From around the world: New Orleans.(North America)(Opera Review)

To celebrate the bicentennial of the Louisiana Purchase, New Orleans Opera commissioned Thea Musgrave to write an opera; the result, Pontalba, opened on October 2. Musgrave chose as her subject the Baroness de Pontalba, nee Micaela Almonester, who built the apartment blocks that flank Jackson Square, in the city's French Quarter. The announcement of the Louisiana Purchase ignites the Act I finale; New Orleanians react to the news, while Micaela's new in-laws use it as a pretext to abduct her to France, where they effectively will imprison her. The construction of the apartments, nicely realized by director Jay Lesenger and scenic designer Erhard Rom, is the climax of Pontalba's Act II (seen at the second performance, Oct. 4).

Along with these set pieces, Musgrave has written music of easy charm and little impact. It's been a decade since she wrote her last full opera (Simon Bolivar, 1993), and the lapse is telling. Though she develops some ideas intriguingly--notably an ensemble in which Micaela and her fiance, Celestin, sing of their love while their families shrewdly contract a match for them--she seldom indulges her conservative aesthetic by writing the full-out arias that her lush melodies and clever orchestrations promise. And as a librettist, Musgrave does herself no favors. She seems incapable of creating a dimensional character and bungles what should be the opera's high point.

In that scene--factual, according to historian Christina Vella, whose book, Intimate Enemies, inspired the libretto--Micaela's father-in-law, Pontalba (baritone), frustrated by her willfulness, shoots her four times, wounding but not killing her; he then kills himself. It's a scene Verdi would have gone nuts over, and it might have granted this opera a life beyond the ...