Fairytales can be terrifying. In Little Red Riding Hood, a girl visits her sick granny to find out “she’s” a wolf sitting up in bed, and one who has made a meal of her grandmother. In one version, the wolf eats Little Red Riding Hood, too. Sleeping Beauty is poisoned by an evil fairy to sleep for 100 years, and the poor Little Mermaid has her feet cut off. That was a Hans Christian Andersen tale, though not the one told by Disney.

The Rose Elf is another of Andersen’s dark tales, repurposed into a haunting opera by newcomer David Hertzberg, who wrote the music and the libretto. An Opera World critic called Hertzberg “opulently gifted”; the New York Times wrote that he was “utterly original.” The Music Critics Association of North America (MCANA) named his first opera, The Wake World, premiered in 2017, as Best New Opera six years ago (the award is made the year following the premiere). And Hertzberg is only 34 years old. 

The Rose Elf was performed Aug. 17 and 18 (I saw the Aug. 18 show) at Portland State University’s Lincoln Hall by OrpheusPDX, Christopher Mattaliano’s 3-year-old summertime chamber opera company that continues to stage provocative operas that few of us have seen. As I’ve written many times before, Lincoln Hall is the place to hear and see intimate opera. This was the West Coast premiere; The Rose Elf premiered in 2018 in Brooklyn, NY. Certainly its themes were tragic, and generally pitch-black, though as in many stories, some redemption comes at the end. 

In short, a genderless elf (sung by superb mezzo and actor Lisa Marie Rogali) who lives in a rose, witnesses a love affair and a murder tinged with the implication of incest. The love is between The Girl, or the “Blooming Girl,” as Hertzberg calls her (silver-voiced luminous soprano Madeline Ross), and The Beloved (silky-smooth tenor Brendan Tuohy). The murder is committed by The Brother, presumably The Girl’s, sung by bass-baritone Zachary Lenox who kills The Beloved and buries him. The Girl, clued in by the Rose Elf who has watched the whole sordid thing, then digs up her lover’s head, plants it in a pot, and carries it around with her, distraught. The Brother visits The Girl, and is disgusted by her obsession with the flower pot, not knowing a human head is buried under the greenery. He aggressively and emphatically spits out his lines and consonants to tell her so. “You’ve become a fooL-L-L!” he sings, pouncing on the end of the word, fool.

The Rose Elf is an eerie story (children were not encouraged to attend) and Hertzberg’s opera focuses more on the other-worldly atmospheric undertone carried through his beautiful music, often interrupted by silence, than it does on the convoluted story itself. Deanna Tham, an Oregon Symphony associate conductor, led the nine-member strings-weighted orchestra, which included a piano (Paul Floyd), a horn (Michael Hettwer), a clarinet (Mark Dubac) and percussion, rendered deftly by Gordon Rencher. Ultimately, the narrative was less important than the atmosphere shaped by the music and staging–not uncommon with contemporary pieces, as director Jerry Mouawad said in a question-and-answer period after the 65-minute one-act opera.

Rogalis’ singing dominated the opera. It ranged from very high to deep “in the basement,” with colors in between. Even with the music’s ranginess, she complimented Hertzberg on creating a vocalist-friendly score. Adding elf-like twitches to her performance, she sang most of the opera, though the other characters moved and acted in ways that made them prominent characters. The bad-brother baritone Lenox, dressed in a long black coat and pork-pie hat, crept along the stage and behind a scrim, where he killed The Beloved. He delivered his lines like hammers. Ross, who sang the role of The Girl, moved in expressive ways, often tortured and tortuous, so that we never forgot her.

The production’s most striking aspect was the stunning pastel set that featured a giant pink rose and various other fairytale-sized “flowers,” honeysuckle and jasmine. A scrim was behind the decorative front part of the stage, and through it, we could see dramatic events unfolding, such as a murder, though neither blood nor gore appeared. Characters, including the rose, loomed large. Director Mouawad and his talented team of Sumi Wu and Alex Meyer designed the set, and Wu was the costume designer who thought up the Rose Elf’s fanciful sparkly costume. The set embodied a fairytale’s proportions, and nature emerged as a character in the opera. A dark story framed in a bright set, ironically, projected magic. 

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Solomon Weisbard’s lighting brought to life the scrim and the characters’ shadow-puppet-like movements behind it. It also enhanced the opera’s mystical nature and dramatized the opening and closing of the flamboyant manmade rose. These oversized aspects helped us to see the fairytale in its imaginative lushness, as black as the story was.

The tiny Rose Elf doesn’t really understand “the muck” of the human world, she sings, though she offers compassion to The Girl and helps her to “sleep,” or hurries her to her death, or to “eternal peace,” as the program notes say. In the end The Girl and The Beloved reappear as storytellers Luna and Horus, having acted out the spooky tragedy. And a story, even a fairytale, keeps life and memory alive.

The Rose Elf wasn’t my favorite of the six operas that OrpheusPDX has staged, and I’ve seen them all. But the competition is stiff. It’s hard to beat Nico Muhly’s Dark Sisters, performed last summer, about a young woman trying to escape the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, yet another dark tale, and one not based on a fairytale.