‘Vermeer’ Paints a Strikingly Original Portrait

Louis Andriessen’s first opera, “De Materie” (Matter), opened a new opera house in Amsterdam a decade ago with a sound so striking that it is already legend. Building the environmentally controversial Het Muziektheater on marshland had required the use of monster pile drivers so deafening that they could be heard a mile away. Andriessen’s “overture”--for an opera of scenes from Dutch history, boldly directed by Robert Wilson--mimicked that pounding onslaught.

Andriessen’s audacious second opera, “Rosa”--also for Netherlands Opera and this time conceived and directed by the provocative British filmmaker and visual artist Peter Greenaway--was downright shocking. Its sadomasochism and bestiality rocked even a sophisticated Amsterdam audience. At an early performance in 1994, one heard gasps of horror as a horse was lowered onto the stage in a torturous treadmill apparatus.

Two years later, there was talk of bringing “Rosa” to the new Lincoln Center Festival. The opera contains such a powerful score (recently released on CD by Nonesuch), stage imagery so unforgettable and a layered drama so disturbing that, love it or hate it, it was arguably the most important opera of the decade. But its production demands overwhelmed the Metropolitan Opera stage; animal rights groups, women’s groups and the strait-laced operatic powers at Lincoln Center expressed alarm.

But last week at the New York State Theater, the Lincoln Center Festival finally got its Andriessen/Greenaway spectacle, importing “Writing to Vermeer,” which had its premiere in Amsterdam last December. Compared to “Rosa,” a performance Friday night seemed relatively tame, although it certainly had its share of mighty images. Based upon a simple, deft theatrical idea, it has a text nearly as luminous as Vermeer’s paintings, which the work venerates, and it has compelling, appropriately incandescent music.

In the usual sense of an opera as music first, text second and stage possibilities last, it is unerring--immediate, subtle, probing, inherently operatic and gorgeously crafted. But as a radical intertwining of operatic elements into the kind of entirely new theatrical experience that “Rosa” was, it is a mild disappointment. Most of the stage direction was entrusted to Greenaway’s assistant Saskia Boddeke, who gets first co-director credit, and undoubtedly much of the conventionality on stage was hers as well. Given the arrestingly original nature of music and text, however, that disappointment is not crucial.

Greenaway does not present us with Vermeer so much as surround us by him. With 11 children, the Dutch master was a domestic man who seldom left his home in Delft, and his paintings of serene domesticity are perhaps the most persuasively radiant defense of family values in all history. Knowing little of his personal life, we are tempted to imagine it from his vivid paintings, and that has been the contagious compulsion in several recent novels (one of which, Deborah Moggach’s “Tulip Fever,” is to be filmed by Steven Spielberg).

In “Writing to Vermeer,” Greenaway, whose own obsession with Vermeer goes back to his 1986 film “A Zed and Two Naughts,” imagines the painter’s women instead. The opera’s three characters are wife, mother-in-law and model. The epistolary libretto consists of 16 fictional letters written to Vermeer by these three women during a two-week period he spent in the Hague. They are loving, sensual and full of news and household gossip. The first words of the opera come from Vermeer’s wife about his model: “Dear Johannes, Saskia sends her love.” The last words are “Yours, with every sign of love. Forever and ever and always and forever and always. Saskia.”

It is through these women’s eyes that we appreciate the man, in a wonderful reversal of the predictable way of inventing him through his gaze upon the women in his paintings. Unlike the typical literal-minded librettist, novelist or filmmaker attempting to give the illusion of a real artist, Greenaway allows us to sense an elusive artist, and he leaves room for music and stage pictures to independently complicate and complete the process.

Those stage pictures can be extraordinary. Greenaway has pioneered the use of projections all over the stage--front, rear, on the floor and on video screens--and they supply the production’s provocation through images of catastrophic external events that threaten familial calm. In 1672, the year of Vermeer’s trip, Holland’s dikes were broken by invading French, British and German armies.

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Greenaway, ever entranced by liquids, fills the stage with milk, ink, blood and especially water. The opera ends with a spectacular drenching of stage and everyone on it. Boddeke, however, congests the stage, less convincingly, with bodies. Wife, mother-in-law and model are each portrayed by three actresses (with the central one singing), and Boddeke confuses the matter more with two additional non-singing roles, also tripled. Multiplying characters is, by now, a tired trick in avant-garde opera productions, and Boddeke applies the practice to fill space with flailing limbs as an obvious visual reaction to excited music.

But Andriessen has his own more inventive ways of creating tension between the extremes of the tranquilly of Vermeer’s household and the terror of the times. A quote from Cage’s serene Six Melodies for violin and piano opens the opera. Dances by the Dutch early-Baroque composer Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck produce modernized period flavor in brash, bright-colored arrangements. But throughout, Andriessen’s voice, with its angular melodies and complex rhythms driven with a hard-edged Minimalism, is unmistakable. His word setting is equally individual, with every syllable precisely articulated in chant, declamation and hauntingly lyric song.

The performance, moreover, was excellent, with commanding singing from Barbara Hannigan, Susan Narucki and Kathryn Harries; in addition, a chorus of four children added the aural equivalent of the special light in Vermeer’s pictures. Two outstanding Amsterdam-based new-music ensembles, Asko and Schoenberg, joined to make the expert orchestra, conducted with dazzling conviction by Reinbert de Leeuw.

With this sensually rich love letter to Holland, “Writing to Vermeer” becomes the likely candidate for a sophisticated musical nation’s sophisticated national opera.