In a conversation with an anonymous interviewer on the same “deeper dive” page of the WTF website, Ashworth makes outlandish claims on Vanessa‘s behalf, e. g., that the score is “up there with the greatest of all time. . .  Why isn’t it the Great American Opera? Or more critically, one of the Great Operas, period?” The thought is extended in the promotional copy elsewhere on the page, which explains that “its unique blend of gothic creep and fiercely emotional music did not jive (sic) with the overly academic tastes of the time.” The time during which Floyd’s Susannah, Ward’s The Crucible, Moore’s The Ballad of Baby Doe, Blitzstein’s Regina, Weill’s Street Scene and Lost in the Stars, and Menotti’s own The Consul and Amahl  were establishing themselves with wider audiences and somehow surviving the strictures of academic tastes? Those operas do not have Vanessa’s pretensions to grand opera size, or its rarefied stylistic reach. None of them is camp. All are better operas than Vanessa.

The conclusions I have drawn from this experience are three. 1) Vanessa should be gently reinterred, with all due graveside honors. For the curious, there are the recordings.^(I) 2) The artistic directors of Heartbeat Opera should apply their unquestionable talent, dedication, and inventiveness to interpretations of great operas that respect and strengthen their artistic integrity, not undermine them. Of course, if they cannot extrude the camp element from their serious, sincere selves, that may not be possible, in which case they should disband before inflicting further cultural damage. 3) If the Williamstown Theatre Festival cannot find a way to accommodate Heartbeat or other similar imports in the listenable acoustics and relative comfort of the ’62 Center, it should stay out of the opera business.

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NEXT TIME: The 2025-26 Metropolitan Opera season gets underway in just over two weeks. As has been the pattern in recent years, most of what interests me in terms of opera, production, and casting occurs from midseason on—the first, in fact, in November. That would be a revival of the now-ancient Schenk/Schneider-Siemssen production of Strauss’s Arabella, an opera I’ve not been able to get very close to, despite much beautiful music. I will try to dig in a little farther this time. Later, there will be a new production of Bellini’s I Puritani, then the new Tristan, a Eugene Onegin revival, and a few individual performances to check out and perhaps write about. Long gaps between some of these events, so I’ll be turning attention to recordings, starting with Marston’s Parsifal in the famous (and famously elusive) 1938 broadcast that is our only memento (except for studio excerpts) of Lauritz Melchior and Kirsten Flagstad together as Parsifal and Kundry. Other Parsifal performances, in part or in whole, will surely figure in. I’ll set October 10 as the date for that.

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