Czar-struck opera

Onstage in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, towering green walls and chandeliers evoke the inner sanctum of a palace in Imperial Russia. A man in black enters, followed by a retinue of beautiful noblewomen wearing vibrant shades of red. Restless and discomfited by the man’s presence, the women begin to slowly lose control. One countess stands apart and confesses her feelings, caught in the fervor. “I cannot contain my desire.... I crave sin. Vile thoughts fill me.”

Giving succor to a supplicant, the dark monk Rasputin responds. “I go sleepless. I fast. I take water only. I do these things for you. I am the circle of pilgrim wanderers sent to take the sins off of you and put them on myself.”

The voice is unmistakably that of Placido Domingo. But Domingo is not onstage. Instead, a young stagehand wearing jeans and a headset is standing in for the tenor, who sings from the orchestra pit. Unlike the others, he’s in only his second day of rehearsal.

As the stagehand moves through the blocking and Domingo’s mesmerizing voice, at once prayerful and seductive, rises from below, Rasputin comes alive. Such is the numinous power of opera. The moment is one of great intensity, fraught with sexual tension and religious rapture dangerously intertwined.

Rasputin is the enigma, the mysterious element in the tragic tale of Russia’s last czar, Nicholas II, and his beloved wife, Alexandra. The royal couple became entangled with the darkly charismatic monk, contributing to their undoing and, eventually, to their brutal deaths at the hands of revolutionaries in 1918.

It is a story of operatic destiny, and a tale that seemed destined to become an opera. And now it has. The world premiere of “Nicholas and Alexandra,” with music by Deborah Drattell and a libretto by Nicholas von Hoffman, will take place next Sunday at Los Angeles Opera. Conducted by Mstislav Rostropovich and directed by Anne Bogart, it will star Los Angeles Opera general director Domingo as Rasputin and Rodney Gilfry and Nancy Gustafson as Nicholas and Alexandra.

A love story set against a backdrop of historical upheaval, the saga of Russia’s last czar and czarina has long held a place in the American imagination. “I had thought about the idea of writing an opera on the story of Nicholas and Alexandra for about 15 years,” says Drattell, who was initially inspired by the Robert K. Massie book of the same name. “I felt it had all the ingredients: a love story, a villain, intrigue, the family and the execution. It’s a story that, at least in our culture, has never died.”

Nor is Drattell alone in seeing the subject’s appeal. Coincidentally, there are two operas on the subject premiering this fall. In mid-September, the Finnish National Opera in Helsinki will present Einojuhani Rautavaara’s “Rasputin,” with bass Matti Salminen in the title role and Jorma Hynninen and Lilli Paasikivi as the czar and czarina.

The Los Angeles Opera “Nicholas and Alexandra” has been in the works for several years. It is one of a number of operas commissioned by Domingo since he officially took over the company in July 2000 and the first to reach the stage.

It arrives at the beginning of the first season in which the company will be the primary tenant in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. The change is enabling L.A. Opera to grow, with more performances scheduled this year and other expansions in the works. And any new production, but especially a world premiere, serves as a calling card for a company, particularly a newly ascendant one.

“This represents our efforts to produce new work for Los Angeles Opera,” says artistic director Edgar Baitzel. “We want to present various styles to our audience. Deborah Drattell is one, and others will follow.”

For her part, Drattell has found bringing her work from page to stage a heady process. “It’s totally surreal,” she says. “It feels like somebody else has written this work, like somebody else is in Los Angeles. Normally, I’m a mother with four children, and my day is filled with giving everybody breakfast, driving them to camp, going to the orthodontist and everything else. And here I’m totally submerged in this other world. It feels like an out-of-body experience.”

MAKING THE MUSIC

It is mid-August, and Day 2 of orchestra rehearsals is underway. Seated on the podium in a black swivel chair cranked to full height and wearing the kind of red-and-white checked shirt typically seen at a 1950s company picnic is maestro Rostropovich. The celebrated Russian cellist and conductor, who has been the muse for an array of the 20th century’s most important composers, has score open and baton in hand, as he leads a stop-and-start exploration of Act 3, Scene 1.

Seated at a table behind Rostropovich with her score open is Drattell, dressed in black shirt, skirt and heels. Only the pink-flowered Louis Vuitton handbag on her chair suggests a less staid taste. When the orchestra pauses, the diminutive composer rises to give a note. “Excuse me, maestro ...”

Rostropovich, with his halo of gray hair and slightly quizzical expression, turns to look at Drattell.

“Measure 27, may I take that down one dynamic?” she says. “Except for the flourishes -- if you’re doing a flourish, do not take down the dynamic.”

“No problem,” says the maestro, employing one of his favorite English expressions. After he turns back to the orchestra, the vivacious Drattell gives one of the violinists a thumbs-up and a kissy face of thanks.

A few measures later, she has another adjustment to make. “Maestro, excuse me ...”

Drattell is not shy about contributing to the process. She is respectful yet assertive, capable of holding her own alongside the heavyweights. And that, along with her considerable talents, may help explain why she’s made such headway in a field still overwhelmingly dominated by men. Then again, it might just be good old Brooklyn chutzpah.

Born in the same New York borough in which she now resides with her husband, Dr. Yacov Stollman, and their children, Drattell earned a doctorate in music from the University of Chicago. An Orthodox Jew, she is a petite bundle of charms with a distinctly New York demeanor. At 47, she has composed a number of operatic works, including “Festival of Regrets,” a one-act that was part of a New York City Opera “Central Park” trilogy in 1999. With libretto by playwright Wendy Wasserstein, the piece took a comedic view of Upper West Side Jews.

Her first full-length opera, “Lilith,” also directed by Bogart, was produced at New York City Opera in 2001. In it, Drattell and librettist David Steven Cohen explored the legend of the biblical Adam’s first wife, before Eve. Writing in Opera News magazine, William D. West noted that her “use of individual instruments ... her uninhibited use of percussion for theatrical effect and her plumbing of the depths with eerily mysterious music emanating from the lower reaches of the orchestra, revealed a remarkably original voice.”

This past May, Drattell’s chamber opera “Marina: A Captive Spirit” was staged by Bogart. The first part of a projected trilogy with poet Annie Finch, it’s about the grim life of the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva. Drattell and Wasserstein also recently completed a full-length comedic opera titled “Best Friends,” about “New York women and society intersecting with the world of contemporary opera,” she says.

“Deborah Drattell’s music -- all of it -- is deeply religious,” Bogart says. “I think it’s rooted in the deepest sense in her own relationship to religion.”

Although Drattell’s work has received a mixed critical reception, its strengths lie in a style that is both vividly theatrical and emotionally charged. The stories are told, and the characters given their individual identities, through the music, which can be lushly romantic one moment and haunting and nearly otherworldly the next.

Drattell has also served as composer in residence at New York City Opera, where she launched a showcase for American composers. It was during her tenure there, in 1999, that her manager, Edgar Vincent, who also manages Domingo, gave a CD of Drattell’s music to Baitzel, who was hard at work with the tenor making plans for Los Angeles.

She and Baitzel met and agreed to a reading to present her idea to Domingo. In May 2000, an audience gathered in the auditorium of New York’s Cooper Union University to hear segments from three scenes with singers and an orchestra. “I’ll never forget that day,” the composer recalls in the L.A. Opera offices after a day of orchestra rehearsals. “Right after the reading was the commitment.”

The man of the hour, Domingo, remembers being suitably impressed. “I heard the music and I saw something very special,” he says. “When she writes an opera, she writes a complete orchestration right away. And it was very colorful, very richly orchestrated. That’s what really caught my ear, the orchestration and the making very sympathetic of the couple of Nicholas and Alexandra.”

Moreover, Drattell’s project seemed like a good fit for Los Angeles. “I liked very much the way the music was accessible,” Baitzel says. “I think it’s very important, if you start a program for premieres, that the audience loves the music that they hear and that you don’t scare them. Deborah Drattell’s subject and her music seemed to be the right one for us.”

There was one catch. Drattell had envisioned Domingo as Nicholas, but the tenor had his eye on Rasputin.

“I have never liked so much the figure of Nicholas in history. I find him weak,” Domingo, still clothed in Rasputin’s black tunic and pants with a large gold cross hanging from his neck, says as he sits in his dressing room during a rehearsal break three weeks before the opening. “Also, I see Rasputin as an ageless character. And I like to concentrate now more on characters that do not have to be a young person.”

“At first, I was very depressed,” says Drattell, recalling her initial reaction to Domingo’s preference. “It’s like, ‘The good news is he liked it, and the bad news is he wants to be Rasputin.’ ”

Not everybody thought it was such a tough break. “I had lunch with an executive in the music industry, and he asked about the reading,” Drattell says. “We’re sitting in this restaurant, and he leaned across to me and said: ‘Is there something wrong with you? Are you a moron? Let me just slap you back to reality. Placido Domingo wants to sing your opera, and you’re depressed because he doesn’t want to be Nicholas? Get a grip and shift!’ ”

She did. “The truth is, Placido was right,” she says. “He is a great Rasputin.”

Composing the score over the course of the next two years proved to be an intermittent process because of Domingo’s touring. “I had to wait until he was available to work on it,” Drattell says. “I was writing the piece for him, so it was shaped a lot by working sessions that he and I had.”

One key development was that the role of Rasputin grew. “Adding more to the part of Rasputin is important in the whole story,” Domingo explains. “It’s not because it’s me, because this piece will be in repertoire and somebody else will do it after me. But I think if she makes the role larger because it was for me, I think somehow it has added something. I find that the element is historically so important. We have enough of the element of love of Nicholas and Alexandra. You never know what happened in the relation between Rasputin and Nicholas and Alexandra.”

In May 2002, a small group of supporters gathered in a Central Park South apartment to watch Drattell formally present the full orchestral score to Domingo. At that time, it was also announced that the New York-based Andrew W. Mellon Foundation had given its first grant to L.A. Opera -- $750,000 to help pay for commissions over a three-year period, including the Drattell opera. Of course, the average budget for a new opera is around $1.5 million. But that kind of support is key at a time of reduced backing from many sources.

That summer, Drattell, Bogart, set designer Robert Israel, costume designer Catherine Zuber and L.A. Opera associate director of artistic operations Christopher Koelsch took a trip to Russia. They visited the room where Rasputin was bludgeoned, the palace where the members of the royal family were held before being led to their deaths, and more. “We wanted to be in the rooms that they had been in and feel what that felt like,” Bogart says. “Thanks to maestro Rostropovich, we were given access to anything we wanted.”

Rostropovich had long since agreed to conduct “Nicholas and Alexandra,” in part because of a lifelong fascination with the last of the Romanovs. “Even though I was born 10 years after the czar’s family was murdered, I felt as if there was some kind of responsibility lying on my shoulders,” he says after his second day of rehearsing with the orchestra, speaking through a translator even though he does speak English.

“I was very interested in all kinds of things that were related to the czar’s family,” says the conductor, whose Paris home contains curtains from the Winter Palace and other czarist artifacts. Rostropovich is responsible for the pending publication of the diaries of Nicholas II’s mother, Maria Fyodorovna. He also bought at auction a 500-page file of documentation by a Russian government commission investigating Rasputin -- a find that became the source of the book “The Rasputin File” by Edvard Radzinsky. “I don’t know why or how, but I somehow have connections with this family,” he says.

Yet that would not matter if he had not been moved by the music. “Deborah understands brilliantly the dramatic aspects of the opera,” says Rostropovich, who met with Drattell several times and worked with her in Paris at the end of July. “She is a master of orchestration, an accomplished composer.”

PICKING UP THE PACE

Drattell and Domingo did not meet to work on the opera between the end of 2002 and this past spring. But when work resumed, it was at a heightened pace, with all of the major elements of the production coming together over the four months since.

On an unseasonably sweaty day in May, Domingo was wearing not Rasputin’s blacks but a gunmetal gray suit and two hats -- that of general director and that of singer. He had come to the L.A. Opera scenic shop, in a Santa Clarita warehouse, to look over the “Nicholas and Alexandra” set for the first time. Score in hand, Domingo strolled amid the mammoth walls and doorways. The singer seemed to be absorbing the atmosphere created by the imposing set pieces. At the same time, the general director examined the set with an eye toward how it would work within the confines of the Pavilion stage.

Days later, Drattell flew to L.A. for a two-day work session with the tenor. In addition to fine-tuning his role with the composer, Domingo expressed concern about the opera’s length. Drattell later cut 20 minutes, bringing the running time to about 2 hours, 45 minutes.

Then, in July, Bogart and the members of her SITI company met at their New York headquarters to develop a movement vocabulary for “Nicholas and Alexandra.” On the last day of a week of work sessions, Drattell was present, as was Baitzel.

A model of Israel’s set sat on a lighted table in the corner. Images of Russian Orthodox icons and other relevant artwork were taped to the walls. And seated around a large table, Bogart and company went through the score, scene by scene, discussing staging ideas.

The SITI performers appear in “Nicholas and Alexandra” as what Bogart calls the curates. They are onstage throughout the opera and execute an iconographic choreography that evokes the period. “The opera starts with a woman alone, Alexandra, who in the moment before her execution remembers her life,” Bogart explains. “The notion of the curates is that they essentially move her through the memory of her life.”

Bogart, known for her collaborative approach and a strong visual sense that incorporates highly stylized movement, sees the work she has done with her company members as but one of many ways in which the story will be told. “I don’t look to the libretto except for the basic storytelling,” she says. “I look to the music for the staging. I think in this opera that’s where it lives.”

As for the person who wrote that music, it has been a long road to the realization of her dream of writing an opera for Domingo. Along the way, she says, so many moments have moved her so profoundly that when she is asked about them, she stops for a moment. As she looks back on the rehearsal when she heard the singers and chorus for the first time, Drattell’s eyes begin to fill with tears and she cannot continue.

Truth be told, there were tears at that rehearsal too. “They were all watching me, and I couldn’t even look at anybody because I was crying,” she says once she’s regained her composure and her sense of humor. “People gave me tissues. I was looking down, doing deep breathing. It was worse than it is now.

“But I absolutely love to write music, so the way I get through everything is to focus on that process. It’s gotten me through all the highs and lows.”

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‘Nicholas and Alexandra’

When: Sept. 14, 17, 23 and 26, 7:30 p.m.; Sept. 20, 2 p.m.

Where: Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Music Center, 135 N. Grand Ave.

Price: $25-$170

Contact: (213) 972-8001