Williamstown — The indie opera company Heartbeat Opera will make its Williamstown Theatre Festival debut on July 17 with Samuel Barber’s Pulitzer Prize-winning opera “Vanessa,” running through August 3. R.B. Schlather directs.
“Vanessa” is an American opera by Samuel Barber, with an original English libretto by Gian Carlo Menotti. Composed in 1956–57, it premiered at the Metropolitan Opera on January 15, 1958, conducted by Dimitri Mitropoulos with production design by Cecil Beaton and stage direction by Menotti. The opera was an immediate success, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Music that same year, but it soon faded into near obscurity. Full productions have remained rare.
“Vanessa” showcases Barber’s gift for melody and orchestral color, blending late Romantic lyricism with 20th-century harmonic sensibilities. At times tonally ambiguous, the music incorporates dissonance and chromaticism to deepen the opera’s emotional ambiguity and sense of estrangement. The result is both rooted in tradition and emotionally modern.
The opera’s libretto could have been drawn from a Henrik Ibsen play: A woman waits decades for a lost lover but falls in love with his son, who seduces and abandons her niece Erika. When the older woman marries the younger man, Erika inherits her aunt’s isolation, poised to repeat a cycle of illusion, longing, and emotional repression.
Heartbeat Opera and R.B. Schlather are a match made in heaven. Founded in 2014 by artistic directors Louisa Proske and Ethan Heard, the company specializes in intimate stagings of classic operas, reimagined with chamber orchestra arrangements—exactly the kind of work that defines Schlather’s approach.
In everything he directs, Schlather challenges the boundaries and conventions of traditional opera—and critics love him for it. So do audiences, who have praised his work for transforming the opera-going experience.
Here is what Schlather says about Vanessa:
I am struck by the cyclical quality of this work. These characters feel suspended in some kind of emotional isolation, replaying cycles over and over. They are dealing with existential ideas about who they are, what their destinies are, what to do with the material of their pasts, how to face their futures. They feel like people out of Greek Drama, completely tragic, pathetic, and poetic. I’m haunted by the atmosphere of the piece—eerie, stark, seductive, repressive, and also raw and brutal. It really pulls you in, gets under your skin. I’m particularly interested in what gets inherited, especially from woman to woman: trauma, silence, expectations. It’s not about the past, it’s about patterns. It exists out of time. That’s what elevates it for me to something mythic, tragic, monumental.
The opera’s librettist wrote:
This is the story of two women, Vanessa and Erika, caught in the central dilemma which faces every human being: whether to fight for one’s ideals to the point of shutting oneself off from reality, or compromise with what life has to offer, even lying to oneself for the mere sake of living.
See Heartbeat Opera’s production of Samuel Barber’s “Vanessa,” running from July 17 through August 3 at The Annex at Williamstown Theatre Festival, 245 State Road, North Adams, MA (inside the North Adams Gateway Center). Tickets are available here.
