The Santa Fe Opera is a special haven for opera lovers. Tucked away in the hills north of the city, it is one of the most beautiful places to hear opera on this planet. The theatre is open on the sides and at the back of the stage, but thanks to some clever engineering, the sound is fine. The stage is built as an acoustic shell. Between the orchestra pit and the auditorium is a narrow channel of water that helps to disperse the sound. Large baffles keep the rain and some of the wind from threatening the performance. 

The company was founded by a young conductor, John Crosby, in the mid-1950s. Crosby’s parents provided the initial funding to buy the land and build the original 500 seat open air theatre. The Santa Fe Opera now performs in a beautiful covered auditorium that seats over two-thousand people. The scenery surrounding the theatre provides the grandeur.

This summer, we saw two productions that represented John Crosby’s original vision. Crosby loved the operas of Richard Strauss, which became the backbone of the company’s programming. In Crosby’s day, a Strauss opera was always on the menu. He was equally devoted to contemporary opera. Our visit included a Strauss opera, Der Rosenkavalier, and a premiere, Gregory Spears and Tracy K. Smith’s The Righteous. 

Richard Strauss was fortunate in collaborating with as fine a dramatist as his librettist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal. The librettos for Strauss operas contain some of the most finely drawn characters in all of opera. Der Rosenkavalier is long, but every moment tells us something about the characters on stage.

Der Rosenkavalier builds on a situation in the Mozart-da Ponte masterpiece The Marriage of. Figaro. There a teenage page, Cherubino, played by a woman, has an unrequited crush on the unhappily married Countess. In Der Rosenkavalier, the boy, still played by a woman, becomes the lover of a princess who is the wife of the Field Marshall. The boy, Count Octavian, beliefs at the outset that his passion for the married older woman is noble and eternal. The Marschalin knows better. “Today or tomorrow,” she sings, “you will leave me.” The Marschalin is one of the most fascinating characters in all opera. At thirty-two, she already feels that time is her enemy. She sings at one point that some nights she has the urge to stop all the clocks in the palace. Of course, she is right about Octavian. When he sees the teenage Sophie, a wealthy bourgeoise girl who is to be married off to the boorish Baron Ochs, it is love at first sight.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal originally intended the oafish nobleman Baron Ochs to be his central character. Written for a comic bass (aren’t all foolish, randy middle-aged characters in opera written for basses?), it’s a long role. Ochs is an awful snob and a lecher to boot. He has no manners. Much of the opera is devoted to his humiliation. Like Malvolio in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, the humiliation goes on a bit too long. It’s the Marschalin we care most about. Her graceful surrender of her young lover at the end is a great operatic moment. The role demands a great singing actress.  

I have seen many good productions of Der Rosenkavalier during my lifetime. My first, at the Met in the 1950s, starred the great Swiss Mozart-Strauss soprano, Lisa Della Casa, as the Marschalin; Met favorite Rise Stevens in the title role; and the German Strauss specialist Hilde Gueden as Sophie. A decade later I saw a production with Della Casa as Octavian; Elizabeth Schwarzkopf as the Marschalin; and Judith Raskin as Sophie. Veteran German bass Otto Edelmann was the Baron Ochs at both these performances. These great singers set a standard for my judgement of productions of this opera. For us old-time opera lovers, nostalgia is part of the experience—judging present performances on the basis of our memories (probably idealized) of past ones. The current cast at Santa Fe is a mixed bag. Of the women, Ying Fang, the Sophie, is the most powerful. Still in her twenties, Fang is already one of the most important lyric sopranos. She can comfortably sing the stratospheric vocal line Strauss wrote for his high sopranos and she can act. I have never before seen a Sophie who emerges as a worthy rival to the Marschalin. Rachel Willis-Sorensen’s voice has lost some of the bloom it had before she started taking on heavier Verdi roles, but she sang the Marschalin with great sensitivity to the words as well as the music. Paula Murrihy looked good as Octavian and acted the role as convincingly as a mature woman can act like a seventeen-year-old boy, but was far from the greatest Octavian I have heard. I have heard Matthew Rose sing Baron Ochs before. I have never seen him act the role as well as he did in this staging. 

In the Santa Fe opera production, directed by Bruno Ravella, the characters still occupied baroque palaces, but the gorgeous costumes placed them in 1950s high fashion. There were moments that verged on surrealism, particularly as Baron Ochs gets lost in his sexual fantasies. I love productions that surprise me. This production was full of brilliant directorial inventions that actually clarified the text.

Der Rosenkavalier is also a conductor’s opera. I have seen fine performances conducted by Rudolf Kempe, Karl Boehm, James Levine, Charles Mackerras, Kiril Petrenko, among others. Karina Canellakis’s conducting placed her in this pantheon. 

If in Der Rosenkavalier Hofmannsthal ‘s original conception of an opera about a male character became a work in which the female characters were far more interesting. The same can be said of Gregory Spears’ and Tracy K. Davis’s The Righteous. Ostensibly the work focuses on David, a proud man of God who leaves his pastoral role to enter politics. He sees his new role as the result of God’s calling, but that is a rationalization for his powerful ambition. At the end, his is Governor of the state, but has lost the three people who meant the most to him: his best friend Jonathan, his first wife Sheila, and his second wife Michele. We should care most about Paul, but he isn’t a very interesting character dramatically or musically. We have seen his type before in plays, movies and television series and Spears didn’t seem inspired to write powerful music for him. It doesn’t help that Michael Mayes, who plays him, seems to be dangerously forcing his voice.

 Nor does it help that Spears and Davis decided to make Jonathan a countertenor. Jonathan loves David in ways David cannot return, not only because he isn’t gay, but because his ability to love is limited. Making Jonathan a countertenor neuters the character and removes any erotic element. Anthony Roth Costanzo is a fine singer, but his voice got lost at the Santa Fe Opera. Jonathan is a gay man who ultimately runs the family corporation—not likely for a gay man in the 1970s in the Southwest. 

The wives are far more interesting. Wife one, Michele, Jonathan’s sister, comes from a rich, powerful family. Her father is a petroleum mogul who has becomes governor of the state. Having lived with that kind of ambition, Michele does not want to see her husband enter politics. Nor can she be silent about his affair with Sheila, a married woman who is an ardent believer and church volunteer. 

By the end of the opera, Jonathan, Michele and Sheila have moved on. Jonathan frees himself of his business responsibilities and moves to California to live the way he wants to. Michele becomes a successful lawyer. Sheila becomes more involved in church work. The three characters don’t need David in their lives to thrive. 

Both Michele and Sheila get grand arias that take them on powerful emotional journeys. Spears has proven in his earlier works that he knows how to write the sort of elaborate vocal solo that was central to traditional grand opera. His music for the two women is beautiful and emotionally powerful. The greatest music is given to the chorus. The opera opens with a hymn and closes with an elaborate ensemble with principals and chorus. Again, grand is the word that comes to mind. 

Jennifer Johnson Cano and Elena Villalón stole the show as Michele and Sheila. They gave thrilling performances. The chorus was brilliant.  I have always been impressed with Jordan de Souza’s conducting. He kept this large scale work in balance and did full justice to Spears’ rich orchestrations.  

The Righteous needs some revision, but there is enough wonderful material there to justify another production somewhere.