Consider the setup (I won’t be recounting the plot. It’s easily accessed.): in a palatial country house “in a northern country, the year about 1905” (a vagueness that lends us some guidance while keeping us at arm’s length), a seriously deluded middle-aged Baroness anxiously awaits the imminent return of a lover who has abandoned her long since. She has created an atmosphere of gloom by covering all the mirrors and pictures in the house, whose other inhabitants, in addition to the principals named earlier, include two very minor singing characters (a major-domo and a footman), servants, a chef (unseen), and peasants, presumably working the estate. One would like to empathize with Vanessa; indeed, that’s necessary if the opera is to work. But her response has been so extreme, and sustained for so long with no regard for its impact on supposedly beloved others, as to mark her as a clinical case somewhere in the narcissistic cluster. Though we don’t know why the lover, Anatol Sr., left her, we get some clues as soon as she begins to sing. She asks Erika to read to her by the fire, but no sooner has Erika begun (with an anguished speech from Oedipus Rex—please!) than she snatches the book from her, declaims a few lines in an over-the-top wail, then throws the book away. Menotti’s directions for her in this opening sequence are “almost anguished in her intensity,” “clasping her breast,” and “almost hysterically.” Barber tries to respond, but his idiom is neither severe enough (as in an Erwartung with a few other characters) nor melodically engaging enough to make it other than off-putting. And that describes too much of Vanessa’s setting throughout the opera. The entire premise seems contrived for atmosphere and melodramatic effect for their own sakes.

With the arrival of the male protagonist, Anatol Jr., we are handed an enigma that neither I nor Samuel Barber have been able to resolve. In the libretto, he’s an out-and-out bounder, seeking an alliance with the family money and property through whichever female is amenable. But the things that might make him intriguing rather than only puzzling (chiefly, how he lets us know his natural propensities while keeping them hidden from even such a mistress of deniability as Vanessa, and whether we can at any point begin to trust what he says) are completely absent from his music. It’s all the same tone, and even so shrewd a vocal interpreter as Gedda can make only tiny tactical moves toward conveying any complexity. The bits of personal history he conveys that we might be inclined to believe (to Erika, not Vanessa, and as part of his seduction story)—”my father [Anatol, Sr.] lost his fortune dreaming,/while my mother bought subtle poisons/to destroy his dreams” (ah, the evil mother)—are completely neutral, leaving it all up to the singing-actor to decide. And I cannot refrain from observing that all this constitutes an exact, if off-kilter, reproduction of the E-19 protagonist-couple metanarrative I’ve so often written about.^(I) For the rest, the score’s qualities struck me this time through as all-too-recognizable ancestors of some of what I heard in the recent American operas I surveyed: unearned extremes in the vocal writing to indicate passion; a tendency for the sonority to hover in the upper-middle range, dominated by woodwind textures; and a great deal more interest in the orchestral writing than in the vocal. Of course Barber was a superior craftsman. A good arranger could cook up a very listenable, almost Delius-like Vanessa Suite from Barber’s intermezzos and entr’actes. But in an opera, these are only garni.