MUSIC: The Mating Game

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From Mozart's Don Giovanni to Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress, the figure of the libertine, that politically incorrect swine, has swaggered provocatively through 200 years of operatic history. Cads, bounders and rakehells abound onstage: one thinks not only of the lecherous Don and Tom Rakewell but of Nerone, Pinkerton and Eugene Onegin as well -- moral reprobates who give hardly a second thought to the consequences of their actions.

Now comes the composer-librettist team of Conrad Susa and Philip Littell, who have seized upon Pierre Choderlos de Laclos's 18th century epistolary novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses as a fitting subject for an opera. It is an inspired choice: in the machinating Marquise de Merteuil and the voluptuary Vicomte de Valmont the composer has two soulless soul mates whose knowledge of the ways of love make The Art of War look like a kindergarten training manual. What Susa and Littell have created in The Dangerous Liaisons, now getting its world premiere at the San Francisco Opera, is nothing short of wonderful: a finely wrought near masterpiece that ennobles its characters with music that comes not from the head but from the heart -- hating the sin of licentiousness, but loving the sinner, as all good operas do.

Familiar from its various stage and cinematic incarnations, Liaisons, sung in English, is an extravagant chess match of check and mate -- and mate and mate. The Marquise (mezzo Frederica von Stade, in top form) is an archmanipulator who wields her sensual allure like a double-edged sword, encouraging her lover's worst instincts as she wreaks her revenge on society. Her foil, the unapologetic knave Valmont (the splendid baritone Thomas Hampson), is a cynical womanizer who makes the fatal mistake of falling in love with one of his victims, unwisely and too well. Who is worse? The amoral rake who seduces and abandons without remorse? Or the wily temptress who sends her dark knight on errant missions of the heart? In this telling, the two protagonists not only are equally responsible, they deserve each other, and their fate.

Susa, 59, a painstaking composer probably best known for his delightful 1973 opera Transformations, was delivering orchestrations right up to the dress rehearsal, but the seams don't show. From first note to last, Liaisons is a finely polished work that achieves a French transparency, sparingly invoking Debussy (not Pelleas but Images pour Orchestre). Unabashedly tonal, although hardly reactionary, the score glows with a luminescence too long absent from modern opera, and especially opera in English; for an equal, one must go back to Britten's Death in Venice (1973), which Liaisons resembles musically in many small ways.

The biggest deficiency, and it is a serious one, is that Susa never quite delivers the musical climax that the material demands. It is quite canny to stage simultaneously the death of Valmont and his inamorata, Madame de Tourvel, aptly illustrating their bond beyond the grave. But here, and in the final scene, when Merteuil is snubbed, shunned and ruined by the pox, the music needs to be bolder, richer; the composer must make clear exactly how he feels about what has happened to his characters as, say, Berg does at the end of Wozzeck.