lacking  any component of nobility or attempted moral guidance and at first attributed only to the poor, the oppressed, or the simply marginal (strolling players, for instance), was soon pushed up into the higher bourgeoisie, the aristocracy, and finally royalty, and that this parallels the way that the strengths and weaknesses of the related singingacting styles were now made to serve the musical and dramatic requirements (and moral visions) of their predecessors. This unmasked some truth. And lost sight of some aspiration.

The pièces bien faites of Scribe and Sardou were the theatrical reflection of the age’s fascination with mechanical devices, with how preformed pieces could be fit together into something that worked, and the workings themselves left in view as objects of admiring attention. Hence a drama of “situations,” not “human characters,” reliant entirely on extraordinary, erotically charged personalities to lend it an illusion of life. As entertainment, fun for a while, and undeniably gainful. Even Duse, though she privately loathed it, kept Fedora in her repertory to the end, because it sold. Similarly, the “arrangements” were tokens of modernity—of the new speed and convenience of communication and transportation, the faster and longer reach of the “arm of the law”— and as such congratulated audiences on their attendance to such miracles while allowing them moments of pastoral nostalgia over what was slipping away. The attraction of all this for an opera composer of the Gay Nineties is understandable. But when the composer’s talent lies wholly in other, less modern directions, and when what is “modern” in compositional terms is the concealment of structural mechanics, things are not apt to turn out for the best. There is about enough in Fedora to make for a CD of highlights that would give the impression of an opera worth doing: from Act 1, Fedora’s monologue (necessary to set her up) and Cirillo’s narrative; from Act 2, “Amor ti vieta,” perhaps the latter part of the “Interlude,” and the final scene from Loris’ return; and from Act 3, everything from De Siriex’s scene to the end. Then there’s all the rest, unfortunately.

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For this renewal, the Met has turned to David McVicar and his customary design associates, Charles Edwards (sets), Brigitte Reiffenstuel (costumes), and Adam Silverman (lights). They are long settled in as the go-to house team, rather like John Dexter and his collaborators in the ’70s or the Merrill/O’Hearn duo before that, and obviously are prized by the management for the efficiency and economy of their work and their comfort rating with the company’s core audience. This last is owed primarily to their eschewal of in-your-face postmodern conceptualism, a choice for which I, too, am grateful, even when it is detectable only as a negative virtue, as with their Don Carlo. Of their work seen in New York, the Fedora production resembles most closely their Adriana Lecouvreur, another opera of verismo-ish style (and of bien faite derivation, though of earlier origin and much more successfully adapted). Stepping over the low-ambitions bar set for us by the director, I can say that the show looks spiffy enough and is on the whole well enough staged. So I will pass over some quibbles with color palette and costumes to address my one major objection, and that is to McVicar’s ruinous habit of dragging everything out for public inspection—often, with a fiendish exactitude, the very things whose theatrical value, if any, lies in remaining unseen. In Act 1, he puts Vladimiro’s bedroom (upstage, center) behind a transparency. The attempts of the doctors and attending persons to save Vladimiro’s life are thus periodically on view, while in the foreground Fedora’s efforts to ascertain what’s going on and to control her feelings, the comings and goings related to the interrogation and transcription of testimony, the sending for a prescription—all the seen things that are meant to play out against the suspense of the unseen, which is suggested by the body language of the persons passing in and out of the room—are put in the shade by the fading in and out of the Great Moments in Medicine tableau. When it’s on view, what are we going to watch? In Act 2, the shade of Vladimiro (nothing spooky, just a gentleman who can dance, like all the others) passes across the action from time to time, and again assumes the up-center position on the terraced set during the “interlude”—all the emotional baggage Fedora has been lugging with her from St. Petersburg, brought to the brim in this moment, externalized, the Princess left with nothing left to do but gawk, and the audience directed to watch him, not her. I’m not saying it’s an easy task in a big opera house. But that’s where the modern singingactress, with some acquaintance of pantomimic technique in relation to the music and an awareness of the space she must conquer, might most fully capture us. The second act also presents the requirement of playing off the crucial downstage exchanges between Fedora and Loris against the spectacle of the presumably great Luzinski’s virtuosic offerings for the guests, and of sustaining the ironic tension between something of central dramatic importance and something incidental to the point of frivolousness. The specified antechamber, I would have thought, could have been of use here. But there wasn’t one. There was only the round settee, out in the open room, behind whose column the principals cowered while the concert, once again upstage and elevated, went forward. This arrangement succeeded neither visually nor acoustically.

It was the educated guess of one of my students that this production was intended as a vehicle for Anna Netrebko. I recall no announcement or rumor, but that makes sense, especially as a continuance of the partnering of Netrebko with Piotr Becała, as in Manon and Adriana. This role is less of a stretch for Yoncheva than last season’s Élisabeth in Don Carlos. But the progression of her voice as I have heard it, from Violetta to Luisa Miller (her most appealing work, I thought) to Élisabeth and now Fedora, has not been encouraging. The timbre remains attractive, the pitch range and intonation are sufficient, and the voice’s calibre will serve for parts of up to what I would term a light spinto nature. In her Fedora I heard welcome efforts to engage the chest register with greater strength, though not yet in a very vibrant way. However, the voice betrayed a slow beat in sustained phrases at less than a full-out forte, which compromised her attempts to register with “O grandi occhi lucenti” and other contemplative passages.This improved with the more extended writing later on, where higher pitch and louder dynamics bring in the firm resistance lacking further down—her version of the typical contemporary soprano alignment problem, which leaves her without the ability to etch in telling verbal inflections and shifts of color in the midrange. As for her physical acting, William Winter would have found nothing to distress him. She has spoken of her wish to contact Fedora’s “vulnerability.” If by this she means locating the insecurities and nervosity that give rise to Fedora’s extreme behavior and “feline” qualities, I’m with her. But the behavior and the qualities still have to be there, or there’s no impetus for all these happenings. She certainly looked regally handsome, but in a constrained way, and the bustled gown of Act 2 gave her something of the dowager’s gait and posture. The last scene was well staged, and she did her best work there. There is more to this talent than is getting out, I believe.