Carl, are we having an earthquake?

It's worse, Eddie.

Much worse.

They're coming.

They?

Yes, they the energy vampires.

They come every night when my owners are asleep and suck the electricity from me with those bangs.

They're here.

Carl, there's no such thing as energy vampires.

It's just appliances and electrical devices that drain electricity even when they're not in use.

You may not realize it, but devices like cell phone chargers, computers, printers, and battery-powered tools can account for five to ten percent of your electricity usage when they're plugged in.

But in reality, they're using electricity and costing you money twenty-four hours a day.

But you can fight the energy vampires by turning off power strips, using outlet timers, or simply unplugging any device that's not in use.

Vanessa, score by Samuel Barber with a libretto by John Carlo Manotti.

I'm Nick Ravellis, and this is Opera Talk.

The

composer Samuel Barber was born in Westchester, Pennsylvania in 1910, and he seemed destined to live a life in music from childhood.

After all, his aunt was the great Metropolitan Opera Contralto Louise Homer, herself married to a composer, Sidney Homer.

While a student at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, Barber met another young composer, Giancarlo Manotti.

Born in Italy in the town of Cadigliano in 1911, Manotti came to this country in 1928 to study composition at Curtis, and the two began a close relationship that continued through the rest of their lives.

But whereas Manotti had success in opera relatively early on in his career, with a Metropolitan Opera debut of his first opera, Amelia Goes to the Ball in 1938, Barber was finding his compositional voice by writing songs, chamber music, and symphonic works.

His reputation as a composer was canonized by the 1938 broadcast of his first essay for orchestra and the now ubiquitous Adagio for Strings by the NBC Orchestra under the baton of Arturo Toscanini, heady stuff for a 28-year-old American.

By the time of the Toscanini broadcast, Barber was already seen as being at the head of a movement back towards romanticism and music.

His musical style was the antithesis of the 12-toned school being espoused by young American composers and academics coming home from studies in Europe.

Barber's musical language was totally connected to his desire to connect emotionally with the audience.

Although his music could be dissonant, it was always lyrical and expressive, unbound by theories of atonality.

Probably because of this accessible style, he received many important commissions.

Rudolph Bing, the director of the Metropolitan Opera, offered Barber a commission for an opera based on the composer's success in these other fields of composition, convinced that his inherent lyricism would lend itself well to the form.

In searching for a librettist, Barber turned to a number of contemporary authors.

But eventually, in a rather bold move, Barber turned to his close friend Manotti to write the libretto for the opera.

More as inspiration for the libretto than a true source, the two composers turned to Isaac Denison's Seven Gothic Tales for the opera's setting in an unnamed northern country in a quasi-Victorian period, and used the haunting atmosphere that pervades that work.

They felt that given Collis's temperament, she'd be a perfect fit for this tragic woman who has been tortured by the memory of past love and who, refusing to accept reality, is desperate to relive that past no matter what the consequences.

But Collis, shrewdly realizing that the character of Erica, Vanessa's niece, would be a star turn for whoever took the role, declined.

Cena Urenak was contracted to actually sing the role but canceled at a moment's notice, and the Met management turned to Eleanor Steber six weeks prior to opening night.

Although the role was extremely demanding, Steber learned it and eventually made it her own.

The

young Mezzo Rosalind Elias was cast in the role of Erica and proved Collis to be correct.

She nearly walked off with the opera, so convincing was she in her portrayal of Vanessa's niece.

Filling out the cast were tenor Nicolai Gaeda as the lover, Anatole, Mezzo Regina Resnick as Vanessa's mother, the Baroness, and bass Giorgio Tozzi as the old doctor.

The star-studded cast was under the baton of Dimitri Metropolis.

The first performance on January 15, 1958, was an unqualified success with the audience and with many of the critics, although they were somewhat qualified in their judgment.

It

is a shame that Manotti, as a composer, never received the same kind of success at the Met with his own operas, which were destined to achieve greater admiration on television and in regional companies throughout the world.

But given the success of Vanessa, it wasn't long before the Met came back to Barber with a commission for a grand opera to open their new home at Lincoln Center in 1966.

Antony and Cleopatra opened on September 16th of that year to more fanfare and hoopla than any other opera had in the history of the Met.

Despite an all-star cast that included Leontine Price, Jess Thomas, and Justino Diaz, the opera was one of the great disappointments in the company's history of commission for a new opera.

The disappointing reception of Anthony dealt a blow to Barber's compositional process from which he was not to recover.

Although he wrote a handful of works after 1966, he was never to regain the stature he enjoyed during the height of his success with Vanessa.

When he died of cancer in 1981 at the age of 70, his librettist and longtime companion, Manotti, was at his bedside.

Manotti, as of the time of this broadcast, remains active in the opera world as a stage director and recently celebrated his 93rd birthday.

The opera is set in a lavish home in a northern European country around the year 1905.

Vanessa, her mother the Baroness, and her niece Erica are expecting Vanessa's former lover, Anatole, whom she hasn't seen in 20 years.

The disappointment of that love caused her to close up the house, cover all the pictures and the mirrors, and become a recluse.

A fierce snowstorm, Vanessa suspects, has delayed Anatole's arrival, and the tension mounts.

The Baroness sits silently as Erica tries to entertain Vanessa by reading out loud.

A tower bell announces the arrival of a carriage, and a young man stands in the darkness of the doorway.

Not looking at him, Vanessa recounts her feelings of love, then turns to find it isn't the man that she expected.

She screams and runs from the room.

Erica enters and in conversation comes to understand that this is not Anatole, the lover of previous years, but Anatole, the son of that lover by another woman.

Erica sees him as a charming, handsome stranger, and they sit down to the table that was set for Vanessa and her Anatole.