I knew only two arias from Halevy's La Juive when, flush enough to see an opera in Europe, I decided to attend the Vienna Staatsoper?s new production of it. My reason was less a desire to see this particular opera than to experience what promised to be a great performance by Neil Shicoff, long a favorite of mine, as Eléazar, father of the Jewish girl of the title, Rachel. Eléazar, a difficult, conflicted character, seemed ideal for his talents, and, given the tenor?s own Jewish background, I suspected he felt the role would be an important and very personal addition to his repertoire. I had to see it..

No doubt the main reason for this revival was as a vehicle for Shicoff. He is revered in Vienna, and surely the Staatsoper management considers his wishes. But I also wondered how this particular opera would be received by the Austrians with their high profile of anti-Semitism. In Vienna even today, armed guards surround its large synagogue because, its members will tell you, "we are not among friends here." Shicoff decided to learn the opera in l992 with plans to perform it in l996 depending on how the elections in Austria went. Possibly, the move to l999 was due to the Staatsoper?s waiting for an easier political climate.

I didn't expect it to be a persuasive revival. Premiered in l835, La juive has much in common structurally with the operas of Donizetti, Meyerbeer and early Verdi, many of which are rarely revived north of the Alps and east of the Rhine. Not being an opera historian, I had supposed that Juive had lapsed in popularity due to its old-fashioned musical values (much as many of us treasure these) and due to a startlingly melodramatic libretto. Listening to the available versions, I thought it might be difficult for a contemporary audience to warm to this work. For all its melody and grandeur, no character in it is very appealing. The character of Brogni may be perceived sympathetically as a victim, but Rachel seems made of very heavy cardboard, her lover appears incapable of telling anyone the truth, and the implacable Eléazar might be a monster of fanaticism by modern lights.

To prepare, I spent two months listening with libretto to the Phillips recording with Carreras and to a tape of the live concert version at OONY of April, l999. I learned to enjoy the opera for its melody and effective emotional thrust, but neither of these versions gave much hint of the theatrical power to be unleashed at this century?s last major revival in Vienna. Both versions are heavily, though differently, cut. The Staatsoper production would be disfigured by cuts as well, but was rumored to open up music that had not been heard in this century. (An uncut Juive, including its ballet, might run close to five hours.)

Director Gunther Kramer chose to update to a vaguely mid-20th century setting that I, who favor traditionalism, thought might be tiresomely incongruent with the early l9th-century conventions of the opera. The scenes in photos I saw before I left for Vienna didn't promise compelling visuals. I was wrong. Kramer was brilliantly right.

In this production, costuming was more specific than the minimalist sets. The Christians were clad in light-reflecting creams and whites, the villagers outfitted with pointedly Austrian peasant allusions. The men wore hats with perky feathers, sturdy knees showing between their short pants and lederhosen. Their wives all had aprons tied tightly over bellies that bulged in what seemed various states of smug pregnancy. The effect was of fatuous conformity, and when the men began to harass the Jews, they looked like schoolyard bullies.

The Jews were equally conformist, but with a different purpose. The men wore solemn hats and sack suits of absorbent black, though they were allowed white shirts. Rachel, the only visible female Jew, wore a plain dark dress of vaguely late 40s-early 50s vintage, her hair short and unelaborate.

The opening set was a moired plastic scrim covered with a black grid of tall rectangles to serve for the windows of the church. Behind this, the villagers are massed for a service and singing a great hymn. The rectangles also served as "street-level" doors. One door--Eléazar's--would be gleefully painted with a sloppy yellow Star of David by energetic bigots, and the paint would smear Eleazar's coat as the townsmen torment him.

For the rest of the opera, the scrim disappeared, leaving a set divided by a diagonal platform , low to the left and rising very high to the right. Above this platform, all was white, lit by a dense chandelier of massive proportions on the left. The only seams were from a door at the top far right. This was the light-filled domain of the Christians. Below the platform was darkness, although slender posts lined up in rows to the back of the stage were visible, suggesting a kind of warren. This underground was the ghetto.

The dichotomous spaces were used very well. When Eudoxie, accompanied by her two gold and white children and a dazzling entourage, comes to Eléazar's to find a suitable gift of jewelry for her husband from the town's leading goldsmith, she does not condescend to enter his house, but remains above, smiling radiantly down on him. He, of course, has to look up to address her. To examine the medallion he offers Eudoxie, Eléazar will sit at the plain dark table and chairs, where moments before he was conducting the Passover dinner. But the table has been cleared with expert haste, and the Jews participating in that dinner have fled into the warren.

These differentiated worlds became even more effective in the denunciation scene. Eléazar and Rachel are still below in the dark, watching on the periphery of a celebration that is going on in the light with all the townspeople in attendance. When Rachel accuses Leopold, she must run up onto the platform, into their lightworld, where she denounces him from the farthest right and highest point. (By this time, I realized with shock just how strongly modern dress served this story and its powerful music. How this conception and the commitment of the performers were driving home the ugliness of minds who would create a word like miscegenation and deem it an infraction punishable by death. I wasn't the only one agitated to tears by this. Up till then, the audience had been enthusiastic over the singing and the production, but I think the majority were as overwhelmed as I was that this was turning out to be more than entertainment. This was a magnificent example of the power of opera, of theater, to affect people's thinking and perhaps change lives.)

In the middle of Act III, the libretto has Brogni then deliver his magnificent anathema specifically addressed to Leopold, Rachel and Eléazar. But in this staging, it is only Leopold that Brogni stalks to the low end of the platform, throwing him physically from it, out of the light, into the underground. Eudoxie tries to reach her husband, but Brogni blocks and warns her away. Leopold is damned, and she is not to touch him or she will be tainted herself. Eléazar and Rachel, forgotten for the moment, are free to run away.

This scene ends with a magnificent ensemble for all, originally including Eléazar, but in this production, Shicoff did not sing his part. Instead, he withdrew into the warren, where he took off his coat, sat, and began to wrap a tephilah around and around his arm, girding himself not only with his God, but for the battle to come, for the necessary strength to endure. You knew that by the expression on his face. If the Christians expected heretical and subhuman standards from him, he had expected only savagery from them. This was one of the irradicably powerful images of the production..

In the next scene act when Eudoxie pleads with Rachel to withdraw her accusation and thus save Leopold?s life, they meet in the light atop the platform, after which Eudoxie descends into the darkness. For the rest of the opera through the final scene, Eléazar and Rachel will be in the light, and the Christians below. In the last scene, they sit in rows on elaborate white and gilt chairs, staring at the audience with stony faces. By then, Leopold is back in the protection of the fold, but he is not stony-faced. He is frightened by the narrow escape he has had and by what to do with the guilt he must now live with.

I had only two quibbles with the staging, one physical and one conceptual. The physical was Rachel's death, described in the libretto as her being cast into a cauldron of boiling oil. In this production, seven men dressed in red satin robes and pointed hoods (save for the color, what does this, perhaps even in Austria, conjure up?) rush from the door on the right to engulf her. It took a moment--both evenings I attended--to realize these hooded figures were meant to be flames. I am not sure how I would have done it, but I hope, as this production appears in other venues, that a more effective solution will be found. The conceptual quibble was with Brogni. Alastair Miles, a tall slender man, was visually perfect: definitively fair, small of feature and thin of lip. A conformist, not a thinker, he would rise to the rank of Cardinal. But the libretto also presents him as carrying his own great sorrow, suggesting this has softened him. Here, he was gratuitously unsympathetic. He stops the townsfolk from roughing up Eléazar, but immediately turns arrogant toward the Jew he recognizes from Rome. This contradicts the healing power of the plea for tolerance he then sings and the tenderness of the psychic connection he and Rachel seem to make before Eléazar hurries her away. Again, after the similarly tender, almost mystical emotions of his later scene with Rachel, the music and text indicate he is desperate to save her. He calls for the imprisoned Eléazar to be brought before him, thinking he can persuade Eléazar to embrace the Church, which would null the charges against her. But in this staging, Brogni affects being so casually absorbed in a book that he is barely aware of Eléazar's presence until the Jew surprises the Cardinal with some leverage of his own.

Miles has a beautiful instrument, firm and focused. If he lacked body in two or three of Brogni's very bottom notes or quite the majestic power of earlier recorded Brognis, hearing a bass like his is always a pleasure.

It must be said that both Regina Schorg as Eudoxie and Zoran Todorovich as Leopold were vocally wanting: she for not having enough coloratura agility, he for lacking the (admittedly rare) extension to do justice to Leopold's serenade. Both voices were attractive enough, and both singers were brilliantly cast as to visual type. His Leopold was handsome, sensual and weak to the point of worthlessness. Schorg--entering to a lovely, cantering piece of music with the armful of roses, sash and posture of a beauty queen and the radiance of never having had to question the accidental blessings of her status--was another unforgettable image. In the final act, all her radiance would freeze into a hard, willfully oblivious mask with equal effectiveness.

I have no qualifications for my praise for Soile Isokoski as Rachel. Her lovely timbre is superbly schooled, able to convey a wide emotional range and to float with sweetness over the ensembles. She also is an intelligent, moving actress, winning the audience to her side with endearing moments, as when stealing secret, proud glances at her "Samuel" during the Passover dinner. One of the cuts opened in this production occurs after two stanzas of Leopold's serenade when Rachel greets him by singing a third stanza as a solo. The music is so lovely, one wonders why it was ever cut at all, and Isokoski made the most of it, shyly, playfully masking her joy at seeing him again. You remember her vulnerable charm when you later see a guard shoving her small, defenseless figure, and it hurts.

Shicoff's portrayal was mesmerizing, both vocally and visually. His slight-of-build, self-effacing Eléazar is nothing of the mighty patriarch preserved in the Caruso, Slezak or Tucker photos, but was invested with ?a furtive, hunted quality,? as the anti-Semite Théophile Gautier once described the Jews of Venice. Habitually cautious to check the streets before going out, his tread was then hurried and the footfalls silent. Bitterly recognizing his own powerlessness when the villagers bully him, he submits and allows himself only the defiance of putting his paint-smeared coat back on with dignity. Refusing to look at Brogni while the latter interrogates him, his demeanor is shrunken, yet cocky. All these were signs of an inner war between the strategies necessary, but galling to the soul for his own and his daughter's survival and the need to keep his self-respect despite those strategies.

Eléazar is not the easily categorized villain or hero of typical melodrama. While he certainly mourns his dead sons, he doesn't appear to be crazed with grief as an excuse for his actions, and as he clearly does love Rachel, it is hard to understand his sacrificing her to avenge the wrong (never clearly stated) that Brogni has done to him. Shicoff didn't soften his portrayal to make it easy for us. We saw the granitic face as he wrapped the tephilah, heard the cruel, vibrato-less baiting of Brogni, and felt his relish when at last he had turned the balance of power from the Cardinal to himself. But the portrayal also asked us to imagine what the life Eleazar has known would do to a person's world view. For an opera that has been sluffed aside as being "old-fashioned," the ambiguity of its main character is startlingly contemporary. It is in fact possible Halévy's vision is clearer to audiences of today than to those attending the opera's thousands of performances before World War II. And what a privilege to experience a performer who illuminates the complexity of that vision so vividly.

Shicoff's voice has acquired the weight of a father, but again, vocally this was not the majestic patriarch. Rather, this was the voice of a deeply conflicted human being, as his timbre has always suggested. This was certainly the most dramatically propulsive version I?ve heard, but with such a singer and such an interpreter, the many cuts were regrettable, especially in the pivotal duet between Eléazar and Brogni, here given, as usual, inexplicably piecemeal. His "Rachel, quand du Seigneur" was taken without the strenuousness of Caruso, but with death-defying slowness and accents of heartbreak that would haunt me for days. On both nights, the following ovation of several minutes was not merely the eruption of a pleasured audience. It was a necessary release for us from the almost unbearable tension he had created. But tension immediately peaked again with the cabaletta capped by an electrifying final line (again, often incomprehensibly cut) of "Israel la réclame!" that left us stunned as the house lights rose before the final scene.

It should be obvious by now that, from seeing this performance, I went from liking this opera to loving it deeply and considering it a masterwork valid, moving, timeless and timely. For the Viennese, it was the hit of their season--one couple assured me of the last few seasons." The general response seemed amazement at the power of a great opera they hadn't known before, usually adding Of course, Shicoff is a very great tenor."

This production has appeared in Israel with different performers, is slated for the Metropolitan in 2002 with Shicoff and Isokoski, and is being considered for San Francisco and probably several other venues. That Juive made such an impact on me and on Vienna is largely due to the great commitment of all involved in this production. But I also feel its success is a strong argument for commitment to reviving other neglected, "out-moded" operas. How many other works of depth and provocative richness are lying forgotten in our past?

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