Tucson to experience an opera within an opera

Arizona Opera is presenting an opera about an opera this weekend.

Confusing, right?

If you think you’re confused, consider how soprano Leah Hawkins feels.

She is in the lead role of Ariadne in Strauss’ “Ariadne auf Naxos,” which Arizona Opera is bringing to the Temple of Music & Art, 330 S. Scott Ave., for two performances this weekend.

“I think musically it’s brilliant. I love Strauss’s harmonic language,” the New York-based singer said. “I think I had a hard time with the story at first because it’s silly and kinda goofy. But the more that I stage it, the more that I sing it, the more that I love it.”

Goofy is not a term often associated with opera, lest you count the madcap mayhem of Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” and “The Magic Flute.”

But goofy kind of fits “Ariadne auf Naxos.” Here’s the storyline: An opera troupe has to share the stage with a burlesque comedy troupe, both hired by the richest man in Vienna to perform on the same evening.

The conflict is laid out in the prologue backstage, where the Prima Donna opera singer pouts and spouts her displeasure with having to perform serious art among actual clowns. The burlesque troupe, of course, counters that it should have first dibs and open the combined show, which leads to the opera’s composer having a nervous breakdown of sorts.

Hawkins and fellow soprano Rebecca Nash, both making their Arizona Opera debuts in the title role, have the daunting task of playing two roles — the uptight and self-serving Prima Donna strutting her superiority backstage; and the character the Prima Donna creates with Ariadne, the heartbroken Greek goddess who eventually falls into the arms of Bacchus, the Greek god of winemaking, grape-growing, ritual madness, religious ecstasy and fertility.

“I think it’s a really interesting character. You start with yourself playing an opera singer who then plays a character in an opera,” explained the Australian-born/London-based Nash, who was supposed to sing the role with Arizona Opera in the 2019-20 season but the performance was postponed due to the pandemic. “There’s you as a woman. There’s this Prima Donna, the character that you meet before the opera starts and who you also see peeking out in various pressured moments throughout the opera. And then you also see the character that Prima Donna creates for you, and all the time underneath it’s (me). It’s complex and interwoven and really interesting and a fun acting challenge, as well, to be able to show the physical

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differences between who you are as a person, who the Prima Donna is as a person and who Ariadne is as a creation of a character. You’ve got to have two women inside you at once who is driven by the woman you are.”

Hawkins, who started her career as a mezzo before switching to soprano in 2015, said the goal from the stage is to let the audience see all three women.

“That’s what is so difficult about this. As a singer, as an artist, I like to find humanity in all of these people and for these people to be as natural and real as possible,” said Hawkins, who in May won a prestigious Richard Tucker Career grant. “In this you have to find three different ways to make these people feel natural. You need to see the character, Ariadne. Then you need to see the Prima Donna and then you need to see me. It’s been a challenge, but we’re finding it.”

In addition to her Arizona debut, Hawkins is making her role debut and singing her first German opera with this performance.

This is the second time Nash is singing the role of Ariadne, although singing Strauss’s soprano roles has become her specialty, she said.

“It’s the composer I’ve sung the most in my career. I’ve sung many of the roles he wrote for soprano and he was a composer that really loved sopranos. His wife, Pauline, was a soprano and many characters he wrote with her in mind,” Nash explained. “He writes long beautiful lines … that really suit my instrument and suit my sensibility, I guess, and the sound that I make. I have always been drawn to his music.”

“Ariadne auf Naxos” is part of Arizona Opera’s McDougall Red Series of chamber operas.

It runs 2 hours, 36 minutes with one intermission and is sung in German with English supertitles.

Catch the performance at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 10, and 2 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 11.

Tickets are $30 to $125 through tickets.azopera.org or by calling 520-293-4336.