In their advance promotion, Heartbeat promised to render Vanessa down to its emotional essence, to rid it of its “gewgaws and doilies.” This left the impression that they had significantly trimmed the work’s playing length. Well, a little. The timings of the RCA recording (of the four-act edition) round out to one hour and fifty-four minutes, those of the Naxos three-act version actually longer, at 2:02 (the Mitropoulos/Gil Rose difference, I assume). Taking Mitropolous’ timings and subtracting the Skating Aria, we are down to a ten-minute reduction, to Heartbeat’s advertised one hour and forty intermissionless minutes. Let us consider for a moment the original’s structure and settings. We may meet a gewgaw and doily or two along the way. Each of the acts is a closed structure, though the two scenes of the fourth act are connected by an interlude that covers the scene change. Act 1: Early winter. Vanessa’s “richly appointed drawing room,” with a small table laid for supper. A jardin d’hiver through French doors at the back, dark at present. The covered mirrors, and a large painting over the mantelpiece, also covered. Intermission. Act 2: the same, though a month later on a sunny morning, the jardin d’hiver now visible and active, and the snowy exterior beyond. Intermission. Act 3: The main entrance hall to the house, now referred to in the libretto as a castle. The main entrance at left, an archway with partial view of the ballroom at the back, and at right a stairway leading to the rooms upstairs. Intermission. Act 4, Sc. 1: Two weeks later. Erika’s bedroom, her bed partially visible in an alcove to the right. Dawn of New Year’s Day. Interlude. Act 4, Sc. 2: the drawing room as in Act 1, two weeks later. In all, three full settings, one of which serves for three of the five scenes. In the three-act version, Acts 1 and 2 are played as a single act in two scenes. The time covered by the action: around two months.

A doily candidate, for sure, is the opera’s opening sequence, wherein Erika orders elaborate French dishes (“Écrevisses à la bordelaise . . .langoustines grillées sauce aux huîtres,” etc., while the Major Domo repeats the orders to the gathered servants and we hear them echoed back to the kitchen, while Vanessa, facing upstage and mostly hidden in her large-backed chair, fires off corrections (“Find something better than that! . . . Too many sauces,” etc. It could be a Marx Brothers send-up of High Sassiety, and was a source of some amusement among fans.^(I) Still, has it any dramatic function worth saving, however poorly it may serve? At rise, we see that Erika, though very much under Vanessa’s thumb, is in charge of certain aspects of the running of a large estate—an heiress apparent. We see the covered mirrors and picture, and wonder what they mean. Forward to the end of Act 2, when Erika is left alone in the drawing room as the others leave for church (and we hear the morning hymn from offstage). Realizing that despite that first night’s passion and Anatol’s offer of marriage, she must renounce him and yield him over to Vanessa, she slowly uncovers the mirrors, and finally the grand portrait of the beautiful Baroness Vanessa in younger, happier days. Having thus returned the house to the atmosphere of those times, she sings the act’s closing lines, “Let Vanessa have you,/she who for so little/had to wait for so long!”, and falls on a sofa, “sobbing hysterically.” It’s the turning point of the plot, unfortunately less compelling in the realization than in the telling, though Elias made it work for the audience. It sets us on track for the opera’s final scene. Following the giddy activity surrounding Vanessa’s engagement to Anatol, and the darker passage of Erika’s rescue after her self-abortion in the snow, she is now alone, in full command of the estate. And she is once again issuing instructions to the Major Domo, this time to re-cover the mirrors and portrait, “just as before,” to announce that she will receive no visitors, and that the gate to the park must be kept closed. “Now it is my turn to wait,” she sings—on the last line of the opera, just as she had sung the first.