So it develops that dramaturgically, this is actually a solid scheme for conveying the opera’s central action, which is the generational transference of a family curse—the estate’s proprietress passively awaiting the appearance of true love—from Vanessa to Erika. We wish there were some prospect of that for Erika (the appearance of an Anatol the Third twenty years hence? the recently arrived Young Pastor?), just as we wish that our eponymous heroine were more sympathetic, and that the work’s creators had been able to fulfill the structure more persuasively. And we wish that a better solution for that opening scene had been found than the faintly ridiculous one adopted. But the scene does serve a valid dramatic function, doily though it may be. And as the Heartbeat’s production gets underway, we are soon aware that among the gewgaws and doilies are the time and place of the action (as well as any sense of time passing) and the context of the action provided by the life of the household—in other words, the elements that underpin a sense of character and character relations for the performers, and that orient us, the audience, somewhere in the world. Heartbeat’s Vanessa exists in a space, not a place, and outside time. The music still proceeds through time (our time, there in the Annex), and the performers still sing the majority of the wordnotes inscribed by the creators, but we are all in a bubble, floating free of any recognizable reality. The first thing we notice, as the instrumental ensemble tunes up, is that we are also in an acoustical trap, where all sounds bounce from side to side and intermingle, and where words will not be easy to discern, especially for the highest voice, Vanessa’s. The second is that the action will be conveyed through shadowplay, creating an atmosphere of spooky campfire tales, augmented by that of black-and-white B movies.

That concept was the inspiration of the director, R. B. Schlather^(I), who also devised an extreme body-language idiom for Vanessa, suggestive of some best-forgotten variety of interpretive dance, that placed a heavy burden on the role’s valiant performer, Inna Dukach. Just as we would like to feel empathy with the character, so we would wish to empathize with the performer. But the combination of writhing, wailing, and facial agonizing, all right in our faces, was simply too unpleasant to allow that. Except for some inevitable entanglement with the writhings for Anatol, including an embarrassing sexual pantomime, the other characters were left free to pursue their shadowy intentions, and did so with admirable commitment to Schlather’s detailed Personenregie. Without that opening scene as a reference point, or a chorus for the hymn, or the peasants who have helped in the search for Erika, a fair amount of snipping and paving over was required for the late scenes (at one point, Erika was given the opening lines of “Must the Winter Come So Soon?”, like the reprise of a musical’s hit tune). And without a Major Domo to issue the final orders to, or the mirrors and portrait to which the orders pertain, there can be no fulfillment of the dramaturgical scheme. For that last line, Erika was simply framed in a square of light, like a perpetrator under interrogation. I felt a soaring sense of release from captivity when the houselights came up.