Vanessa

In a house cut off from the world, three women have lived for twenty years as prisoners of expectation. Abandoned by her lover Anatol, Vanessa has suspended her life in memory, drawing her mother and her niece Erika into the same suspended existence. The sudden arrival of a man shatters the fragile equilibrium of the household, setting in motion a drama of illusion, longing, and renunciation. Will Vanessa persist in the web she herself has woven, or will she at last confront reality?

Vanessa by Samuel Barber, with a libretto by Gian Carlo Menotti, opens the sixty-ninth edition of the Festival dei Due Mondi – the first under the artistic direction of Daniele Cipriani – in a new, awaited production. The opera returns to Spoleto, where it received its Italian premiere in 196, performed in Italian and, for the first time, in its three-act version. Today it reappears on the programme in its original language, English, restoring the power of its international spirit.

On the podium is the South Korean conductor Sora Elisabeth Lee, leading the Filarmonica del Teatro Comunale di Bologna and the Chorus of the Teatro Lirico Sperimentale di Spoleto. The production features an internationally distinguished cast: Lauren Fagan in the title role, alongside Virginie Verrez, Lulama Taifasi, Sara Mingardo and Maurizio Muraro. The staging is by Leo Muscato, with sets by Andrea Belli, costumes by Margherita Baldoni, lighting by Alessandro Verazzi, and choreographic movement by Simona Bucci.

Barber’s first opera – and the first American opera to be presented at the Metropolitan Opera in over a century – Vanessa was born of an artistic and personal partnership of extraordinary intensity. Although Menotti was already an established composer, he had never before written a libretto to be set by another composer, and the project was initially approached with mutual caution. “We had the usual suspicions that very good friends have about each other,” Barber later recalled. “I wondered if he would really do it. He wondered if I really could do it”. What emerged was a work that wholly captured the composer’s imagination: “I lost myself completely in the life of Gian Carlo’s characters”.

Its 1958 premiere at the Metropolitan Opera in New York was met with unanimous acclaim. Critics hailed Vanessa as “the best US opera yet staged at the Met” “a major contribution to the international repertory” and “the finest and most truly “operatic” opera ever written by an American”. That same year, the work earned Barber the Pulitzer Prize.

Far removed from the avant-garde currents of its time and suffused with a twilight atmosphere recalling the bourgeois theatre of Ibsen and Strindberg, Vanessa explores universal themes of time, illusion, and the refusal of reality. It is an opera of profound humanity, whose power and striking relevance remain undiminished today.

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