When the Santa Fe Opera's new production of La Traviata opens Friday evening, an elaborate 6-foot chandelier will light a scene in the Paris home of Flora Bervoix, where a party is taking place.

Sounds easy enough. Elaborate furnishings are the staple of grand opera.

But in this case, the chandelier is huge — and too cumbersome to fit through the stage door. So it needs to be "onstage" from the beginning of Act 1. But where?

That's just one of the many puzzles that confronted the production crews of the SFO in advance of the 2009 season.

The solution?

Until Act II, the chandelier will be hiding below the deck. At intermission, a hinged trap door will open and a pick point will drop from the roof to hoist it into the air. Then the door will close. At the end of the scene, the door will open again and the chandelier will be lowered back into the trap, and the floor pieces will fold up to look like another of the set's granite blocks.

These last steps all happen in view of the audience — during a short pause in the performance.

It's the same every year. Long before the singers, conductors and directors arrive in Santa Fe for rehearsals, the company's technical and property crews are at work building the sets and props, and solving thousands of problems posed by the ideas of set designers who might live a half a world away and never have visited Santa Fe — and don't know about the wind at the opera.

While this season's Don Giovanni is a revival, the other four operas are all original productions. "Because (each of the sets) is custom-designed, it's a brand-new challenge each time," said scenic charge Mark Edlund, stressing that the chandelier is "just one piece of one opera."

Production chiefs begin studying the music and librettos and reviewing the drawings submitted by the designers soon after the previous season ends. The collaboration continues up until opening night. "We spend hours talking through changes, listening to what's in their heads," said production director Paul Horpedahl.

The goal is to make everything be or look authentic, up close as well as from the seats in the balcony. Randy Lutz, longtime props chief, calls it making sure that everything is "finished," which both "helps the singer get in character" and rewards the audience.

Rarely are the challenges insurmountable. In the case of a new production of Così fan tutte in 2003, the SFO concluded that the preliminary design was both too expensive and unaccomplishable. The designer and the director subsequently bowed out, and six months before the opening of the opera, a new team was hired. More recently, after the design team for the 2007 production of Tan Dun's Tea: A Mirror of Soul visited the theater, they concluded they couldn't work in the space.

But usually the SFO is able to translate the creative ideas of some of the world's most famous set designers to the stage.

'La Traviata'

By late winter, master props carpenter David Levine was already welding together the 6-by-6 chandelier, which was identified early on as one of the biggest challenges. Aluminum costs three times as much as steel, but because weight was a concern, the lighter material was chosen.

Levine said the challenge is to take an artistic idea and "deconstruct" it. The process is similar for just about everything, he pointed out. "They're making benches over there, but it's the same thing."

The style depicted in the drawings by Chantal Thomas, who was the scenic designer for Platée in 2007, combined the looks of Spanish blown glass with wrought iron and Tiffany stained glass, but the final version will have clear "glass" lenses.

In late May, Marit Aagaard and her crew used a vacuform machine, built last year for The Marriage of Figaro, to form the 80 or so lenses or facets for the chandelier. They placed the wood and plaster molds in the machine and suspended a large sheet of plastic below red-hot coils until it began to soften and droop, then lowered it onto the molds dusted with baby powder. At the same time, a suction machine was turned on to pull out all the air between the plastic and the molds. The now rigid, clear lenses will be cut out and glued onto the chandelier from the inside.

In the Stieren Orchestra Rehearsal Hall, Mims Mattair was using sheep shears to shape a section of green shag carpeting to make it look like a French meadow. The soft carpeting, he said, would be later bleached and colored various shades of brown and green to resemble the landscape outside the country home where Violetta and Alfredo are living. "Weeds" and "grass" would be added to the carpet to make it more realistic.

Other members of the production team, which numbers 200 at the season's peak, were painting the blocks that will represent both a French cemetery and the Paris streetscape. There are 25 of them, each constructed of steel and plywood. They are covered in muslin and painted to resemble various shades of granite. Thomas provided a paper image of how each should be colored. Some have soft backs to provide access to lighting fixtures, and several will ultimately get a mirrored finish for the party scene. The insides of the blocks will be fitted with cradles to secure the shrouds that will be pulled over them in Act III — and keep them from blowing away.

Block number 17 will be topped with a thin mattress where Natalie Dessay, in her debut as Violetta, will be able to lie down, but still be able to see the conductor. "There will be a bed fitting," Lutz promised.

To make room for the grassy hillside, blocks 21, 22 and 23 retract into one another and move upstage. Block 15 will swallow block 16. And several blocks will be carried off stage — all during a two-minute pause in the action.

Because saving money by reusing old sets is more critical than ever in this economy, the side walls from the 2007 production of Platée were restuccoed for the Verdi opera.

'The Elixir of Love'

In late spring, hundreds of sunflowers sprouted in the prop shop. Volunteers added rods to the stems of flowers purchased at the annual gift fair in New York. In the intermission between Act I and Act II of Donizetti's comedy The Elixir of Love, a dozen members of the chorus and crew will "plant" 363 flowers through holes drilled in the raked floor. During a recent rehearsal, "we made the shift," Lutz said, explaining that finishing in time "was always iffy."

The crews also resurfaced the deck, which was used for last season's Adriana Mater, using raffia that had been wetted, flattened and glued down to resemble rough wood.

Elixir's main themes are announced on a huge billboard the crews built from steel to hold two solid panels as well as four soft ones attached to rollers made from irrigation tubing donated by a Texas fan.

The opera also calls for two vintage cars. The 1940s Willys Jeep was found near Amarillo, Texas, and moved to Santa Fe by trailer. It appears in Act I, steam coming from under the hood as soldiers push it onstage. Sean Scott from the props crew built a foam version of the 1948 engine that he copied from Internet photos. "I tried to emulate it as close as possible," he said. The engine that came with the Jeep, he said, was the wrong one and "many people in the audience know what they're looking at when it comes to anything." The "engine" will be given a patina and signs of various leaks in the paint shop. "When they're done," Scott said, it will look really real."

Katy Phebus, Lutz's assistant, found the Bugeye Sprite on Craigslist in Phoenix and had it shipped to the SFO, where the roll bar (not original) was removed and some of the original features reconstructed. A new/old rag top will be made for it.

There's also a Vespa loaned to the company by a Rio Rancho man who rebuilt the scooter for his father.

The designer originally wanted a huge tablecloth to be unfurled onstage and tables and chairs set on it. "There's nothing you can do to keep that from blowing away. We nixed that," Lutz said.

'Alceste'

The massive walls for Alceste, Gluck's opera based on a play by Euripedes about the faithfulness of Queen Alceste, are made of steel with quarter-inch plywood. Screw holes are filled and sanded, and one side gets a high-gloss black finish. On the rock side, which represents a craggy canyon, 2-inch foam is glued on the plywood. The computer-generated image of the river-rock pattern by designer Louis Désiré was projected on the foam and then carved and painted. "We hope they love what we've done, but there is always a final tweaking to make it a little browner, a little bluer," Edlund said, noting that the scenic and costume designer is from Barcelona and new to the SFO.

'The Letter'

For the world premiere of The Letter, an "opera noir" by composer Paul Moravec and librettist Terry Teachout based on a W. Somerset Maugham short story, Hildegard Bechtler designed an ingenious set. Leslie Crosbie, a British expatriate living with her husband, Robert, on a rubber plantation in the jungles of Malaya, shoots and kills her lover on the veranda of her bungalow, then claims he tried to rape her. The whole opera takes place in 90 minutes with no intermission and, said Tracy Armagost, Horpedahl's assistant, "It really needs to flow."

The bar at the Singapore Club doubles as the jury box. The lawyer's office pops through the wall. Leslie's jail cell folds out from the side wall, and the bars clang into place. The prison tiles were made especially for the show. "The designer would never give you something you could go into the store and buy," Edlund said.

This was a case, Horpedahl said, where the designer benefited from a firsthand look at SFO's outdoor stage. "It's often hard to convince designers to come and see us in New Mexico well in advance," he said. Bechtler was somewhat reluctant, but once she came, he said, "Her ideas changed dramatically," and "she was forthright about how valuable the trip had been."

With opening night less than a week away, most of the problems have been solved, but "it's been a challenging season," Lutz said.

While some solutions are inevitably variations on things that worked in the past, the execution is always different, said Horpedahl, adding, "It's always new. It's a clean slate every time. That makes it energizing."

Contact Anne Constable at 986-3022 or aconstable@sfnewmexican.com.

SANTA FE OPERA 2009 SEASON

Opening night: 9 p.m. Friday, La Traviata

Performance Schedule

La Traviata: July 3, 8, 11, 17, 24, Aug. 4, 11, 17, 22, 26, 29; Natalie Dessay as Violetta and Saimir Pirgu as Alfredo

The Elixir of Love: July 4, 10, 15, Aug. 6, 12, 20, 25, 28; Jennifer Black as Adina and Dmitri Pittas as Nemorino

Don Giovanni: July 18, 22, 31, Aug. 8, 13, 21, 24, 27; Susanna Phillips as Donna Elvira and Lucas Meachem as Don Giovanni

The Letter: July 25, 29, Aug. 3, 7, 15, 18; Patricia Racette as Leslie Crosbie and Anthony Michaels-Moore as Robert Crosbie

Alceste: Aug. 1, 5, 10, 14, 19; Christine Brewer as Queen Alceste and Paul Groves as King Admeto

Information: www.santafeopera.org