An old opera gets new life in this production of 'Alceste'

Last May, Opera Boston general director Carole Charnow saw a production of Andre Previn’s operatic version of ‘‘A Streetcar Named Desire’’ in Washington, D.C. She knew immediately she had found the director she wanted for the collaborative production of Gluck’s ‘‘Alceste’’ that Opera Boston and Boston Baroque will present this week.

Brad Dalton, a Harvard alum from the mid-’80s, has worked as an assistant director at the Metropolitan and San Francisco operas and is now making a name on his own. He set ‘‘Streetcar’’ not so much in a literal New Orleans as in the mind of the heroine, Blanche DuBois. It was the abstract but emotional quality of his staging that Charnow thought would be right for ‘‘Alceste,’’ one of the oldest operas that remains in the international repertoire. Intelligent, emotional, and wired, Dalton talks a mile a minute in an accent redolent of his native Texas, hands flying.

‘‘For weeks on the phone and via e-mail, the administration and production team talked about a lot of different environments for the piece, an Army hospital, or some kind of industrial setting,’’ Dalton says. ‘‘We needed something that was broad and mythical, because this opera is about a sacrifice that transforms a whole society — like the sacrifice of Christ, who was an aggressive outlaw figure who led the way to a new way of living.’’

Gluck composed ‘‘Alceste’’ in Italian for Vienna, where it was premiered in 1767 before an audience that included the 11- year-old Mozart, who was to remember it well in later years. Nine years after its premiere, Gluck revised his opera in French, for Paris, and it is that version Boston Baroque music director Martin Pearlman has chosen, in part because he considers it more theatrical.

The story is derived from myth, and from a Greek play by Euripides. Admetus, the king of Thebes, is dying. An oracle proclaims that the young king will live if someone else will choose to die in his place. His wife, Alceste, makes the decision to sacrifice herself. Admetus recovers but is horrified to learn at what cost. Hercules arrives in the underworld to rescue Alceste; Admetus offers to give up his own life. Hercules conquers the infernal powers, and the heroine returns to the world of the living.

‘‘Alceste’’ is unusual among operas in that there is no character who is not completely virtuous, so Dalton wanted to find a way to make the story meaningful in human terms. He chose to set it in a rigid society where the people have been frightened into living according to the letter of the law. Alceste’s sacrifice leads the community into a different world.

A major influence on his thinking was Lars von Trier’s 1996 film, ‘‘Breaking the Waves,’’ which is set in a religious community in Scotland. He also studied the New England communal religious societies of the 19th century, particularly the Shakers.

‘‘In their buildings and furniture,’’ Dalton says, ‘‘the Shakers took away all excess and ornamentation, which is what Gluck wanted to do with what he perceived as the excesses of Italian opera. Like Gluck’s opera, Shaker objects are elegant, sober, and austere.’’

For much of the last century, ‘‘Alceste’’ was a diva vehicle produced to show off great stars such as Kirsten Flagstad, Eileen Farrell, and Dame Janet Baker; they stood next to Greek columns and sang their hearts out. But late in the century, a postmodern production of the opera by Robert Wilson seen in Europe and in Chicago made it a director’s opera too.

Opera Boston and Boston Baroque hope to have it both ways. An up-and-coming soprano, Nicolle Foland, takes the title role, and a new staging will emphasize dramatic values.

For the stage design, Opera Boston turned to Susan Zeeman Rogers, who has worked for many area theater companies and who created the set for the company’s much-applauded production of John Adams’s ‘‘Nixon in China’’ last season.

‘‘I wanted an image of a repressive society where something bad has already happened,’’ Rogers says. ‘‘I came up with something that used to be a building, but not a place to live in anymore, something dry, arid, crumbled — and singed, even burnt. Death is just outside the door. This provides an opportunity for something new that is going to happen.’’

For costume design, the choice fell on Rafael Jaen, a Venezuelan artist who teaches at Emerson College; the costumes are being built as student projects in the Emerson shop, which is in a new theater building directly behind the Cutler Majestic. In the large, cluttered room there are sewing machines, racks of costumes from old shows, and, on mannequins, some of the 36 costumes for ‘‘Alceste,’’ sober garments mostly in shades of black and gray.

‘‘I worked on things with a late Victorian appearance that looks very tight and confining,’’ Jaen says. ‘‘But they cannot be confining, because there is a big dance and movement element in ‘Alceste.’ ’’ Prometheus Dance, which collaborated on ‘‘Nixon in China,’’ is choreographing the piece, but instead of using professional dancers, it will work with the Boston Baroque chorus, which will leave its usual world of standing on risers to become actors and dancers. ‘‘They have to be able to move,’’ Jaen says. ‘‘So there is stretch built into every costume.

For Hades, the characters will be wrapped in net, like cocoons.’’ Boston Baroque’s operatic work has been in productions attempting to re-create Baroque conventions — or in semistagings based on some of those conventions.

But Pearlman feels this concept production is ‘‘fantastic.’’ ‘‘We didn’t want to set it in Gluck’s time or on the moon,’’ Pearlman says. ‘‘The production is abstract, but in an ascetic society that could be anytime or anywhere, like the strong emotions unleashed in the music. The one thing we didn’t want is for anything to feel heavy and static.’’

The single period element Pearlman insisted on was that the orchestra not be buried in the pit. It is important for music of this period for the orchestra to have a real presence. You see pictures of Baroque opera productions, and the orchestra is seated on the same floor level as the audience.’’ Of all things he did not expect, the more Dalton studied ‘‘Alceste,’’ the more relevant the opera seemed. ‘‘Anyone who is willing to sacrifice can succeed in ways that are unexpected. This is not a museum piece; there is a passionate human core in it, with fire in it. was afraid I would have trouble coming up with ideas — this is the first opera from this period that I have directed — but the answer to every question is right there in the music.’’