MUSIC : Opera on the High and Bumpy Road

There has been one change at the Santa Fe Opera this summer and it seems almost symbolic. The company has marked its 32nd season of operatic daring, Southwest-style, by opening a new roadway to its unique 1,773-seat, outdoor, hilltop opera house. The ascent from the highway is now scenic, precipitous and occasionally bumpy, but the road gets you there.

Scenic , precipitous and bumpy apply, also, to the staging and performances of four of the productions currently upholding Santa Fe’s renown as America’s most consistently innovative opera company. In their own fashion, these evenings under the New Mexico sky get you there. Whether the journeys are consistently worth taking remains a point of contention.

In his enduring quest for the vital, contemporary, music-theater experience, Santa Fe’s founder and general director, John Crosby, has adhered to his own standards by offering the U.S. premiere of Krzysztof Penderecki’s “The Black Mask” (1986), a flawed, sporadically chilling essay in spiritual Grand Guignol from a formidable and compassionate musical intelligence.

Then, with the double bill--introduced last month--of the early, satirical “Feuersnot” and the ponderously allegorical “Friedenstag,” Crosby in 1988 has moved two steps closer to boasting productions of all 15 operas of Richard Strauss. Only the first of the canon, the pseudo-Wagnerian “Guntram,” and the mammoth “Die Frau ohne Schatten” await staging in this desert oasis. (The complete Strauss operatic canon, as offered this summer in Munich, was reviewed by Martin Bernheimer in these pages last week.)

Singing, even in a company noted for its ensemble efforts, still matters. While the company has not achieved its international reputation primarily as a shrine of vocal splendors, American baritone James Morris, who started his career in the Santa Fe apprentice program in the early 1970s, proved the saving and illuminating grace of the misconceived “Der Fliegende Hollander,” unveiled in July.

And what other company in America will ever find the courage to approach “The Black Mask,” staged originally by the Salzburg Festival? Resembling an extended “Twilight Zone” episode with raging philosophic pretensions, the opera betrays Penderecki’s current orchestral style at its most sophisticated and most purified and his dramaturgy at its most muddled.

During a press conference prior to the opening on July 30, the 56-year-old Polish composer, who had previously adapted Huxley’s “The Devils of Loudon” and Milton’s “Paradise Lost” for the musical stage, admitted his struggle in deciding on a libretto for his third opera.

He ultimately selected Gerhart Hauptmann’s obscure, 1929, symbolic, one-act melodrama of human fallibility during the Thirty Years’ War. With the help of Salzburg director Harry Kupfer, Penderecki adapted his own libretto, retaining 90% of Hauptmann’s original. Santa Fe heard “The Black Mask” in a powerful translation by Michael Feingold.

What it also heard was a corrosive, confusing, 100-minute fable resembling a theological “Ten Little Indians,” in which the culprit is the Black Plague bringing death to the members of a dinner party in a remote Silesian village in 1661.

Most of the diners live with a guilty secret. Schuller, the mayor, has wed Benigna and adopted her mulatto child, Arabella. Benigna pretends the girl is her niece. The abbot is an outright social climber. The count is a lecher and alcoholic. And to ensure the universality of the message, each of the visitors adheres to a different creed, from Jansenism to Judaism. Meanwhile, Arabella’s father, Johnson, a fugitive, prowls the mansion, leaving a black hand print and frightening the servant Potter to death.

Only two diners--Arabella and the merchant, Perl--are ultimately spared from the epidemic and their consuming sense of sin. Penderecki doesn’t merely present this material. He attempts to wrap it in religious righteousness.

Into the opera, he periodically inserts fragments of the Requiem Mass, chanted by an offstage chorus and disembodied contralto, signs that these damned characters, a microcosm of society, are nearer to meeting their destinies.

Penderecki is not a composer to shy from a major statement, but in “The Black Mask” he never penetrates the mechanics of the melodramatic form to bring that statement into focus. The opera emerges half exposition and half denouement, peopled by a roomful of eccentrics, climaxed by a tepid dance of death.

Moreover, the vocal writing veers from speech to recitative, arioso and even to the occasional aria, leaping the jagged intervals that inevitably militate against textual comprehension. A display of madness or a moment of self-illumination automatically signals a flight into the stratosphere. There are brilliant moments here: A dinner-table ensemble seems like a perpetuum mobile for the damned, a chorale of stunning force.

But most of the interest resides in the pit, where the 72-piece orchestra, augmented by 13 off-stage players, when not swamping the singers, proposes intricate rhythmic structures, frequent ostinatos, melodic fragments and steely percussive climaxes.

Penderecki flirts with atonality but omits the chance procedures and tone clusters that won him notoriety in the 1960s. And within the often austere textures, one hears evidence of the resurgent romanticism the composer explored in his 1975 Violin Concerto and the more recent Cello Concerto No. 2.

The large cast coped valiantly in bringing “The Black Mask” to life. Beverly Morgan, who replaced Kathryn Bouleyn early in rehearsals, found Benigna’s dementia impossible to project comfortably. Repeating her Arabella from the Salzburg premiere, Lona Culmer-Schellbach scored an audience success. Timothy Nolen brought baritonal security to Perl. Tenor Dennis Bailey’s effortful Schuller, Ragnar Ulfung’s sardonic Potter and James Ramlet’s Pastor Wendt made noble contributions. In the pit, George Manahan led a performance marked by incisive attacks and superior orchestral execution.

Within designer John Conklin’s opulent, black-paneled set, director Alfred Kirchner caught a strain of black comedy and strove for meaningfulness in a big way. Framing the stage are blow-up photos of starving Ethiopian children hanging from charred ruins. When the set collapses at the end of the opera, more of the same paraphernalia lurks at the rear of the stage. It’s almost impossible not to get the point.

It was too easy to miss it in the production of “Feuersnot” (Dearth of Fire). Director Goran Jarvefelt declined the opportunity to aerate the wit of this 1901 comedy, Strauss’ revenge on the conservative Munich audience for its rejection of “Guntram.” William Wallace’s translation, poorly projected by the entire cast, failed to communicate the jokey-ness of Ernst von Wolzogen’s libretto, an adaptation of a Flemish legend. And conductor Crosby rejected the impulse to bathe the 90-minute score in the radiant lyricism that still brings loyal Straussians to “Feuersnot.”

It is an eminently fresh, inventive work, pointing the way in its scoring and delirious waltzes to the mature Strauss. However, in Santa Fe’s production (seen July 27), one felt the absence of the ironic detachment and specificity of gesture needed to overcome the archness of the opera.

Baritone Brent Ellis lent considerable strength and a modicum of bluster to Kunrad, the magician whose rejection by the nubile Diemut goads him into dousing all the fires in the city. Soprano Mildred Tyree’s Diemut postured cutely and floated an imperfect Straussian line. Designer Carl Friedrich Oberle’s curving medieval street with its similar row houses suggested that “Feuersnot” takes place inside a wedding cake.

The Santa Fe audience found the weary, simple-minded pacifist message of “Friedenstag” (Day of Peace) more to its liking. Joseph Gregor’s psychologically weak libretto (prepared by Stefan Zweig) trades in all the mechanics of parable as a commandant during the Thirty Years’ War resists blowing up his city only because of the intercession of his wife, Maria.

Strauss in 1938 evidently had little heart for “Friedenstag.” Over the uninterrupted, 80-minute span, the composer ranges from throat-clearing to note-spinning on a grand scale. Maria’s soaring plea temporarily lifts the spirits. The final chorus, a vulgar succession of block chords, deflates them.

Yet, Jarvefelt’s monochromatic, anachronistic production, which failed only in the final Girl Scoutish pageant, and Crosby’s stirring conducting were persuasive elements.

Baritone Michael Devlin delivered the commandant’s ruminations with fervor and audible strain, while, as Maria, Alessandra Marc in her Santa Fe debut emerged the undeniable vocal sensation of the summer. She served notice of an unwieldy stage presence and a major, gleaming dramatic soprano voice used with remarkable confidence and no little recklessness.

Nobody denies the freedom of experimentation at Santa Fe, but in “Der Fliegende Hollander,” stage director Nikolaus Lehnhoff interpreted the freedom as a license for intellectual, anti-musical overkill. Conklin’s designs cover the stage with abandoned elements of previously discarded Eurotrash productions, and grim forebodings are readily confirmed.

Lehnhoff hints at all manner of meaning that poor Wagner forgot. During the overture, the Dutchman wanders over a stage littered with chains and winches and plops into a conveniently placed easy chair. His ship doesn’t drop anchor. It rains red cloths, Kabuki-style, and sends claws of wood through Daland’s ship like a third-rate horror movie.

Daland’s house is decked with photos of ancestors (who happen also to be Wagner’s) and is dominated by a giant white mask of the Dutchman, which splits apart to admit the hero when he comes to claim the obsessed Senta. Lehnhoff avoids the confrontation of the crews in the third act, invents a wedding and ends with the doomed couple writhing in “Tristan und Isolde” death throes.

In the July 29 performance, Morris retained his dignity throughout the directorial extravagance, offering an impeccably vocalized, suitably anguished protagonist. Marilyn Zschau invested Senta with the requisite passion and a constant wobble every time the score took her above the staff. William Wildermann’s crafty but frayed Daland and Mark Baker’s ardent Erik proved more germane than Edo de Waart’s boisterous, spineless conducting.

With “Der Fliegende Hollander,” the road to Santa Fe has rarely seemed so difficult to climb. The season, which also includes a new John Copley production of “Cosi fan Tutte” and a revival of the 1986 “Die Fledermaus,” continues through Aug. 27.