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Strauss's "Ariadne auf Naxos" is a woman's opera. The glamour, the pathos, the ravishing vocalism, the real weight of the piece lies in the three principal female roles, abetted by the meltingly beautiful female trio that hovers about Ariadne in the second act. If you muster three major voices for the parts, you've just about got it made.

And the Metropolitan Opera has made it. The new production by Elijah Moshinsky, which opened Thursday, assembled a threesome hard to beat - Jessye Norman in the title role, Ruth Ann Swenson as Zerbinetta, Susanne Mentzer as The Composer. They riveted the eye and the ear.

The Composer, who passes through various critical states of mind on "his" way to despair, was forcefully projected by Mentzer, whose mezzo retained its fullness and glow in all but the most stressful notes at the top. She made a sympathetic figure in her dismay, a character of human dimension amid all the nonsense with which Strauss surrounds her. To Swenson, delightfully flirtatious, fell one of the most notoriously difficult arias in the lyric soprano canon, and she pirouetted through its high-wire acrobatics with never a false step. The bright, focused agility of the voice seemed made for this part.

As for Norman, she rode the surging contours of Strauss's luxuriant vocal line with all the power and luster for which she is famous. Ariadne's trance-like mood simply clears the deck, so to speak, for pure singing; Norman captured the grief and joy in seamless streams of rich vocalism.

Thomas Moser, making his Met debut in the role of Bacchus, displayed a strong tenor that held its own opposite Norman in the opera's long closing episode. The lighter men's roles were in good hands, with Mark Oswald an attractive Harlekin and Thomas Stewart an imposing Music Master. The trio of nymphs - Joyce Guyer, Jane Bunnell, and Korliss Uecker - were perfection. Conductor Ion Martin kept them all in order and well paced.

Strauss's Prologue is intended to be chaotic, and Moshinsky's staging does not try to minimalize that. The double-decker set, with the opulent Viennese interior gleaming in white marble above and a labyrinth?of dark doors and theater gear below, was a juggle to the eye but consonant with the score. The abstract second-act set was stunning - the suggestion of steep cliffs etched in gold, backed by a medieval map of the night sky that slid open to provide the theater troupe with a cheerful rosy backdrop.

Events sagged after the arrival of Bacchus, who looked like a refugee from "The Flying Dutchman" and kept disappearing with Ariadne behind sliding panels, only to reappear. The couple's Hollywood-style clinches struck the wrong note, but it was the only wrong note of the evening.

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