Finally, I must emphasize that in this fairy tale we’re supposed to invest in as if real, this operetta-ish opera whose music must penetrate as no operetta’s does, the three principal characters must look good in the typically appropriate ways, as the della Casa/Gueden/London trio certainly did. We’ll catch up with the supporting characters, several of considerable importance, and with some thoughts on the physical production, as we go along.

The Arabella of this revival was Rachel Willis-Sørensen, whom I hadn’t previously seen. She showed a voice of listenable quality and sufficient amplitude for the part, though weak on the lower end, and had  acquired a working knowledge of its musical and stylistic demands. She was never “in trouble,” seemed to have clear ideas about what needed to be expressed, and addressed everything professionally. But there was an earthbound quality to her singing, a slight tug on the malleability of the line, and this carried over into her physical presence as well.^(I) So for both eye and ear, there was a lack of the unselfconsciously glamorous presence and almost mysteriously calm manner without which the character cannot really assume her central position in the story. Opposite her was Tomasz Konieczny, an artist by now familiar to us. I respected the extent to which he captured Mandryka’s sincerity and, in the later scenes, his involvement with his dawning self-awareness and remorse. But although the voice’s high center of gravity ensured that the notes from E and upward would be met straight-on, the timbre, with its insistence on a piercing, closed vowel formation, as if crammed into an imagined source of resonance somewhere just behind his upper teeth for maximum “cut,” wore me down quickly. He performed with admirable energy and theatrical flair, and in a few of the quieter moments produced a gentle, shaded tone we haven’t heard from his Abimélech, Siegfried Alberich, or Don Pizarro.

The Zdenka was a singer new to the Met, Louise Alder. She has a light, rather colorless soprano that embraced all the notes with blameless intonation. But, dreadfully costumed, she gave a faceless performance of the most generalized sort. Julie Roset, also a Met newcomer, provided a bit of dash with Fiaker-Milli’s warblings in Act 2, neatly and fluidly sung with a small but keenly tuned high soprano. Arabella’s three suitors, the Counts Elemer, Dominik, and Lamoral, were insufficiently differentiated—in Act 2, they simply made their entrances, bowed, and departed, without either giving offense or making an impression. And Elemer, with his slyly written scene in Act 1, is a role with opportunities for an interesting character tenor. Here he, in the person of Evan LeRoy Johnson, and the Matteo, Pavol Breslik, could have interchanged roles without creating so much as a ripple on the evening’s surface—two clear, clean tenor voices with nothing much to say about either personage. One of my memories from the 1950s is of Gabor Carelli, with less voice than either of the forenamed, illuminating that scene with an unmistakeable sense of the character’s manner and attitude. But then, he was Hungarian, like Elemer, and of his time.