The Soul of Spain

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Celebrated composer Osvaldo Golijov makes his long-awaited Met debut with the company premiere of Ainadamar, his gripping opera about the legendary Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, whose life, work, and tragic death made him an emblem of his nation. His story is told in an electrifying new production by Deborah Colker that features a rich mix of dance, drama, and the spectral force the Spanish call duende. By Matt Dobkin 

In the Moorish city of Granada, in southern Spain, there is a famous fountain and well called (in the Spanish spelling) Aynadamar, an Arabic word that means “fountain of tears.” The fountain, appropriately, is shaped like a teardrop, and it sits in a serene, picturesque setting, surrounded by olive trees, next to a park not far from the majestic Alhambra palace. In medieval times, the water that filled the fountain came from an irrigation system built by the North African Muslims who had conquered the Iberian Peninsula. Centuries later, in 1936, the fountain was the site of the execution of the Spanish poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca.

The Aynadamar fountain in Granada; right: Federico Garcia Lorca

Lorca, of course, is one of the essential artists of Spain, as synonymous with the literary identity of his country as Octavio Paz in Mexico, Pablo Neruda in Chile, or Walt Whitman in the United States. Renowned for his gorgeous lyrical poems and intensely dramatic theater works, Lorca was also gay and politically outspoken, factors that led to his murder at the hands of fascist forces. A mythic, martyr figure in Spain, he has long been of interest to the Argentine composer Osvaldo Golijov, who chose Lorca (and, by extension, Spain itself) as the subject of his first and to date only opera, Ainadamar, which has its Met premiere on October 15.

Invited by the Tanglewood Music Festival in Lenox, Massachusetts, to compose an opera in the early 2000s, Golijov’s first idea was to write a piece about Palestinian and Israeli mothers who had lost children to the violence between their two peoples. Soprano Dawn Upshaw was cast, as were a number of young female Tanglewood fellows, constituting an almost entirely female lineup of artists. The opera was set to premiere in the summer of 2003, but in December 2002 Golijov was still not convinced of the libretto he was working with and decided to change course. A friend introduced him to playwright David Henry Hwang, who had won the Tony Award for Best Play for M. Butterfly. Over an initial lunch meeting to determine a new subject for Golijov’s opera, Hwang asked, “What do you love?” “Well, I love Lorca,” the composer replied. “Okay,” said Hwang, “let’s do something with Lorca.”

So far so good, except, as Golijov explained, the opera had already been cast almost exclusively with women. As it happened, one of them, Kelley O’Connor, had a lovely mezzo-soprano voice—and an uncanny resemblance to Federico Garcia Lorca. It was decided: Lorca would be a trouser role, performed by O’Connor, and Hwang was off to the races with his libretto. “The reason Lorca is a trouser role is not ideological,” Golijov says today with a laugh. “It was simply a fluke that I had the other opera cast with all women.”

Daniela Mack and Angel Blue star as Lorca and Margarita Xirgu.

Hwang found Lorca to be “a fantastic and suitable subject for an opera. It wasn’t a long life,” he says, “but it was an intense life and a passionate life and a productive life with a tragic ending.” Although Lorca, sung at the Met by mezzo-soprano Daniela Mack, is the central character, he’s not the biggest role in the opera. Hwang decided that Ainadamar should unfold as a series of flashbacks from the point of view of the Spanish actress Margarita Xirgu, Lorca’s close friend, muse, and confidant, who appeared in virtually all of his plays, including the title role of Mariana Pineda, his seminal drama about the 19th-century political activist (who, eerily, was executed in Granada almost exactly 100 years before Lorca himself). In the opera, Margarita, sung at the Met by soprano Angel Blue, reminisces to her drama student Nuria (soprano Elena Villalon) about her friendship with Lorca, including the many times she warned him about the Falange, the fascist political party operating in Spain at the time. The opera is set nominally in 1969, backstage at a theater in Montevideo, Uruguay, where Margarita is about to go on as Mariana Pineda, as she laments that she couldn’t persuade Lorca to flee with her to Cuba at the onset of the Spanish Civil War. The opera then jumps back to the 1920s, when we meet the ardent young poet, and continues to toggle back and forth from era to era. Golijov found Hwang’s time-traveling libretto to be rich material to work with, and he describes their collaboration as like “telepathy.”

“Lorca can easily become a poster, or a T-shirt, or a statue—like Che Guevara,” Golijov says.
“But David and I wanted to bring out his full flesh and blood and romantic heart.”

Hwang rendered the text in English, but Golijov was intent on his opera being sung in Spanish, so he set about translating the libretto himself. “I felt that if you’re going to write an opera, you have to be able to not just speak the language, but be able to play with the language, to sculpt it, to toss it around. I had a little bit of experience assembling text when I did La Pasión Según San Marcos [Golijov’s widely acclaimed 2000 tribute to Bach’s St. Matthew Passion]. I think that Spanish is a great language for opera. It does not have the history that Italian has, but it has wonderful colors and potential for becoming one with the music.”

One word that is not in Spanish is the title, Ainadamar, which Golijov calls “a beautiful word with a beautiful meaning. This fountain was a source of beauty, and in the Middle Ages, the Arab poets that lived around Granada used to write poems to it.” The word “Granada,” for its own part, means “pomegranate,” and—amazingly—as Golijov began composing Ainadamar, he had a vision of a floating pomegranate “bleeding melodies that sounded flamenco, that sounded Spanish, Arabic, Jewish—all those languages that were spoken before the expulsion of both Jews and Muslims from Spain.”

A scene from Ainadamar at Detroit Opera

Growing up the child of Romanian Jewish immigrants in La Plata, Argentina, Golijov listened to a wide array of music, a colorful swirl of traditions that would fuse in his vibrant, 80-minute score for Ainadamar, which features percussion, marimba, and vibraphone to evoke the sound of water, and sound design that creates the impression of galloping horses, among other eclectic devices.

“In terms of orchestration, I always feel there has to be an iconic element,” Golijov explains. “Sometimes you do that through combinations of instruments that are already in the orchestra, and sometimes by introducing instruments that are not necessarily associated with orchestras. In this case, I have two guitars, one of which is a flamenco guitar.” Indeed, Ainadamar is often referred to as a flamenco opera, and Golijov points out that “there’s a very strong percussive element and many rhythmic patterns that come out of flamenco.” But he is also quick to note that “flamenco is slightly commercial,” and the true style he’s conjuring in Ainadamar is cante jondo, or “deep song,” a darker, more intense form of flamenco that the composer says “emerges from the earth and goes through the singer.”

Practically speaking, this means that some of the vocal style of Ainadamar, which will be led by debuting conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya, will never have been heard before in the Metropolitan Opera House, particularly that of the chorus women and the male character of Ramon Ruiz Alonso, the actual Falangist enforcer who arrested Lorca. The role will be performed by Alfredo Tejada, an internationally acclaimed flamenco singer, whose gritty approach will serve as a fitting counterpoint to the vocal beauty of the three principal women. (Golijov points out the irony of the fact that Lorca himself adored the cante jondo style, embodied in the opera by the man who arranged his demise.) Ultimately, audiences who come to the Met expecting gorgeous operatic vocalism will get it—including a ravishing final trio from Margarita, Lorca, and Nuria that Golijov says owes a debt of gratitude to the trio from Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier—but they’ll also get intense, tear-your-heart-out singing that seizes listeners’ attention in an entirely different way. The combination is thrilling.

A scene from Ainadamar at Detroit Opera

At the root of this musical sensibility, Golijov says, is duende, the Spanish term for a kind of mystical truth, a powerful essence that comes out, occasionally, in the greatest, most honest performances. Golijov explains: “Duende is that ineffable quality that some artists have, or popular singers—when they sing, there is something you feel that makes you think you are in contact with the essence of music. And duende also always has an element of death.” Lorca himself invoked the words of Goethe to describe the concept: “A mysterious force that everyone feels and no philosopher has explained.” (Like “soul,” you know it when you feel it.)

The passion, power, and, yes, duende of Ainadamar were all eagerly embraced by the Brazilian director and choreographer Deborah Colker, who has created her first opera production with this piece. “When I first heard the music, I thought, ‘Wow, this is classical, but it’s also flamenco, and there’s this blood, this smell, this energy, sensuality,’” she enthuses. “My idea was to have movement, energy, and dance the whole time. The opera has people in the streets fighting against the Falange. It was very important to bring out the idea of the streets. This story is not clean—it’s real; it’s raw.”

A technical rehearsal of Ainadamar at the Met

To create this turbulent world, Colker—perhaps best known for choreographing the opening ceremony of the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics—has worked with designer Jon Bausor to create a set that’s seemingly in constant motion. A table on which flamenco dancers stomp is flipped over to create a barricade, or turned on its side to simulate a confession booth. A string curtain hangs in a circle around the proceedings and serves as a surface for projections and lighting. There is movement from everyone on stage, whether leading singers, chorus, or the dazzling corps of flamenco dancers.

“The biggest revelation in Deborah’s production for me is the totality of it,” Golijov says. “Even more than the surface beauty and the emotion she conveys is the deep understanding she has of the rhythmic structures. Somehow she connects the music to the dance and to the acting. The mind and the heart are one thing with her.”

Golijov and Colker are also aligned in that neither set out to make an overtly political statement with Ainadamar, while acknowledging that an opera celebrating a man killed by fascist forces is inherently anti-fascist. “I prefer to bring to the stage poetry, dance, music, life—and let the audience choose how they will relate, rather than try to convince people of a political point,” Colker says. “The real power is to keep Lorca alive.”

That was Hwang’s aim with the libretto as well. “Lorca’s works have a strong sociopolitical power, but he did not think of himself as a political writer,” he says. “So I am hopeful that audiences today can both experience the way the violence and polarization are eerily familiar, while at the same time feeling for somebody who wanted to create beauty, who wanted to find love and bridge gaps.”

Golijov agrees. “Lorca refused to do big political statements,” he says. “For him, everything came from love. Love and love of freedom.”

Matt Dobkin is the Met’s Creative Director, Content and Strategy.