Revel in Opera's All-Consuming Passion this Summer!

By Amy Lilly

Some of the most beautiful music for voice in the Western tradition was written for the female heroines of Italian tragic opera. Never mind that these women are usually dead of tuberculosis, murder, or suicide when the curtain closes. Each time they bring their un-politically-correct stories to an end with that final, fainting aria before collapsing onstage, they break our hearts - and we love them for it.

Two classics in the "woman must die" vein are the highlights of this summer's opera-going season in Vermont: Giuseppe Verdi's La Traviata, performed by the Green Mountain Opera Festival in Barre, and Giacomo Puccini's La Bohème as presented by the Opera Company of Middlebury.

La Traviata - literally, "the woman who strayed" - takes place in Paris in 1850, just two years before it premiered in Venice, Italy. Violetta Valèry has "strayed" by becoming a courtesan - a rare position of prestige available to single women at the time, but one that meant ostracization from "good" society. To make matters worse, she has consumption, as tuberculosis was then known.

Based on the novel La Dame aux camélias by Alexander Dumas, the opera traces a six-month romance between beautiful Violetta and her high-society lover, Alfredo Germont. The relationship is doomed from the start, as the courtesan well knows and tries to make Alfredo understand. But love overrules reason - that is, until Germont senior steps in to break up the liaison. The scandal involving his son has endangered his daughter's chance to marry. Self-sacrificing Violetta agrees to give up her lover, but a frustrated Alfredo reacts by insulting her in her own salon. With unremitting remorse, he delivers his apology to her on her deathbed as she sings of looking down on Alfredo from heaven. The wayward woman, Verdi implies, has been redeemed through love.

Violetta will be sung by coloratura soprano Aline Kutan of Québec, in a production set in the 1930s. From the singer's point of view, the opera is "really more about how [Violetta] sacrifices everything for love" than the portrayal of a 19th-century woman's predicament. "It can be set at any time; the music is timeless. It's about a woman finding her heart," the soprano avers, speaking by phone from her home in Pointe-Claire near Montréal. Her greatest concern is learning to "master these feelings she goes through," including "pondering the possibility that someone actually loves and understands you - the big 'L' word." Kutan has sung numerous roles around Europe, Canada, and the U.S., including the demanding showpiece role of Queen of the Night in Mozart's The Magic Flute at New York City Opera and Opéra National de Paris. This is her first time playing the famed courtesan, a role she says is "every soprano's dream to sing."

Like Kutan, most of the Green Mountain Opera Company's members are, counterintuitively, from the Montréal area, including Artistic Director Taras Kulish. The group's host and sponsor is the Waitsfield-based Green Mountain Cultural Center, which offers a range of events from arts exhibitions to concerts. This is the third year that Cultural Center Director Doreen Simko has brought the company to perform in the Green Mountain Opera Festival. The month-long gig features an Emerging Artists program and free master classes in the Joslyn Round Barn in Waitsfield (owned by Simko's daughter, AnneMarie DeFreest), open rehearsals at the Valley Players Theater, and final performances at the Barre Opera House.

Simko was delighted to report that the Green Mountain Opera Festival just got its first listing in Opera News, the New York Metropolitan Opera publication which provides information on key performances around the country and abroad. The print mention is a mark of how quickly the festival has gained notice, Simko says. "We did [Gioachino Rossini's] The Barber of Seville three years ago on $50,000. We needed army uniforms, so my husband drove down to Norwich University and borrowed some," she laughs. This time, costumes are being rented from the Montréal Opera Company, "so they'll be beautiful," says the 71-year-old opera fan. Last year the group did Puccini's Madama Butterfly to a "95 percent sold out" audience at both performances. The lead soprano from that run, Julie Nesrallah, recently got a second call-back at the Met. "Our fingers are crossed for her," Simko says.

Crossing fingers will do little for another consumptive opera favorite, Mimi of La Bohème. This time it's 1830 in Paris (the opera premiered in 1896 in Turin, Italy), and the heroine is eking out a living embroidering silk and linen in her rented room in the Latin Quarter. "My story is short," she sings with feminine modesty to Rodolfo, one of four bohemian artist types renting the drafty garret upstairs.

An ultra-realist, Puccini balanced Mimi's and the poet Rodolfo's deepening love for each other with a turbulent relationship between Marcello the painter and his old flame Musetta. In a famous aria closing the first act, Musetta wins Marcello back by throwing a pretend fit in public over her shoe and sending her aging sugar daddy after a new pair. As the months go by, Mimi and Rodolfo's relationship is strained by her illness, eventually leading to a sad break-up, and an even more heartbreaking reunion on - you guessed it - her deathbed.

The Opera Company of Middlebury will perform La Bohème in the newly renovated Town Hall Theater, with Castleton State College faculty member Suzanne Kantorski Merrill as prima donna ("first woman") and Wendy Hoffman Farrell as Musetta - the opera's true prima donna, in the sense that epithet has come to mean.

Farrell, from Bolton Valley, is thrilled to be playing the "coquettish and fiery" Musetta. "Then again," the mezzo-soprano adds, "she kind of holds things together. She's not the weak one." Farrell admits that she "used to really not enjoy watching tragic opera. I was always curious - why are we pointing out the tragedy and passing over the joy? But then I realized that there are equal parts of both in all these operas."

The role of Musetta is usually sung by a soprano, so Farrell, 38, is meeting the challenge of a higher register by drawing on lessons learned from a lifetime of voice training. Born in Burlington, the singer grew up in Essex and broke in her vocal chords in the Essex Children's Choir, directed by the "hugely inspirational" Connie Price. As a senior in high school, she saw a traveling New York City Opera performance of Madama Butterfly at Burlington's Flynn Theater. The experience was so deeply moving it changed her life: Farrell dropped her plans to study pre-law at the University of Massachusetts and enrolled in the Crane School of Music, supported by enthusiastic parents. She went on to earn a Master's in Music at Georgia State University in Atlanta, and has since played many roles. Among her favorites are Georges Bizet's Carmen and the trouser role of Prince Orlofsky in Die Fledermaus by Johann Strauss.

Farrell is learning her new role from scratch while homeschooling her three children, ages 12, 10, and 8. "I can get in a solid hour a day [of work], a few days a week," she estimates. For now, she is translating the Italian libretto word by word - a process that helps her remember the part and gives her the opportunity to see its meaning as a whole text. As for those high notes - Musetta's highest is the B before high C - Farrell is in good shape: she reports that she just hit her first high C in performance last weekend.

The opera singer is happiest, according to Farrell, when she looks out at an audience and sees younger faces. Contemporary operas continue to be written, but as the art has aged, so has its audience. The trend has prompted venues to emphasize acting as much as singing quality, provide supertitled translations and high-definition broadcasts, and engage talent from other mediums - like film director Anthony Minghella, who staged the Met's visually stunning production of Butterfly in 2006.

Why is it worthwhile to continue presenting a nineteenth-century art in the twenty-first? It's all about the music, Farrell declares. "I'm an amateur electric bass guitar player; I love all sorts of music. But opera music touched something in me that hadn't been touched before," says Farrell. "There's a depth and a peace to it. We're so bombarded now with media and noise and busyness; this music demands your attention, it demands that you slow down and listen."

Associate Editor Amy Lilly lives in Burlington.