OPERA : A Risky New Life for Lucia : With dark mystery and adventurous staging, a director and a diva attempt to create a challenging new view of Lammermoor

Something old, something new: It’s time for a wedding again in quaint, operatic Lammermoor--an event usually heralded by the delirious chirping of the most expensive trained canary available.

But not this time. Next Sunday, when the Los Angeles Music Center Opera presentation of Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor” opens for the first of six performances at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the walls come tumbling down. Literally. In the Mad Scene.

As designed by National Theatre of Great Britain associate director William Dudley and staged by the controversial Romanian theater director Andrei Serban, this production finds Lucia starting the Mad Scene at the top of the palace.

Then, in Serban’s words, “her whole world starts very slowly to crumble as her mind starts to take off. The set almost melts in front of her eyes. And it’s done in a very quiet, mysterious way that doesn’t interfere at all with the music. It’s as if we are seeing something from her subjective point of view, as if the walls take on another dimension in her mind. . . .”

Originally created for the Chicago Lyric Opera, this “Lucia” comes to Los Angeles with only one holdover from the cast of the November, 1990, premiere: 40-year-old Connecticut diva June Anderson in the title role.

Serban acknowledges that his high-risk stagecraft would scarcely be possible without her. “The set was really designed for June,” he reveals, “because I’ve worked with her before and I know that she is the type of singer who will take extraordinary chances--chances that no other singer would ever dare to take.”

Anderson describes the staging as both “the most interesting production of ‘Lucia’ in which I’ve been involved” and “very tricky: The (set’s) rake is very steep; the stairways are about 12 inches wide, and trying to maneuver wide dresses on that set took some doing.

“But I loved the idea of the production--the way the same set was able to give the suggestion of moors and the skeleton of a castle.

“It’s an extraordinary design,” she says, “kind of like one of those children’s cards that you open up and it becomes three-dimensional and you can close it and get another view and turn it on its side.”

Anderson trained as a dancer until she grew too tall, and calls herself “a typical Capricorn--part mountain goat. I’m used to climbing things, do a lot of exercise--and I’m not always worrying about where my next high note is coming from. So I like the challenge of something that’s very physical.

“But there are limits: The music has to come first, and I don’t want to be winded when trying to sing. So some scenes will be modified in the L.A. performances--especially in the first act. Maybe changing the direction the moors are facing so I don’t have to be going up and down quite so many times.

“When I did the production in Chicago, I had no contact lenses, so I had no fear. Now that I have finally been fitted with contacts, maybe I’ll be a little more nervous when I finally see what I’m getting myself into.”

Unlikely. Two years and nine days after the Chicago premiere of the Serban-Dudley “Lucia,” Anderson sang the role at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City in an even riskier new production directed by Francesa Zambello and designed by John Conklin.

“Actually the set in New York was dangerous and didn’t look as dangerous as the one in Chicago,” Anderson declares. “There was a very steep staircase in the third act in New York, and with nothing to hold onto--I have no depth perception, with or without contact lenses--I simply couldn’t get down it without killing myself.

“I found the only way I could come in was backward--crawling. In contrast, the production in Chicago always gave me things I could hold onto. New York was also difficult because the chorus was not onstage--and they had Lucia kind of loony from the beginning. That’s not the interpretation that I prefer.

“I see her as a highly strung, sensitive character who, when pushed to the limit, just breaks. I like the idea of someone changing. I’m not very interested in characters who stay the same over the course of the opera.”

Mountain goat or no mountain goat, an action plan that required Anderson to climb over heaps of coffins to dip her hands into a blood-filled sarcophagus quickly took its toll.

“I hurt my back in some of the rehearsals in New York,” she remembers, “and found out that I was not covered (insured) by anything, because I was a guest artist or something.” In addition, Luciano Pavarotti, her announced Edgardo, withdrew to sing “Don Carlo” in Milan.

The bottom line: “It was either saying, ‘I can’t deal with this at all’ and leave or try and make the best of it. I was trying desperately to make it work. . . . While performing, I tend not to think what the audience is thinking, but it was abundantly clear at the end of the opera what they had been thinking--and there were a couple of moments during the opera when they laughed outright (at the staging).

“I personally did not like the production very much, but not from a staging point of view. It was the physical production I felt was totally wrong. It looked like it was ‘Die Frau ohne Schatten’ or something.

“I think it’s very important that what you see onstage reflects what you’re hearing. And this kind of music is not gray and linear and German neo-Expressionist. So I had lots of problems and was very unhappy because it was very hard for me to do what I needed to do as Lucia in the context of that physical setting.”

As it happens, “Lucia di Lammermoor” was the last opera Anderson sang in Los Angeles--in the New York City Opera production at the Pavilion 12 years ago. The following year, she left the company to launch an international career that took her to nearly all the major houses of Europe and then, finally, to the Met--courtesy of Pavarotti.

“He was definitely responsible in a very large way for my coming to the Met,” Anderson says. “They had offered me second-cast things and operas I had absolutely no interest in--and turned them down, so they were kind of annoyed with me. (Without Pavarotti) it’s no telling how long it would have taken.”

She met him in 1986 when they were both on the same concert series at the Rossini Festival in Pesaro, Italy: “It was a very prestigious thing to be involved with,” she says. “Marilyn Horne did the first concert, then me, then Luciano, then Montserrat Caballe. I was the only name I’d never heard of.”

All the concerts were shown live on Italian television, and Pavarotti saw Anderson’s. When they met at his rehearsal, he asked when they could sing together. “When you do a ‘Lucia’ or ‘Traviata’ or ‘Rigoletto’ or something,” Anderson answered.

“ ‘Rigoletto’?” she recalls Pavarotti asking. “ ‘You sing “Rigoletto”?’ I said yes. ‘Are you sure?’ Yeah. ‘Well, what are you doing in October or November, 1989?’ And I said I didn’t think I was doing anything special. . . .

“It took a while for things to get arranged,” she says, “but sometime later that year or early the next, it was all settled.” Reviews of her Met debut as Gilda confirmed her diva status, along with raising anew comparisons with one stellar predecessor in particular.

“She demonstrated in a ‘Caro nome’ of exquisite taste, effortless fluidity and pinpoint precision that she is a master of the bel canto style,” wrote Donal Henahan in the New York Times.

“She is comfortable above high C, but the lower ranges do not suffer in quality or power. The wide leaps of the ‘Caro nome’ coda were taken effortlessly and squarely on the note. The Met audience does not often hear a trill as thrushlike and as precise as Miss Anderson’s, nor a soprano who can soar as grandly over the ensemble in the quartet.

“In these and other ways (mushy diction, for instance), Miss Anderson reminded one of the young (Joan) Sutherland. . . .”

Characteristically, Anderson doesn’t take the comparison at face value but considers it from all sides--weighing the evidence. “In terms of upper extension and (vocal) size, there’s a similarity with Sutherland,” she agrees. “And since Sutherland there has not been someone else singing this repertoire with a large sound.

“But my voice doesn’t sound like hers. It’s a lower voice and differently colored. I’ve certainly never patterned myself on Sutherland or on anybody. Now I’m going into the Russian repertory, and if I’m patterning myself on anybody there, it would probably be Mirella Freni.”

At this point, Anderson casually mentions that she doesn’t sing operas in languages that she doesn’t speak. “I’ve just done Tchaikovsky’s ‘Mazeppa,’ ” she says, “and learning the Russian has been a lot of fun for me. Also the tessitura is a little different than a lot of the Italian things--it brings out a lot of different colors in my voice. Sounds very different.

“Most singers learn Russian phonetically, but I couldn’t sing something if I didn’t understand exactly what I was saying--in what tense and what person, and this is an adjective and why.

“I suppose that in a sense I’m overeducated for my work,” says this Boston-born, Yale French major who graduated cum laude . “I sometimes try to analyze things too much, but in insisting on understanding the language, it’s for the better.

“When I first started singing, I didn’t speak Italian fluently. I think one of the biggest differences that came about in my singing is when I reached a point where I seemed to be reciting rather than singing the language.

“If I’m going to complain about opera directors, it’s that they’re not using the words that the singer sings as dialogue--as if they were directing a play.

“I do have the ability to make choices about how I’m going to interpret any given line within the context of the music, and I like the directors to know about that possibility.

“So often, working with a director, you’re merely told, ‘Enter from here and just go stand in the light, do your number and then exit to the left.’ I have my definition of what a director should be and that’s not it.

“I remember in the olden days when I was at New York City Opera being the official understudy and getting the stage directions and I would say, ‘But why? I don’t understand why this is happening this way.’ And one of the A.D.s, the assistant directors, said: ‘Oh, God, there she goes again: The Thinking Soprano.’ ”

She laughs at herself, but also acknowledges that her rehearsal questions and demands have earned her a reputation as “a holy terror.”

“I’m always reading about how difficult I am,” she says. “You ask Andrei if I’m difficult to work with, and he’ll just laugh at you. (Leonard) Bernstein wouldn’t have said that I’m difficult, Michael Tilson Thomas doesn’t think I’m difficult.

“The demands I’m making are nothing more than the ones they would make themselves. But, somehow, a man can be demanding and he’s just being assertive. But when a woman is demanding, she’s difficult. “

The first time Anderson and Serban worked together was in a Paris “I Puritani” six years ago. Characteristically, Anderson made demands.

“The production originally was not done for me but for the Welsh National Opera,” she recalls, “and Andrei wasn’t there for the beginning of the (Paris) rehearsals: An assistant was putting it together.

“The first act was kind of OK, and I really liked the staging of the third act. But the second act--well, I said, ‘No, most of this I simply will not do. I don’t see it this way and I won’t do it, so don’t even bother working on it. We’ll wait until the boss shows up and we’ll try and work something out.’

“And we made it work and when we did it at Covent Garden, we changed a few more things. It’s kind of become my production now.

“Very often a director thinks, ‘This is just a stupid soprano. What does she know?’ Andrei doesn’t think that way, so when I say something to him, he does listen because he knows I’m not saying it out of caprice or because I want to be in a brighter light or want people to applaud more. It’s from a dramatic standpoint or that something simply does not make sense to me.

“People are always saying to me, ‘Well, why can’t you just do your Lucia no matter where you are?’ The Met wanted me to do ‘Puritani’ and ‘Traviata’ and I refused to go into those productions. I can’t go on and do my Elvira or Violetta in the context of those productions.

“Actually, there is no my Elvira or my Lucia; it changes every time I do it. And I think that’s the only interesting thing: I can’t imagine someone wanting to do the same thing over and over.”

Serban, however, can imagine it quite easily--because he deals with it all the time. “Very rarely do you find singers who--although they have done a role many other times in many other productions--are absolutely willing to be challenged in a new situation, to be given new insights into the character,” he says.

“June Anderson may have done many, many Lucias before, but she really wanted to do a completely different Lucia in working with me.

“I usually prefer to work with singers who have not done the parts before, who are discovering along with me how to approach this from a point of view which is musical drama.

“But opera is a lottery, because as a director coming from the theater, I know very few opera singers and I never cast them: The director is always the last one to be called in a project. The singers are cast first and then the conductor and, at the very end, someone asks, ‘Who should direct it?’

“In the theater, I always do my own casting and always choose actors who will suit my vision of the parts. But when I do an opera, then I’m always in a situation where I don’t know if I’m facing a singer who’s willing--who’s interested in acting, who really finds acting necessary to develop his expression in the voice--or a singer who is very suspicious of any director and would prefer not to be bothered.

“For them, a director is like a traffic cop, and ideally I should work with singers who want to understand what singing is as musical theater. Unfortunately, in one cast you find both types, and that’s where the difficulty starts.”

At 49, Serban commutes to various opera houses from Bucharest, where he is artistic director of the National Theatre of Romania. He also holds a permanent post at the Boston Repertory Theatre. Previous productions of his presented at the Music Center include “Turandot” (1984) and “The Fiery Angel” (1987).

He denies that his Chicago “Lucia” involves any radical manipulation of the work a la New York. Indeed, he says, “the production is extremely classical, very faithful to the period and the geography.”

To Serban, faithful means “realistic--(capturing) the very severe hard reality of Scotland and of the moors, and how in a landscape like this a story like Lucia’s story can take place.”

“If there is a shock of any sort, it is a psychological shock, and even that is totally appropriate to the piece. Our investigation is to see what makes Lucia mad and what does it mean to be mad.

“Strangely enough, the most famous moment in the opera, which is Lucia’s Mad Scene, is supposed to show somebody losing herself and becoming totally disorganized in her thoughts--but from a musical point of view, it reveals a totally organized, disciplined structure.

“It’s the rigor of the music versus the complete physical freedom of the body, a contradiction that is very interesting to me.”

Serban believes that “in a way, what we call madness is from Lucia’s point of view a way of seeing deeper,” an idea that Anderson finds liberating: “There’s an innocence, a sensuality, that come out,” she says. “All the love moments that never happened can now happen (in Lucia’s mind) because the moral restraints are no longer there. Anything goes.”

In preparing the production, Serban and Anderson reread the original Sir Walter Scott novel that inspired “Lucia di Lammermoor,” trying to find what Serban calls “elements and details that could be applied to the staging.”

“After that, it’s (a process of) just studying the libretto to try to make sense out of it because it’s not one of the operas that from a theatrical point of view makes total logical sense.

“It’s an opera where the irrational is very much a part of life, and to understand the irrational--the irrational and the subconscious--and to really approach the universe of madness in a way that is very much connected to our world, one is obliged to find the human values in the piece.

“Bel canto is usually about making beautiful melodies, not about motivation,” he says, “and that’s why ‘Lucia’ has always been a venue for great singers to reach high notes. However, for that (approach) one doesn’t need a theater director.

“The reason why I was called, and the reason why I think June was interested in working with me, was to humanize Lucia, to show her as a real person in a real situation.”

Perhaps, but Anderson’s interest in working with Serban may also be explained by his habit of making rehearsals a learning experience--a process of discovery that this diva finds infinitely preferable to the spotlights and roses of actually singing opera in front of an audience.

“I’m not a happy performer,” she confesses. “People always complain that I don’t stay out long enough for curtain calls. But I’m someone who likes rehearsing rather than performing.

“Unfortunately, people don’t pay me to rehearse, so I have to do the odd performance. But I love rehearsing, because that’s when I’m learning things--if I’m in a situation where things can work that way.”

Serban understands why: “In rehearsal she takes more risks, but when the performance comes she gets more aware of all these people who paid high prices for a ticket to see her sing those top notes. And they don’t give a damn about her acting.

“This is not a very interesting situation for an artist. So in the rehearsal, when we are there to investigate motivation and action and singing, the situation is much more inspiring than the performance.”