The "categorically imaginative and radical" (New Yorker) Heartbeat Opera is creating a brand new adaptation of Samuel Barber and Gian Carlo Menotti's Vanessa for Williamstown this summer. Samuel Barber is one of the most celebrated American composers of the twentieth century, and Vanessa was a hit upon arrival at the Metropolitan Opera in 1958 and won the Pulitzer. It could have remained in the canon as one of the great American operas of all time, but its unique brand of gothic creep and fiercely emotional music did not jive with the overly-academic tastes of the time, and over the following decades the piece receded into near-obscurity. The directors of Heartbeat Opera, "an enterprise that has already contributed more to opera's vitality than most major American opera companies," (New York Times) have planned a reinvention of this classic, stripping away the gewgaws and doilies of its original imaginings, and allowing the riveting extremes of these palpable characters to break through. Heartbeat's version pares the work down to five singers, trapped inside their own circumstances, with a new arrangement by Dan Schlosberg.

Librettist Note:

This is the story of two women, Vanessa and Erika, caught in the central dilemma which faces every human being: whether to fight for one's ideals to the point of shutting oneself off from reality, or compromise with what life has to offer, even lying to oneself for the mere sake of living. Like a sullen Greek chorus, a third woman (the old Grandmother) condemns by her very silence the refusal first of Vanessa, then of Erika, to accept the bitter truth that life offers no solution except its own inherent struggle. When Vanessa, in her final eagerness to embrace life, realizes this truth, it is perhaps too late.

—Gian Carlo Menotti

This is a Heartbeat Opera Production co-developed with and presented by Williamstown Theatre Festival