Great expectations | 9 August 2018

‘Outside this house the world has changed. Life is swifter than before; there is no time for idle gestures.’ Anatol, in Samuel Barber’s opera Vanessa, doesn’t pretend to be a romantic hero. The son of Vanessa’s old flame, he’s arrived by night at the remote mansion where she’s waited for 20 years with her elderly mother and niece Erika. He seduces the niece, beguiles the aunt and alienates the grandmother, but at no point is he anything less than honest. ‘I cannot offer you eternal love, for we have learned today such words are lies’, he sings, and Barber, remarkably, takes him at face value. Anatol’s music is lyrical and open; a shaft of light in Barber and his librettist Menotti’s claustrophobic world. It won’t be remotely enough to carry the day.

Nothing in Vanessa is quite as predictable as its lustrous surface suggests. It was premièred at the New York Metropolitan Opera in 1958, and won a Pulitzer Prize.