MUSIC / CHRIS PASLES : That Awkward Stage of Apollo and Daphne

Opera composers have long been attracted to the classical story of Apollo and Daphne. But there’s always been a hitch in trying to stage the story.

As the Roman poet Ovid relates it in his classic “Metamorphoses,” the god Apollo is so smitten by the beauty of the mortal Daphne that he chases the girl relentlessly. Daphne is interested in neither mortal nor immortal lovers, however, and when Apollo finally does succeed in catching her, she prays to be changed into something undesirable.

She gets her wish. At the very moment that Apollo clasps her in his arms, she is transformed into a laurel tree.

Composer Richard Strauss and librettist Joseph Gregor turned the story into a one-act opera in 1937. Theirs was at least the 19th operatic version, beginning with Giulio Caccini’s setting in 1600 and continuing with American composer Arthur Bird’s equally obscure effort in 1897.

“Daphne” contains some of Strauss’ most ravishing music, including an opening scene that creates a sense of the numinous appropriate to a story about Hellenic gods, and a magical, shimmering finale that portrays the metamorphosis itself.

But the work is rarely encountered in the opera house. The first production in the United States was a concert version in Brooklyn in 1960. The opera was fully staged in Santa Fe only four years later.

What are the problems?

The demands of the opera are many. First, it requires two heroic tenors, not just one, and a lyric soprano able to soar in sustained vocal lines. Then there’s that pesky problem of how to stage the moment when Daphne turns into a laurel tree.

San Francisco Opera got around this problem--and saved itself considerable money--by offering “Daphne” in a semi-staged version during its Strauss festival last month.

According to David DiChiera, general director of Costa Mesa-based Opera Pacific, “The saving is considerable because what you’d be saving, besides the production itself--the sets and costumes--is in stagehands. That is a considerable part of any opera budget. Altogether, the saving would have to be at least half of the cost of a full production.”

DiChiera said Opera Pacific has “no plans on the front burner” to present opera in concert, despite the financial advantages. “Audiences who are interested in opera seem to be very much interested in the totality of what opera is, in terms of visual sets and costumes and the theatrical kind of realization of the work itself,” he said.

Others, however, have ventured concert opera presentations here. Pacific Symphony offered Ravel’s one-act opera “L’Enfant et les Sortileges” at the Performing Arts Center in 1992, and the Philharmonic Society sponsored the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra in a concert performance of Mozart’s “Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail” at the Irvine Barclay Theatre in 1991.

In San Francisco’s production of “Daphne,” the men of the chorus, dressed in tuxedos, lined up at the back of the stage and sang from hand-held scores. The principal singers--the men in tuxedos, Daphne in a Grecian gown, her mother Gaea in a formal concert dress--walked on and off stage as needed.

Slide projections created cosmic Impressionistic images in lieu of sets. A curtain sometimes came down to separate the principal singers from the chorus.

At the crucial transformation, Daphne--soprano Janice Watson--slowly raised her arms, turned and walked to the back of the stage, as Strauss’ music, conducted by Andrew Davis, surged and glimmered. It was a fascinating, if necessarily incomplete performance. But it showed that there is more than one way to skin the operatic cat.

“It was problem-solving all the way,” said “Daphne” director Sandra Bernhard in a phone interview Tuesday from the Berkshires in Massachusetts, where she was vacationing.

“We could have presented it just as a concert, but as with Shakespeare, it’s written to be performed and not just read. By having just a minimal amount of staging, you have a much better idea of relationships between characters, and also of the vocal and musical structure of the piece, by being able to arrange people in certain configurations and present entrances and exits, that sort of thing.”

The advantage of the minimal approach?

“We do this to expand the rep and to do pieces that many audiences have had little or no exposure to and that audiences should have exposure to,” Bernhard said.

“Either the works are not cost-effective to produce as full-length pieces or it’s a incredible risk to produce them because they’re not known and audiences are not known for taking full-fledged risks for hearing something they’ve never heard of,” she added.

“But they’re very valid pieces. They’re beautiful music, and they tell a lot about the composer that we would not know had we not presented them.”

In offering such a semi-staged version, however, you have to be careful.

“The more you put on stage, the more (audiences may think), ‘This is not a staged concert, it’s an opera,’ ” Bernhard said.

Additionally, Bernhard said, there are certain conventions that shouldn’t be crossed.

“If you put people in costume, it says something different. If they are not in costume, then they can’t hold props. Someone in a tux or gown holding a prop is an anachronism you can’t get over.”

Critical plot elements create other problems, too. “When someone dies, that’s a very difficult situation to deal with,” Bernhard said. In “Daphne,” for instance, the shepherd Leukippos is slain by Apollo. “But leaving someone who is wearing at tux on the floor for 30 minutes is just not possible. And you can’t have someone run off stage in a tux.

In this case, Leukippos (tenor Hong-Shen Li) discreetly left the stage.

“So all of a sudden you have all these problems you never have as a director (of a conventional stage production). It is extremely difficult. It’s a whole new set of questions.”

Why dress the men in tuxes in the first place? “I wanted a very strong unifying element, from which Daphne could be separate,” the director said. “It said, ‘These people all belong together and she does not,’ which is the crux of the opera.”

Whatever savings presenting opera in concert offers a company, preparation time apparently isn’t one of them.

“With something like this, you spend almost as much time as preparing a full opera,” Bernhard said. “Almost, not quite.”

For the critical transformation, for instance, she and soprano Watson had to spend a long time “experimenting.” “If Janice started the transformation right away, with her arms up, she’d be like that for the next 12 minutes, and there was no where we could go,” Bernhard said. “We had to be really careful and experiment--when movement would happen, how quickly we could go, how slowly we could go.”

Bernhard is satisfied about the results, however. “Should I ever get the opportunity to produce it again, I feel so close to the piece, there are things I wouldn’t change, like the transformation. There is very little about the transformation I would change. This is a way to learn a piece like no other.”