Cyrano de Bergerac, San Francisco Opera, Nov. 6 2010

Franco Alfano’s Cyrano de Bergerac makes for a nice show but it’s not surprising that it’s not standard repertoire.

The San Francisco Opera production, imported from the Theatre du Chatelet, is perfectly appropriate to the time frame of 1619-1655, the lifespan of the historical Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac. Swords are swords and muskets are muskets. The stage action actually begins several minutes before the music starts, as we see the reverse side of the curtain at the theater of the Hotel de Bourgogne, with stagehands preparing the various props that will be used in the performance-within-the-opera. The curtain goes up, we see the theater-goers at the rear of the stage, and we see the back side of the “clouds” that are drawn across the stage. Montfleury arrives in a fantastic airborne chariot, but it’s a 17th-century fantasy, not a 21st-century fantasy. The bakery of Act II Scene 1 is a rather industrial-scale bakery, with a baker at the second-story level mixing his ingredients in a gigantic copper bowl, while other bakers arrange 3-foot-tall loaves of bread, baked in the shape of human figures, for glazing. Scene 2 brings us Roxane’s home and balcony, perfectly represented in “stone.”

Act III, following the single intermission, presents what appears to be the interior of the fort that is under siege by the Spanish forces. Although the cadets are supposed to be the ones laying siege to Arras, they are the ones that are starving, and the well-fed, well-dressed, vigorous Spanish forces are the ones that come over the wall and massacre the cadets, somehow missing Cyrano as they perform the coup de grace on the fallen bodies. Only in Act IV do we see something not quite authentic. The stage is dominated by a large tree that looks more like a tree than do the aluminum creations in the Werther production of a few weeks ago. Left with only a few large brown leaves, it manages to look more artificial and less real than anything else we've seen so far.

These performances are rumored to be Placido Domingo’s final appearance onstage at San Francisco Opera. His voice remains strong and clear and gives no evidence of being ready for retirement. Ainhoa Arteta (from the Basque region of Spain) as his Roxane was also outstanding. Her Christian, Thiago Arancam (from Brazil) started with a rather pinched, strained tenor that improved through the afternoon. Our star-to-be, Leah Crocetto, had one small and one miniscule role as Lisa and Lay Sister respectively; I continue to hope to hear her in larger roles.

The production was magnificent, the singers rose to the occasion, but the music rarely did. A great opera does not have to have hummable, take-home-with-you big tunes to make an impact, but here the music does not make much of an impact. Yes, the final minutes, where Roxane comes to understand that it is the “ugly” Cyrano who had penned all of those wonderful letters from Christian, are quite moving, but the remainder is undistinguished. Perhaps if he had gotten lucky at just one point in his career, we might mention the name of Alfano in the same breath as Leoncavallo and Mascagni, but he didn’t and we don’t. A beta, on the strength of the production and the performances.