At SF Opera, Strauss’ ‘Arabella’ gets a workout but never takes flight

Ellie Dehn (left) and Brian Mulligan perform in Strauss’ “Arabella” at San Francisco Opera. Photo: Cory Weaver / S.F. Opera

Even under the best of circumstances, Strauss’ “Arabella” is an opera that takes enormous effort to get off the ground. It’s a laborious, clumsy piece shot through with many undeniable splendors, and anyone undertaking to make it work onstage faces a daunting challenge.

The secret, as with so many things in life, is not to let them see you sweat.

Unfortunately, the new production of “Arabella” that opened at the San Francisco Opera on Tuesday, Oct. 16, featured plenty of heaving and grunting, as a large creative team attempted to wrestle this colorful but ungainly theatrical behemoth into the air.

In his U.S. operatic debut, conductor Marc Albrecht flogged the orchestra mercilessly, spurring them on to ever louder and blunter displays of force. An eclectic cast of singers — many of them essaying their roles for the first time, and few of them sounding entirely at ease with the prospect — attacked their assignments with more gusto than finesse.

And although designer Tobias Hoheisel has provided a sleek, frictionless setting for the action — a coolly elegant interior dominated by blacks, whites and grays — director Tim Albery deploys his forces with an undercurrent of anxiety, as if groping for that secret combination that will unlock the mechanism to make “Arabella” tick.

Well, good luck with that. Even for a devotee of Strauss’ stage works, the difficulties inherent in this 1933 creation are pretty intractable.

They begin with the conception, which was for Strauss and his longtime collaborator, librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal, to return to the formula that had made “Der Rosenkavalier” a massive hit for them some two decades earlier. Both the setting (aristocratic Vienna) and the tone (rueful comedy) are the same, and of course Strauss’ distinctive compositional style remained constant from one score to the next. Had everything gone as planned, it’s still hard to see how “Arabella” could have made its way out of the shadow of its illustrious predecessor, or come off as anything but a pallid sequel.

But things didn’t go as planned. While the opera was still being written, Hofmannsthal — stunned by the suicide of his 25-year-old son — fell dead of a stroke; and Strauss, who would ordinarily have insisted on extensive revisions, went on to set the librettist’s early draft just as he’d left it.

Strauss’ “Arabella” at San Francisco Opera is directed by Tim Albery. Photo: Cory Weaver / S.F. Opera

That, in turn, is almost certainly why the opera’s central love story between the title character, the daughter of an impoverished noble family, and the Croatian landowner Mandryka, is encircled with such gimcrack dramatic frippery. In the course of the opera’s three acts, we get yet another young woman dressed as a man (as though Octavian’s charades in “Rosenkavalier” hadn’t already covered that ground thoroughly); an array of pointless secondary characters; some woolly philosophizing about love and marriage and the passage of time; and a series of contrivances, delays and misunderstandings without which the lovers could have fallen into each others’ arms in about 20 minutes’ time.

When “Arabella” succeeds — as it very nearly did 20 years ago, in its last mounting at the War Memorial Opera House — there’s a kind of inexplicable alchemy that goes into the process, by which the effortless beauty of Strauss’ vocal writing and the serene, lovable dignity of its central character banish any doubts. On Tuesday, by contrast, the gears were exposed in all their industrious, clanking energy.

Heidi Stober (left) and Ellie Dehn perform in Strauss’ “Arabella” at San Francisco Opera. Photo: Cory Weaver / S.F. Opera

In the title role, soprano Ellie Dehn gave a solidly conscientious performance that conjured up the character’s stateliness but not her ineffable allure. High notes, instead of floating forth as if by magic, were achieved through audible, honorable effort; her chest tones tended to be swallowed up by the orchestra. Dramatically, Dehn seemed as doubtful as the audience about the proceedings but determined not to let the mask slip.

As Mandryka, baritone Brian Mulligan also came off as somewhat perplexed (perhaps suitably so, since the character’s fish-out-of-water attitude toward Vienna is just one of the dramatic notes that are never fleshed out). But he put his robust, fluid sound to good use, especially in his first meeting with Arabella at the beginning of Act 2.

Other performers had to face down the orchestral onslaught from the pit. As Zdenka, Arabella’s cross-dressing sister, soprano Heidi Stober forced her lyrical instrument into scary exertions; tenor Daniel Johansson made a shouty debut as her beloved Matteo, and soprano Hye Jung Lee piped her way a bit strenuously through the coloratura explosions of the Fiakermilli in Act 2.

Richard Paul Fink plays Arabella’s father in Strauss’ “Arabella” at San Francisco Opera. Photo: Cory Weaver / S.F. Opera

The evening’s most smoothly integrated contributions came from mezzo-soprano Michaela Martens and baritone Richard Paul Fink as Arabella’s parents, both of them wondrously at ease with both the cartoonish dramatic shadings and vocal demands of their roles. Scott Quinn, Andrew Manea and Christian Pursell were pleasantly interchangeable as Arabella’s three luckless suitors.

The action was originally set in the 1860s, but Albery has updated it to 1910, which gives the decor a welcome polish but does nothing to help the opera’s dramatic flaws. If there’s one weird trick that can make “Arabella” take wing, it has eluded most of the parties involved.

“Arabella”: Through Nov. 3. $26-$370. War Memorial Opera House. Event Details

  • Joshua Kosman
    Joshua Kosman Joshua Kosman is The San Francisco Chronicle’s music critic. Email: jkosman@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @JoshuaKosman