Readers may recall that, by the time I announced the Merola Summer Festival production of Richard Strauss’ Ariadne auf Naxos, tickets for the first performance were already sold out. Yesterday afternoon, my wife and I ventured down to the Caroline H. Hume Concert Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music to see the second (and last) performance. The bad news is that this venue was not designed for performances of fully-staged operas, particularly one in which the staging of the first part is radically different from that of the second. Nevertheless, the generous cast of vocalists delivered their roles with enviable clarity. Things were a bit more difficult for the orchestra; but what mattered was the balance between vocalists and instrumentalists, which, for the most part, could not have been clearer.
Those familiar with this work know that it is basically an opera about opera. The first part is all about what is taking place before the curtain rises. After the intermission, the “opera itself” begins. Taken as a whole, Strauss and his librettist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, developed a narrative about how the background leads to the foreground. Much of that “background” involves the conflicting diversity of the egos of the individual characters (with Strauss casting himself as the young ambitious composer). In a way, it reminds me of the Betsy Ross character in the Stan Freberg album about the American Revolution, who sings “Everybody wants to be an art director!”
Emilie Kealani as Zerbinetta (lower left) with her fellow clowns Truffaldino (John Mburu), Scaramuccio (Logan Wagner), and Brighella (Cole McIlquham) (photograph by Kristen Loken)
The good news is that all of the participating Merolini found their own personalities for their respective egos. Presumably, this was due to the perceptive direction by Omar Ben Seadia, himself a Merola alumnus for 2014. He managed the overall flow of the narrative in such a way that there was never a dull moment. Just as important, however, was Strauss’ tendency to challenge every level of vocalist with no end of hoops that need to be traversed. Soprano Emilie Kealani, in the role of Zerbinetta, needed to deal with the lion’s share of those hoops, diving smoothly through all of them, often to the disturbance of the title character (soprano Aida Evans), a regal character with no interest in commoners!
Personally, I find this to be an opera about the rich diversity in the human condition. To invoke an old cliché, the personalities in this opera run the entire gamut from the ridiculous to the sublime. Ultimately, Strauss and Hofmannsthal came to an agreement on how the sublime would ultimately triumph over the ridiculous. Nevertheless, the fact that the last word comes from the commedia dell’arte Zerbinetta, the ridiculous still provides the punctuation!
