Having accepted the work, Bing had given it every chance of success.^(I) The title role was taken by a long-established house favorite, Eleanor Steber;^(II) that of the tenor antihero, Anatol, by Nicolai Gedda, following shortly on his company debut as Faust; the part of Vanessa’s niece Erika by Rosalind Elias, breaking out of the supporting roles she’d been singing; the Old Doctor by Giorgio Tozzi, his puissant basso cantante then in its youthful prime; and The Old Baroness, Vanessa’s mother, by Regina Resnik, then caught in a supporting-role limbo between her dramatic soprano self and the Klytemnestras and Carmens of her later years. Dimitri Mitropoulos was the conductor, Menotti the director, and Cecil Beaton the designer. The opera was retained in the Met repertory the following season, though for only three performances, and after Barber revised it, making one significant cut (the so-called “Skating Aria”) and re-arranging four acts down into three, the Met brought it back in 1965 with Elias and Tozzi still in place, but with Mary Costa as Vanessa, John Alexander as Anatol and Blanche Thebom as the Old Baroness, and with William Steinberg replacing Mitropoulos. By no means negligible artists, but the special feeling was gone, and though in the years following its premiere Vanessa had several outings at prominent European venues and with American regional companies, it vanished from the Met’s life and from mine as well, except for some work with students.

This summer, though, it has returned, thanks to a strange set of coincidences, on a nearly deserted strip mall up in the northwestern corner of Massachusetts, where Heartbeat Opera was jobbed in to perform its new version. Three of my previous posts provide background: Where are We? (6/10/22), in which I discuss Heartbeat’s production of Beethoven’s Fidelio; Spaying the Fella (8/12/22), wherein the re-purposing of songs from one of the most operatic of American musicals at the Williamstown Theatre Festival was considered, with some background on the festival’s history; and A New American Rep? (4/4/25), in which I surveyed some examples of an alleged repertory—or even a canon—of recent American operas. Among them, these articles relate the coming-together of the reasons for paying attention to this new interpretation of Vanessa. But there is also a lens through which the current Williamstown Theatre Festival asks all of its offerings to be viewed, and which bears directly on the otherwise inexplicable choice of Vanessa for inclusion in a theatre festival. The lens is queerness, and it doesn’t sneak in under the tent flap, but is proclaimed by the ringmaster. That would be Jeremy O. Harris, author of the well-received Slave Play, chosen as the festival’s artistic director on a three-year contract.^(III)  The festival is currently organized as a smorgasbord offered on three intensive weekends, during which attendees are presumed to pop from one event to another—as at a music festival, the promoters tell us, and they don’t mean Salzburg or Aix-en-Provence.