The Santa Fe Opera - 2024 Season

2024 Season

To purchase tickets or for more information, visit santafeopera.org.

La traviata

MUSIC
Giuseppe Verdi

LIBRETTO
Francesco Maria Piave

June 28, July 3, 6, 12, 19; 8:30 pm
August 1, 5, 10, 17, 20, 24; 8 pm

As the 19th century reached its midpoint, Giuseppe Verdi had 16 operas behind him and had gradually risen to the top spot among Italy’s opera composers. He was a regular presence in the leading Italian opera houses, and the most successful of his early works had launched him to international prominence through productions in dozens of cities in Europe, North and South America, Africa and the Middle East. Most of those early operas were based on grandly plotted tales of conflict set in the past, in Biblical times, perhaps, or during the crusades or some other power struggle of the Middle Ages or Renaissance — in any case, long enough ago that attendees would not feel that they were seeing themselves in the mirror of the stage.

From 1851 through 1853, Verdi let loose three operas that would be among his most beloved in posterity: Rigoletto, Il trovatore and La traviata. He set out to accomplish something new with the last of these. He had promised a new opera to the theatre of La Fenice in Venice, but he was having trouble locating a scenario that met his current interests. He wrote to a singer-colleague, “It’s easy to find commonplace ones, and I can find fifty of them in an hour; but it is difficult — very, very difficult — to find one that has all the qualities needed to make an impact, and that is also original and provocative.” In the end, Verdi and his librettist, Francesco Maria Piave, settled on La dame aux camélias, which Alexandre Dumas fils had published as a novel in 1848 and transformed into a play in 1852. It was a fictionalized telling of a recent event, the tragic death of a famous Parisian courtesan who renounces her lover under pressure from his father. Its ripped-from-the-headlines shock value did indeed prove original and provocative, even after the wary director of La Fenice insisted that the staging be moved back about five decades from “the present time” — which fooled nobody, since Dumas’s novel and play were by then well known around town. It remained, the composer stated, “a subject for our age.”

“La traviata is one of the most frequently performed operas today,” says director Louisa Muller, “and familiarity makes it easy for us to feel comfortable with it, to forget how incredibly audacious it was, dealing with prostitution, disease, the demimonde of Paris. We wanted to move it outside its original setting, but also to locate it in a place we wanted to inhabit while we worked on it, a place with enticing party life that maintains a clear parallel to the intimate story of the piece. At the very end of the 1930s, Paris was the artistic capital of Europe. The great artists, writers, and thinkers all met there, populating the same parties, having feuds. People in those circles were desperate to throw the most extravagant parties during the ‘Last Great Season.’ Nightlife included a succession of costume parties and balls, notwithstanding the underlying tensions wrought by the Great Depression, the Spanish Civil War, the rising tides of fascism in Europe and the fact that everyone knew that World War II was coming.”

She is reframing the opera as a memory play in which the heroine recalls her earlier life as she prepares to die. Muller continues, “We see a woman at the end of her life, who knows death is coming, who is grappling with how to spend what time remains, who wrestles with what freedom really means. It is a personal story set within a larger societal story.”

—James M. Keller

James M. Keller recently is in his 24th season as Program Annotator of the San Francisco Symphony. He is the author of Chamber Music: A Listener’s Guide (Oxford University press) and is writing a sequel volume on piano music. All
2024 Festival Season essays © James M. Keller.

* Debut Artist

Production support generously provided by
The John Crosby Production Fund

The performances of Corrado Rovaris
are supported by
Gene & Jean Stark

The engagement of Louisa Muller
is supported by
The Marineau Family Foundation

Don Giovanni

MUSIC
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

LIBRETTO
Lorenzo Da Ponte

June 29, July 5, 10; 8:30 pm
July 29, August 3, 6, 16, 21, 23; 8:00 pm

Asked to name their favorite Mozart stage-work, many opera-lovers will flail about — because, really, how can you choose? But director Stephen Barlow is decisive. For him, Don Giovanni leads the pack, an opinion he has held since he first saw it as a teenager in Melbourne. Quite a few other cognoscenti have agreed with him. Tchaikovsky, for example, declared it “the greatest of all operas,” Gounod called it “a work without blemish, of uninterrupted perfection,” and the novelist Gustave Flaubert, a devoted operaphile, considered it, along with Hamlet and the sea, “the three finest things that God ever made.”

It is surely the Mozart opera that has inspired the deepest psychological scrutiny — focusing on the licentious title character, for sure, but also on three women he has seduced (or hopes to) and the men who surround them. When Mozart and librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte devised this opera, in 1787, they were adding their voices to a tradition of Don Juan literature that dated back to early 17th-century Spain and since then had been enriched by such theatre-pieces as Molière’s Dom Juan (1665) and Carlo Goldoni’s tragicomedy Don Giovanni Tenorio (1735), not to mention such Don Juan[1]adjacent works as Choderlos de Laclos’ epistolary novel Les liaisons dangereuses (1782), where amoral lovers discard their conquests like so much roadkill. The opera that Mozart and Da Ponte crafted became the specific inspiration for many literary works, including E.T.A. Hoffmann’s short story “Don Juan” (1812) and Søren Kirkegaard’s treatise Either/Or (1843).

This production will explore the opera’s relationship to a different work of literature. Barlow had been invited to direct a 2010 production of Don Giovanni in London when he happened to watch a newly released film based on Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. “The camera moved in on the initials ‘D.G.’ on a briefcase or something,” he recalls, “and the penny dropped. I started thinking about the two D.G.’s — Don Giovanni and Dorian Gray — and was struck by so many parallels. Then I watched an earlier Dorian Gray movie, the 1945 classic with Angela Lansbury playing the role of Sybil. Dorian takes Sybil to the opera, and what opera do they see? Don Giovanni, of course. In Wilde, a murder happens, which sets Dorian on a reckless path, much like Don Giovanni. It seemed as if Oscar and Wolfgang and Lorenzo were pointing me in that direction.”

Working with the designer, Yannis Thavoris, he is setting the piece in London in 1888, parallel to Wilde’s novella. “Just as in the original Don Juan story, Victorian England had a strongly codified caste system,” he notes. “Today you can be mobile, but in 1888 there was little possibility of movement. That also strengthens the overlay of these two works, since social status is a strong theme in Don Giovanni.”

Mozart and Da Ponte called their opera a dramma giocosa, a “jocular drama,” with drama implying that serious stuff is in play — but that it is nonetheless “in play.” “It has to be approached as a comedy,” Barlow insists, “but it is a comedy infused with darkness — the dark heart of Don Giovanni’s world. And of course Don Giovanni will have his portrait painted.”

—James M. Keller

* Debut Artist

Production support generously provided by
The Tobin Endowment
The Robert & Ellen Vladem Perpetual Fund for Opera Production

The performances of Ryan Speedo Green are supported by
Sarah Billinghurst Solomon

The performances of Nicholas Newton
are supported by
Guy L. & Catherine D. Gronquist

The Righteous

MUSIC
Gregory Spears

LIBRETTO
Tracy K. Smith

WORLD PREMIERE
Commissioned by the Santa Fe Opera

July 13, 17, 26; 8:30 pm
July 30, August 7, 13; 8 pm

The time-honored admonition to never discuss politics or religion in polite company has largely run its course — and opera never seems to have paid much attention to that idea, anyway. The repertoire is packed with prayers (Otello, Tosca, Hänsel und Gretel) and politics (where even to begin?), and sometimes religion and politics collide on the opera stage: look no further than the chilling confrontation between church and state in Don Carlos. So it is in modern American life, where religion and politics have become undeniably intertwined — for better or for worse, depending on one’s perspective. The Righteous, which receives its world premiere in the Santa Fe Opera’s upcoming season, considers this phenomenon at the level of individual people — an extended family and their friends. Rather than view the relationship of church and state as the nervous balance of monolithic institutions, it investigates the personal stories of characters for whom religion and politics increasingly merge.

The Righteous is the work of composer Gregory Spears and librettist Tracy K. Smith, who previously collaborated on Castor and Patience, an opera about Black land ownership in the American South. This will be the eighth of Spears’ operas, which include the much-discussed Fellow Travelers (about a gay love affair between government employees during the McCarthy era) and Paul’s Case (after a Willa Cather story about a homosexual protagonist’s nonconformity and alienation). Smith is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer who served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2017- 19 and is now a professor of English and of African and African American Studies at Harvard.

“This work is an opportunity for us to think in earnest terms about the relationship between faith and power,” says Smith. “One great historical event, in our imagination, is the rise of televangelism and the engagement of religious leaders with local, regional and federal politics. We wanted to enter into the psychology of vulnerable, eager, hopeful characters who develop new vocabulary for thinking about the way that is changed by the access to power.” To which Spears adds: “The characters are all searching for God in their everyday life and they’re looking for it in different places, in institutions like the church, or in politics, or they take a more mystical approach to the divine and beyond, or they look for it in interpersonal relationships. Some of our characters make a connection, and some fail to do that, perhaps mistaking God for something more earthly, more flawed, more human. We follow them on their journeys where these struggles take place.”

The score states that the action is set in “a semi-arid state in the American Southwest in some ways similar to West Texas,” and the opera’s two acts land at three points of the plot’s development — in 1979, 1986, and 1990. For operagoers who lived through those times, the productions may seem like a time capsule. Sets and costumes strive for documentary accuracy as a small church becomes “mega,” as a preacher becomes a governor, as new religious and political aspirants spring up in their wake. Director Kevin Newbury points to another phenomenon of that time, and therefore of this production — the intrusion of television into daily life. “In the 1980s,” he says, “people started having televisions in every room, even in the bathroom.” The small screens of TVs playing in the background will chart the passage of years through images of their moment: a succession of presidents, international crises, oil spills, commercials for Sony Walkmans and McDonald’s Happy Meals. “But beyond that,” Newbury adds, “they can underscore how people go from watching the news to being the news.”

—James M. Keller

* Debut Artist

Production support generously provided by
Robert L. Turner

Additional artistic support provided by
The Edgar Foster Daniels Foundation

The performances of Jennifer Johnson Cano are supported by
The MacKay Fund for Debut Artists

The performances of Anthony Roth Costanzo are supported by
Gene & Jean Stark

Der Rosenkavalier

MUSIC
Richard Strauss

LIBRETTO
Hugo von Hofmannsthal

July 20, 24; August 2, 8, 15; 8 pm

A co-production with Garsington Opera and Irish National Opera

A handful of long-running composer-librettist pairs are routinely named as partners: Gilbert and Sullivan, for example, or Rodgers and Hammerstein, or Lerner and Loewe. In the realm of opera, Mozart and Da Ponte produced three masterworks together, while Strauss and Hofmannsthal remained a team for an even longer span. Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal met in 1900, began collaborating six years later, and turned out the initial fruit of their labor — Elektra — in 1909, the first of six operas they would produce together over 26 years.

Elektra was an edgy piece, murderous and blood-soaked like Salome, the Strauss opera that had preceded it. The composer worried that it might be wiser to create something entirely different, perhaps a romantic comedy that would charm audiences. He and Hofmannsthal tabled that thought for the time being, but two weeks after Elektra’s premiere, the librettist proposed an idea: a dashing young count (Octavian) outsmarts a pompous boor (Baron Ochs) to win the hand of an ingenue (Sophie). It was, he said, an “entirely original scenario for an opera, full of burlesque situations and characters, with lively action, pellucid almost like a pantomime. There are opportunities in it for lyrical passages, for fun and humor. … Period: the old Vienna under Empress Maria Theresa.”

“It contains two big parts,” he said, “one for baritone and another for a graceful girl dressed up like a man.” Those would be Baron Ochs and Octavian, a boy portrayed by a female singer. Sophie, the object of their affection, was initially little more than a device, an excuse for the boys’ competing with each other. Missing in action at that point of conception was the Marschallin, the lonely wife of a high ranking military man. Once invented, she would grow to become the central force of Der Rosenkavalier and one of the most beloved characters in all of opera. It is she who undergoes the greatest personal growth of the aristocrats and courtiers populating this work. At the opening, she is cavorting in bed with the considerably younger Octavian, who has not yet set his sights on Sophie. By the end, she has relinquished him with extraordinary grace, acknowledging that (as an interlocutor puts it) “youth will be youth.” Joining in a glorious trio with Octavian and Sophie, she accepts that she has now moved beyond youth and that she must not stand as an impediment to the fledgling lovers. Hofmannsthal drew inspiration from 17th- and 18th-century French comedies, but opera aficionados will recognize another source: Le nozze di Figaro, by Mozart and Da Ponte, in which Countess Almaviva accepts the realities of aging with similar poise against a philandering background that includes her flirtations with Cherubino, who, like Octavian, is a boy portrayed by a mezzo-soprano. In a letter to Strauss, Hofmannsthal referred to the relationship of Der Rosenkavalier to Le nozze di Figaro as “not an imitation, but bearing a certain analogy.”

The fantasy world of this opera is often cited for anachronisms, most notably that the Viennese waltzes that run through the piece would have denoted the mid-19th century rather than the mid-18th. In this realization, the action is moved up yet another century, to the mid-20th, though without compromising the work’s inherent elegance. The gowns may now be more Dior than Fragonard, the hairdos more bouffant than periwig, but the characters go on loving and learning, and through it all growing, which is what this opera is all about.

—James M. Keller

Conductor | Karina Canellakis*
Director | Bruno Ravella*
Scenic & Costume Designer | Gary McCann
Lighting Designer | Malcolm Rippeth

*Debut Artist

Production support generously provided by
The Estate of James R. Seitz, Jr.
The Jane & Arthur T. Stieren, Jr. Endowment Fund, in memory of Arthur T. Stieren, Jr.

Additional artistic support provided by
Miranda & David Lind

The performances of Karina Canellakis are supported provided by
Susan Esco Chandler and Alfred D. Chandler

The performances of Paula Murrihy are supported by
Friends of Richard Strauss Operas

The performances of Ying Fang are supported by
The Peter B. Frank Principal Artist Fund

The Elixir of Love

MUSIC
Gaetano Donizetti

LIBRETTO
Felice Romani

July 27; 8:30 pm
July 31, August 9, 14, 22; 8 pm

The pressure was on when Gaetano Donizetti composed his ingratiating comedy L’elisir d’amore (The Elixir of Love) in the course of six weeks in 1832. Something had suddenly gone awry at Milan’s Teatro della Cannobiana — precisely what remains unclear — and the opera scheduled to open that May evaporated. In mid-March, the theatre’s director turned in a pinch to Donizetti, with whom he had worked previously, and star librettist Felice Romani, who was just coming off his fifth collaboration with Donizetti. Their new opera was ready to begin rehearsals by May 1, and eleven days later it was greeted with vociferous cheers from the opening-night audience.

Donizetti was accustomed to working fast. He unveiled four operas that year — not an unusual pace for this composer, who would end up writing 65 operas over the span of 29 years. Still, time was of the essence that spring, and to get the new opera finished in time, he and Romani took a shortcut. Rather than start totally from scratch, they adapted a libretto that already existed — Le philtre, penned by the eminent Eugène Scribe for a musical setting by Daniel Auber that had been introduced a year earlier in Paris. The basic plot remained the same. Nemorino, a good-hearted peasant, is sincerely in love with Adina, a landowner; but because of her higher social status she refuses to take him seriously. A charlatan selling presumed medicines shows up, and Nemorino purchases from him an “elixir of love” that he hopes will help him win Adina’s affection. Repeated dosages grow expensive, so Nemorino enlists in the army to afford the stuff. Touched by this sacrifice, Adina ransoms him back from the army by purchasing his enlistment contract. She hands it over to him, declaring that now he is free from obligation, but the surprising tenderness of her music belies what he has already begun to suspect — that she really does love him despite her protestations. Finally they become a couple, and Nemorino is convinced that the elixir of love really did work its magic.

Donizetti’s brief was to write an opera buffa, but he ended up calling it a melodramma giocoso, accurately implying that all is not mere fun and games. An occasional spirit of melancholy tempers the comedy (as in Nemorino’s evergreen aria “Una furtiva lagrima”), just enough to earn real sympathy for the characters. The piece remained box-office gold from its premiere on. In the decade from 1838 to 1848, a quarter of all operatic productions in Italy were of works by Donizetti, with L’elisir d’amore being his most performed piece. Even when his music fell somewhat out of fashion, from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th, operagoers refused to let go of this masterwork, whose popularity has now continued unabated for nearly two centuries.

The Santa Fe Opera has programmed it in two previous seasons, most recently in 2009. For that production, director Stephen Lawless changed the location from the Spanish Basque country in the late-18th century (as envisioned by the composer and librettist) to an Italian village in 1945, at the end of World War II, with the military contingent becoming American GIs. Viewers were enchanted, and now it returns for a revival that promises to delight audiences again, perhaps with a furtive tear mixed into the jollity as the lovers find their inevitable footing and the elixir does its job.

—James M. Keller

Adina | Yaritza Véliz*
Nemorino | Jonah Hoskins
Belcore | Luke Sutliff
Dulcamara | Alfredo Daza*

Conductor | Roberto Kalb*
Director | Stephen Lawless
Scenic & Costume Designer | Ashley Martin-Davis
Lighting Designer | Thomas C. Hase

* Debut Artist

Production support generously provided by
The Estate of Suzanne Hanson Poole

The performances of Alfredo Daza are supported by
The MacKay Fund for Debut Artists

Apprentice Scenes

August 11, 18 at 8 pm

The Next Generation…Center Stage

The opera’s singing and technical apprentices take the mainstage spotlight for two unique evenings of staged scenes. These evenings are fun-filled “sampler boxes” of operatic styles. They are a great introduction to opera and a great value for families to enjoy an evening out. They are the perfect opportunity to experience the future of opera – now.

The opera’s singing and technical apprentice programs have launched numerous distinguished careers, including singers William Burden, Joyce DiDonato, Michael Fabiano, Brandon Jovanovich, Kate Lindsey, Samuel Ramey, Susanna Phillips and technicians Ruth E. Carter, Alex Davila, B.R. Delaney, Jennifer Good, Rupert Hemmings, Aja Jackson and Jeffrey Mace to name a few.

Theater Image © Robert Godwin; 2024 Production Illustrations © Benedetto Cristofani; Apprentice Singers © Curtis Brown Photography