“To this we’ve come…,” laments Magda Sorel in her great aria from The Consul, the opera that closes Florida Grand Opera’s season and marks the climax of Gian Carlo Menotti’s grim and most famous melodrama. If the aria bears some similarity to Vissi d’arte in Tosca; in fact, the Italian-American composer resorted to several Pucciniesque moments to add interest to a work than in this 21^st century has lost some of the freshness of its premiere 65 years ago.

The Consul is a classic of the 1950s, a somber opera that flirts with vernacular musical theater, sometimes with Italian verismo, but has managed to retain a sort of cult status over time among a group of unconditional fans that eagerly await the sporadic occasions on which it returns to a professional stage. In spite of musicologist Joseph Kerman acerbic words “Menotti is a trivial artist, a sensationalist in the old style, and in fact a weak one, diluting the faults of Strauss and Puccini with none of their fugitive virtues” to attend a complete Consul was the main interest of the FGO last venture of 2014-15. It’s worth mentioning that beyond its undeniable musical virtues, a production that was daring in the midst of the McCarthy furor today involves the risk to appear dull or old-fashioned if it fails to highlight its parallels to an issue as timely now as it was then.

In the composer’s own text, the lines fluctuates between the colloquial in the dialogues and the recherché in some of the arias. In the musical sphere, Menotti owes not only to Puccini but also to Kurt Weill, Eugen d’Albert, Erich Korngold, Benjamin Britten even Berg’s Wozzeck, his contemporary American colleagues and, of course, his partner Samuel Barber. The grandmother’s sorrowful lullaby is only one of many examples of Barber’s tender lyricism in the score. Menotti interrupts the flow of dramatic discourse with nightmarish scenes – in addition to others descriptive of the supporting characters – that overload the dark aspects of the opera and evince his curious fascination with the morbid and phantasmagoric already present in The Medium. The State oppression and the mercilessness of bureaucracy lead the protagonist into a blind alley. She ends up committing suicide but not before hallucinating a dance macabre in a final scene that because of its gruesomeness is the hardest to pull off and, in more than one sense, the least convincing.

At the height of the Cold War, The Consul’s dehumanized world touched a nerve in American audiences. It was a huge success. TV versions in black and white followed, proving the opera also works in close-ups, perhaps even better than on the stage. A 1963 Austrian TV version in German directed by Rudolph Cartier and featuring Melitta Muszely and a cast of great veterans, Ljuba Welitsch and Hilde Konetzni included, was equally effective. Within a work influenced by films noirs and the tearjerkers of the golden age of Hollywood, Menotti’s eclectic musical language seeks to achieve dramatic effect or draw vignettes, and succeeds on both counts. The orchestration employs dissonances, haunting brief solos and other devices to closely illustrate stage action, step by step. At the podium, Andrew Bisantz was a successful and meticulous translator of the composer’s intentions, both in the chamber-like interludes and in the orchestral outbursts as in the atmospheric music covering scene changes.

The Consul comes to the FGO in a borrowed Seattle Opera production, with gloomy sets by David Gordon lighted by Kevin Myatt, more successful in the Kafkaesque consular offices of the second and third acts than in Magda’s house. In her debut as stage director, Dr. Julie Maykowski, FGO’s director of artistic administration and head of the Young Artist Program, opted to place performers in front of the audience, alone or in groups with different results. Obviously comfortable in English, the singers managed well within the acting conventions of opera for this ensemble piece, a favorite of regional companies and college productions, in which every role, no matter how small, has its moment in the spotlight. From Jason Ferrante as the magician to Betsy Díaz as the Italian mother, Carla Jablonski as the indolent secretary, Tyler Simpson as the secret-police officer, Rebecca Henriques as Ana Gómez and members of the Young Artist Program in minor roles, a team worthy of mention.

In a role that has been played by stars of the caliber of Virginia Zeani, Patricia Neway and Inge Borkh, soprano Kara Shay Thomson was an intense Magda Sorel, boasting the rich voice of her last year’s Tosca. Her greatest moment was “My son is dead…Papers, papers!” in the aria To This We’ve Come. Her least effective was a final scene that poses problems for every singer; even the most skilled in the art of less is more. The experienced Victoria Livengood, playing the mother was admirable – her disappearance of the opera is a weakness of the libretto – , and Keith Phares, well remembered for his performance in last season’s Mourning Becomes Electra, excelled as the fugitive John Sorel.

In a curious analogy, The Consul concludes with a scene similar to the ending of the aforementioned Electra by the recently deceased Martin David Levy; a ghostly march to the grave, closing the inexorable chapter begun by poor Magda, as disconsolate as her To This We’ve Come.