What 'Cold Mountain' gets right

SANTA FE, N.M. - The opera world is craving an epic mainstream hit, and Cold Mountain has been anointed.

Whatever anybody thought of the Santa Fe Opera Festival opening on Aug. 1, Cold Mountain is sold out here and has a recording and a PBS telecast in the works. With three other companies committed to producing it - co-commissioners Opera Philadelphia (in February 2016) and Minnesota Opera, plus North Carolina Opera - the piece is an inevitable success, and it deserves to be.

Cold Mountain has its cosmetic problems, but the common asset noted so far in reviews -- generally positive, with the significant exception of the New York Times -- is solidity, the product of its seasoned collaborators, Pulitzer Prize-winning Philadelphia composer Jennifer Higdon and much-traveled librettist Gene Scheer. But high-octane creative teams often fail to get an opera across the finish line, so what did this one do right that many others, similarly anointed, did not?

For one thing, its subject resonates: The story not only has presold familiarity (Charles Frazier's 1997 best-selling novel and the often-excellent 2003 film version), but also a durable legend for a backbone; Cold Mountain's Civil War deserter finding his way home to North Carolina is Homer's Ulysses updated. More resonance: Higdon grew up in East Tennessee, just over the Smokies from the real Cold Mountain.

Less empathetic, in comparison, was another Philadelphia co-commission, the Richard Danielpour/Toni Morrison opera Margaret Garner, which appeared to be most of the way there at its 2005 Detroit premiere. But it lost opening-night energy by the time it arrived in Philadelphia, where the music seemed awfully medium voltage when paired with the potentially electrifying story of this rebellious slave.

Andre Previn's 1998 A Streetcar Named Desire was so deeply attached to the original Tennessee Williams lines that it did not fully account for the difference between spoken and sung English. Even a few extra words in each line can make for an unnaturally elongated opera. The 1992 William Bolcom/Robert Altman McTeague, a tale of greed and moral ruin set in turn-of-the-century San Francisco that was wonderful in many ways, similarly turned into an operatic crippled ocean liner. It's one thing to tell a story from another age but another to stick so close as to also adopt a retro narrative style. At times, these two operas felt like plays being sung in slow motion.

No such veneration afflicted Cold Mountain. It knows how to be an opera. Librettist Scheer has an interventionist history, having turned Herman Melville's anecdotal mosaic of a narrative in Moby-Dick into something with operatic sweep, also putting the famous "Call me Ishmael" line that begins the book at the end of Jake Heggie's opera, creating a 21st-century-ish arc involving rootless seamen searching for identity.

Similarly, Cold Mountain maintains the framework of the original book but also dramatically departs from it. Though director Leonard Foglia has remarked that a single arioso by the central character, Inman, seems to encompass an entire chapter in the 449-page novel, one also finds that elsewhere, a few pages, even sentences, are expanded to involve ensembles that deliver visceral gravity - needed in the opera but not in the book.

The slave Lucinda, mentioned briefly in the novel, appears in Act II with a personality invented by Scheer in one of the opera's best scenes. Chained to fellow prisoners who have been slaughtered, Inman is at the mercy of this bitter slave (brilliantly portrayed by Deborah Nansteel) who has the key - and a gun. You don't know until the final nanosecond which one she'll use on him. It's an edge-of-the-seat moment.

Another great scene: When Inman is reunited with his adored Ada, the book deals with the impossibility of catching up, of telling each other where they've been. But Scheer and Higdon have characters from past scenes return: Lucinda instructs him, "Tell her what I said"; soldiers say, "Tell her how you fought . . .."

Much of the scene's power comes from cumulative acquaintance with the reprised secondary characters, who were written, composed, cast, and performed with as much care as the main characters. Kevin Burdette, who played a Larry King-like talk show host in Nico Muhly's Dark Sisters in Philadelphia, is Cold Mountain's visionary blind man who prefers to not see: "I fear it might turn me hateful." The preacher Veasey (Roger Honeywell, a former Philadelphia Rodolfo in La Bohème) is alternately Inman's enemy and high-priced savior - typical of wartime alliances.

Quality is one thing, sympathy another, and rarely did singers have to struggle to master their well-written vocal lines. Nathan Gunn (Inman), Isabel Leonard (Ada) and Emily Fons (sturdy Ruby, who helps Ada in Inman's absence) were vocally resplendent, seeming free to find the dramatic truth of any given scene. Tenor Jay Hunter Morris was able to build on his previous characterization as the ruthless Ahab in Moby-Dick to give an even more vivid performance as the cold-blooded Home Guard leader Teague.

They weren't supporting the opera; it supported them. I worried about that during a Cold Mountain preview at the Guggenheim Museum months back: Ensemble passages seemed so tightly woven I couldn't hear inside them, as though the opera were undermined by its own desire to achieve. But it appears that was more about dry acoustics that prompted oversinging - in Santa Fe, the music has all the space an epic needs.

With such solidity, anything superfluous or less than relevant was more noticeable. When a secondary character went on about having discovered fiddle playing, the opera seemed to take a vacation from its narrative. Even if Robert Brill's set had chaotic eloquence, it didn't leave enough room to do justice to the opera's epic nature. The Act I orchestration could be maddeningly literal: Somebody mentions water and you hear it in the orchestra. Momentarily, the piece seemed to talk down to the audience in the manner of Gian Carlo Menotti.

But none of this was really in its harmonic fabric, just the wrong frosting on a cake that didn't need it.

After all, this opera has been anointed.