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Soprano Mary Dunleavy will make her Glimmerglass Opera debut as Violetta Valery, the celebrated but consumptive courtesan of the Parisian demimonde who’s given a second chance to die loved, in Jonathan Miller’s mounting of Verdi’s “La Traviata” Saturday night at the Alice Busch Opera Theater in Cooperstown, N.Y.
The Glimmerglass Opera production is the last of the five major productions—two new and three revivals--of the much-loved, much-performed opera that will have been staged in the United States and the United Kingdom since May.
It’s been a dizzying, dazzling few weeks.
And historic.
To recap, in late May, Russian soprano Marina Poplavskaya sang Violetta in the Los Angeles Opera’s revival of Marta Domingo’s 1999 period “La Traviata,” with Elizabeth Futral singing Violetta for three performances.
In June, Russian soprano Anna Netrebko sang Violetta, the first time she’s sung the role in the U.S., at the San Francisco Opera in the Marta Domingo Jazz Age-set production that premiered at L.A. Opera in 2006 with Futral as Violetta. Netrebko made her entrance stepping from a 1929 Buick, an image evoking a Tamara de Lempicka painting.
After appearing in the Domingo period production in Los Angeles, Futral jetted to San Francisco to complete, with Ailyn Perez, San Francisco Opera’s “La Traviata” run.
Also in June, in the U.K., Renee Fleming performed Violetta in the Royal Opera House’s revival of Richard Eyre’s 1994 production.
ROH had revived the production with Anna Netrebko just last year, but this time Eyre was on hand to direct it for the first time since he had staged it 15 years earlier. The June 30 performance of the opera was beamed into cinemas across Europe.
Then, on July 3, French soprano Natalie Dessay made her role debut as Violetta in Santa Fe Opera’s new Laurent Pelly-directed “La Traviata.”
Now that operagoers have had a few days to catch their breath, clarity may return with Miller’s new production at Glimmerglass Opera, where audiences will get the opportunity to see Dunleavy’s Violetta, her signature role, for a 14-performance run that begins Saturday night.
Dunleavy is a versatile soprano equally praised for her strong acting, emphasized, as just one of many examples, in the Dallas Opera’s staging of Offenbach’s phantasmagorical “Les Contes d’Hoffmann” in 2005.
Olin Chism, who reviewed the production for the Dallas Morning News, observed that “the opera has plenty of juicy parts, but the Dallas Opera’s version cuts down on the number of needed soloists.”
He was referring to the opera’s four heroine soprano roles—Stella, the opera singer; Olympia, the whirring mechanical doll, creation of the eccentric scientist Spalanzani; Antonia, who has inherited her famous opera singer mother’s lovely pipes but also, tragically, has a weak heart that may well burst if she attempts to emulate her mother’s success; and Giulietta, the cold-hearted Venetian courtesan.
Many opera companies engage different singers for the four soprano roles for their productions of “Les Contes d’Hoffmann,” so it’s completely understandable if one should happen to think this is how the roles should be performed—four soprano parts, four sopranos.
In the opera’s prologue, the poet E.T.A. Hoffmann waits in a bar adjacent to an opera house, where the prima donna Stella, his latest infatuation, is starring in Mozart’s “Don Giovanni.” She sends him a note in which the key to her dressing room is wrapped, for a little romantic intrigue. But councilor Lindorf, Hoffmann’s nemesis, intercepts the note, intending to circumvent the assignation and have Stella for himself to boost his prestige.
Meanwhile, in the bar, the obsessive Hoffmann enfolds the stories of his failed romances. At the center of each of the three tales are his great loves, Olympia, Antonia and Giulietta. Each, in actuality, represents a facet of Stella’s personality.
In the tales, three incarnations of evil materialize in the form of Coppelius, the optician who supplied Olympia’s eyes and in a rage reduces her to a pile of cogs and gears when he discovers that for his fee Spalanzani has paid him with a worthless draft, the sinister Dr. Miracle, who abets Antonia’s singing, knowing full well that the outcome will be fatal, and the magician Dappertutto, who enlists Giulietta to steal Hoffmann’s reflection, to cruelly thwart the poet’s romances.
Part of the great fun of “Les Contes d’Hoffmann” is seeing a single bass-baritone perform the four villain roles, which is how Offenbach wrote it.
It’s even more thrilling when a single soprano takes all four heroine roles—also how Offenbach wrote it.
And that’s what the venturesome Dunleavy did in the Dallas Opera production.
Only few sopranos, including Catherine Malfitano, have undertaken that challenge, and fewer still have brought it off with complete success, given the sheer breadth of the vocal and acting demands put on the soprano--which is one reason (packing the opera with top sopranos may be another) why opera companies often cast the roles with different singers.
In February 2000, Dunleavy played three of the four soprano roles—Stella, Olympia and Antonia--in the Metropolitan Opera’s revival of its immensely popular 1982 Otto Schenck staging, especially sweet for Gunther Schneider-Siemssen’s Spalanzani’s workshop design for the Olympia act.
Earlier in that run, Ruth Ann Swenson played all four soprano roles, a departure from how the Met has usually handled casting for the “Les Contes d’Hoffmann” heroines. In his review of that production, The New York Times’ Bernard Holland said that, “Ms. Swenson, despite the beauty of her soprano voice, did not have the ease of coloratura to negotiate Olympia's mechanical doll sequence. The previous revival (in 1998), split among Natalie Dessay (Olympia), Patricia Racette (Antonia) and Jennifer Larmore (Giulietta), was probably a wiser decision.” (Then again, an imperfect “Les Contes d’Hoffmann” with a single soprano in the four roles seems more preferable to a flawless production of the opera that, with different sopranos in the roles, defeats Offenbach’s theatricality.)
In a telephone interview from Cooperstown, Dunleavy said that when she joined the production, the Met was determined to have a mezzo-soprano as Giulietta (not an uncommon decision for this opera), so that’s how it was, and Victoria Livengood got the role.
No matter. Dunleavy used the experience as an opportunity to work out her playing of all four heroines when the chance came, which did, in 2002 at the Connecticut Opera.
Reviewing the production for Opera News, David Shengold wrote: “Having performed Olympia and Antonia very capably at the Met in February 2000, she (Dunleavy) did not disappoint her fans in her first traversal of all four of Hoffmann’s loves, the clear (and more than justified) impetus for this production. In fact, Dunleavy’s Giulietta, a highly sexy apparition in scarlet silk and blazing Rhonda Fleming-style orange locks, may have been the most striking impersonation dramatically, far more nuanced than the high-class tart one usually sees in this role. She handled the courtesan’s comparatively low-lying music skillfully....”
Dunleavy, who describes her voice as containing “a lot of lyric and coloratura,” said, “It takes a lot of work to get all three girls together on the same night.”
The roles progress from Olympia’s coloratura into the lyric and dramatic ranges of Antonia and Giulietta.
“It’s especially challenging for the Olympia role,” she said, calling “Les Oiseaux Dans la Charmille,” The Doll Song, “a real coloratura piece.”
Her work with that showpiece aria, which ends with a devastating A-flat, has led to other offers for her to play Olympia, but she would much rather sing all four roles.
Roles in Dunleavy’s repertoire include Gilda in “Rigoletto,” Norina in Donizetti’s “Don Pasquale,” Giulietta in Bellini’s “I Capuleti e i Montecchi,” and Thais in Massenet’s opera of the same name.
She scored an early success as the malevolent Queen of the Night in Mozart’s “Die Zauberflote,” winning international praise.
She retired—jettisoned is probably more accurate--the role in 2002, after, according to a July 2006 Opera News profile, 84 performances for 11 companies over a nine-year period.
She betrayed no sentimentality about the decision, remembering what the role, with its two spectacular but hellish arias with five blistering high Fs, four of them alone in the vengeance aria, is capable of exacting from a soprano.
If anything, it was a case of too much stress for too little reward to justify continuing to perform it. There were other roles she wanted to perform and singing the Queen of the Night, a role with short stage time, required a long period of preparation, leaving less time for other parts.
Dunleavy said it would take a month or so to get the Queen in her voice again.
Balancing the demands of the Queen and Violetta, the latter of which has long been the staple of her repertoire and which she regards as the far more rewarding role for the sweeping artistry it demands, grew increasingly frustrating.
“The roles were difficult to sing at the same time. I had my work cut out for me,” she remembered.
So the Queen went. The fun was gone from doing the role, Dunleavy said, and that was that.
The Queen of the Night had its time in her repertoire, but now that time was over.
But Dunleavy would not quite be finished with “Die Zauberflote.” In 2006 she sang the role of Pamina, the Queen of the Night’s daughter, in Julie Taymor’s production at the Met, a performance that put her in an exclusive echelon with Lucia Popp and Colette Boky as the only sopranos to have sung both the Queen of the Night and Pamina at the Met. (In 2007, Diane Damrau joined that circle, becoming the only soprano to sing both roles in a single run.)
Violetta may very well be the most difficult bel canto role ever written.
Dunleavy said that, like the Hoffmann heroines, the character has a precipitous vocal progression, beginning with the sparkling coloratura of Act I, which ends with the thrilling E-flat of “Sempre libera,” and then moving into the lyric and finally, dramatic soprano ranges to reflect how Violetta has changed.
“The highest and lightest is the first thing you sing,” she said.
Dunleavy first performed Violetta before she turned 30, and her interpretation of the role has changed as she herself has.
“There’s a lot to Violetta,” she said. “You can’t sing about love until you’ve fallen in love and had your heart broken.”
Dunleavy called Violetta a “very dramatic, taxing role.”
“She goes through a lot of emotional turmoil,” she said. “There’s a lot of vocal intensity.”
Her performance as Violetta will mark her Glimmerglass Opera debut, which was delayed last summer when she became pregnant and had to withdraw from a production of Handel’s “Giulio Cesare in Egitto,” in which she also would have made her role debut as Cleopatra.
Dunleavy said it was her first Handel role and that she had spent a lot of time working on it and loving it when she learned she was pregnant.
On Sept. 28, 2008, she gave birth to a daughter, Madeleine Bridget.
“I hope to have another shot at Cleopatra,” she said.
She’ll perform in the Glimmerglass “La Traviata” with tenor Ryan MacPherson, who will sing Alfredo, and baritone Malcolm MacKenzie as Germont. Dunleavy’s other Alfredos have included Rolando Villazon and Jonas Kaufmann, whose Alfredo she described as “very lovely—very young and energetic” like Villazon’s.
This is Miller’s second “La Traviata” for Glimmerglass Opera, where he made his company directorial debut 20 years ago with the opera. His most recent work for Glimmerglass was a 1940s Nebraska-set production of Janacek’s “Jenufa,” with Maria Kanyova, who sang Violetta for Portland Opera in fall 2008, in the title role.
Miller popularized transplanting the settings of classic operas to different time periods and locales. In September, the English National Opera will revive his 1982 Mafioso “Rigoletto,” set in Manhattan’s Little Italy in the 1950s. Tenor Michael Fabiano, one of six winners of the 2007 Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions, will make his U.K. debut in the production, singing the role of the licentious Duke, who drops a coin into a jukebox and begins crooning to a recording of “La Donna e mobile.”
Earlier this year, ENO mounted Miller’s new 1932 Paris-set “La Boheme,” for which Miller and set designer Isabella Bywater took inspiration from the photographs of Brassai, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Andre Kertesz. (Miller loathes the artist’s smock-and-beret clichés that have afflicted too many productions of the Puccini opera.)
His production of Donizetti’s “L’elisir d’amore” at New York City Opera in 2006 was set in a roadside diner somewhere in the vast barren spaces of the American Southwest circa 1960.
While he eschews Regietheater’s (German for director’s theater) messy maimings of operas, Miller has shown a clear predilection for placing operas in contemporary contexts.
But only when he thinks it makes compelling sense to do so.
In the case of “La Traviata,” he feels the opera fits very well in the time Verdi set it, which was 1847, the year he visited Paris for the first time, reflected in his period productions for Glimmerglass Opera in 1989, and the Paris Opera, with Angela Gheorghiu as Violetta, in 1997.
The new Glimmerglass production will also be a period version, with sets and costumes by Isabella Bywater, but with Miller, “period” can be deceiving, since he despises Zeffirelli-like ostentation.
Dunleavy calls the new Glimmerglass Opera production a “stripped-down, very honest version.”
“It’s actually very beautiful,” she said.
Miller, she said, was particularly focused on banishing the virulent “La Traviata” clichés.
“He wanted it to be realistic,” Dunleavy said. “He wants it to be about the story itself—the interplay of the three people.”
“It’s very simple, very beautiful visually,” she said.
Verdi’s “La Traviata,” with soprano Mary Dunleavy as Violetta, tenor Ryan MacPherson as Alfredo and Malcolm MacKenzie as Germont, opens Saturday, July 18 at 8 p.m. Other performance dates: July 20 (matinee), 26 (matinee), 28 (matinee), Aug 1, 3 (matinee), 6, 8, (matinee), 11 (matinee), 14, 16 (matinee), 20, 22, and 25 (matinee).
“La Cenerentola,” Rossini’s scintillating re-imagining of the Cinderella fairy tale, opens at Glimmerglass Opera on Sunday, July 19, with mezzo-soprano Julie Boulianne as Angelina, tenor John Tessier as Don Ramiro, bass-baritone Eduardo Chama as Don Magnifico and baritone Keith Phares as Dandini.
Menotti’s “The Consul,” the story of an indifferent bureaucracy’s destroying of a family, opens Saturday, July 25, with soprano Melissa Citro as Magda Sorel, baritone Michael Chioldi as John Sorel, mezzo-soprano Joyce Castle as The Mother, and mezzo-soprano Leah Wool as The Secretary.
A concert version of Purcell’s “Dido and Aeneas,” with mezzo-soprano Tamara Mumford singing Dido and baritone David Adam Moore singing Aeneas will be presented for four performances beginning Aug. 2.
All performances at the Alice Busch Opera Theater, Route 80, Cooperstown, N.Y. Tickets: (607) 547-2255 or www.glimmerglass.org.
Photo: Mary Dunleavy. (Glimmerglass Opera)
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