Meanwhile, though, how can the opera Vanessa, supposedly sniffed into existence through the atmosphere of Seven Gothic Tales by the Danish writer “Isak Dinesen” (Karen Blixen), be shoe-horned into a Tennessee-themed theatre season? In an interview with Joseph Dalton, also in the Times Union, Heartbeat’s Artistic Director Jacob Ashworth says that “Vanessa is probably the most Tennessee Williams-esque piece you can think of in opera,” and he goes on to add that “It’s written by these two incredible, legendary queer writers.” Bingo on that last, but the first allegation sounds odd, since Ashworth might have looked into the rights for André Previn’s A Streetcar Named Desire or Lee Hoiby’s Summer and Smoke, or even Raffaello de Banfield’s Lord Byron’s Love Letter, a one-acter much more easily adapted to the chamber format than Vanessa, and the only opera for which Williams actually wrote the libretto.^(I) Not that I particularly recommend any of them—but all three are on the face of it more “Williams-esque” than the Barber/Menotti work. No, the rationale for Vanessa‘s three weeks in the Berkshires is, again, its companionable queerness—that of the work itself, and more immediately, that of Heartbeat Opera. With Fidelio the Heartbeat folks were able to hijack a great composer’s music to subvert his central theme, in that instance of (hetero) married love, and to replace the original’s cultural values with their own. What, however, could they do with the already certifiably queer Vanessa—play it straight? I’ll return with the answer shortly. First, a little closer inspection of the original, without which we cannot properly evaluate Heartbeat’s “re-imagining.”

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In preparation for the Heartbeat production, I re-familiarized myself by turning back to the RCA recording. Despite the nostalgic pleasures of tasting again the more optimistic spirit of that time and hearing again those singers I saw so often over a 25-year period, the listening was a rather deflating experience. I had remembered the score as a richer one, its orchestral coloring more satisfying, its harmonic idiom more pointedly dramatic, its melodic component more consistently engaging. There are two memorable melodic passages in Vanessa, both brief. One is the mezzo song, “Must the Winter Come So Soon?”, a lovely piece in Barber’s best vein, the elegiac. The other is the theme of the farewell quintet, “To leave, to break.” It’s not “Hab’ mir’s gelobt” or “Selig, wie die Sonne,” but it’s a haunting passage, voiced by each principal in turn and marked with a nice grace-note ornament on the second foot of the second line (“To find, to keep”). This  number registered quite an impact in the original production, as voiced by those singers, partly because of Menotti’s staging, which hewed an extended still moment out of the surrounding activity. If we examine it, though, we recognize its artificiality. Whereas the characters of the Strauss and Wagner ensembles continue to lead their individual lives, to have their own thoughts and feelings through their variations, those of the Barber quintet step out of the frame and, suddenly gifted with a shared outside perspective, reflect the same philosophical thoughts in a kind of group insight. The piece is thus left with nowhere to go after its initial statements, and the promising beginning dissolves into a generalized buildup, after which “life resumes.” The formality of the device only reinforces the nagging suspicion we’ve been trying to hold off—that these characters’ lives haven’t been making much sense all along.