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Feb. 10th, 2014 11:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretI saw Osvaldo Golijov's opera Ainadamar yesterday at the Philadelphia Opera. Before I talk about the art, a few more mundane notes.
I haven't taken SEPTA's regional rail in several years, because it went from extremely slow to impossibly slow a few years ago when they were doing track improvements. The track improvements are now done and the train impressed by having moved past extremely slow to normal slow. It is still a local-only affair but it is still a way, way better deal than Amtrak to Philadelphia.
Second, I got super-cheap tickets by buying the limited view seats. They weren't really limited view. They were "you can get a decent view if you're willing to lean over the rail for the whole opera." So that was fine while it lasted, and now my back hurts.
In slightly less mundane preface, Osvaldo Golijov is a contemporary Argentine Jewish composer that I first encountered on some Kronos Quartet recordings from the '90s, when I was first learning about avant garde classical. He blends Latin music inspirations like Villa-Lobos and Piazzolla with Jewish music inspirations like Bloch and Bernstein, but that's a really ungenerous way of describing his influences. Though those voices are undoubtedly crucial in his musical style, it feels quite often like Golijov has gone back past those symphonic writers to find their original sources in folk music and then reinterpreted them. He is in dialogue both with the great 20th century folk-classical masters and with the whole folk tradition as a separate entity. I saw David Krakauer and a handpicked ensemble play his "The Prayers and Dreams of Isaac the Blind" last fall, a cycle of Jewish folk melodies carefully structured to sketch a narrative of Jewish history, and what struck me most was that Golijov managed to be both dark and meditative, and at the same time extremely funny.
Ainadamar is the story of playwright and poet Federico Garcia Lorca's death, layered through multiple retellings and time and perspective shifts. The libretto is by playwright David Henry Huang.
It stems from a strange and troubling question about coincidence in art: Lorca wrote a play called Mariana Pineda in which the title character is martyred for her political beliefs, and then Lorca himself became a political martyr when he was murdered by the Franco regime. The question Ainadamar begins with is what is the meaning behind this coincidence? Did Lorca prophesize his own death?
By careful musical echoes and theatrical cues, Huang and Golijov suggest that perhaps there is some cosmic connection between art and death. We watch again and again as actress Margarita Xirgu, a close friend of Lorca, dresses as Mariana Pineda, is shot on stage, and then undresses from her costume. Again and again she relives this moment, again and again (as the third act suggests) she keeps this idea of art as revolution alive. Long after Lorca has been slain, Xirgu continues to become, briefly, Mariana Pineda the martyr, and by extension Lorca the martyr.
In the second act Golijov borrows from ecclesiastical music to echo Lorca's death further back to that original martyr for truth, Jesus Christ. In the third act, when Xirgu is dying and being at last reunited with Lorca and Mariana, the other parts of her deific trinity, they reenact the Last Supper.
But Golijov does not appear to be saying that Lorca is Jesus, his death for art salvific. In perhaps the opera's most striking moment, the gunfire that kills Lorca and two other enemies of the state gets taken up in the tapping flamenco dancing feet of his murderers. Art is not truth, the music claims. Art is a powerful force of life and death that serves whoever wields it. Be wary of putting too much faith in the power of music to heal, because music can also destroy. And Golijov managed to sneak that idea into the central scene of an opera about artistic martyrdom! The artistic complexity of Ainadamar is astonishing when you give it close attention.
Along those lines, it's worth talking about the way Ainadamar converses with operatic history, because it's a 21st century opera and there are no worthwhile 21st century operas that don't speak to 20th and 19th century operatic tradition. Usually this happens in winking moments, where a composer says "look, I'm playing with Mozart here, but I've transposed a gender or a mood or a theme." Golijov never, ever winks in Ainadamar. You more often sense that his callbacks are the notes of a careful student of the master: His soprano trio in the third act recalls, of course, Strauss's famous third act soprano trio in Der Rosenkavalier, but you don't get the sense that he's stuck this reference in as an easter egg for opera nerds. The subtextual message is "Strauss made this work, and I aspire to learn from the best." Golijov makes these borrowings his own without any kind of irony, the student becoming the master and assuming his place in the tradition of transmission. It's amazingly retro.
The most important of these callbacks is Lorca as a trouser role, a technique Golijov and Huang appropriate from the 18th century without specific determinative intent. It complicates Lorca's gender and the sexual charge of his relationship with Xirgu, but not in any particular way that is strictly necessary for the advance of the story, and the libretto doesn't do very much with either Lorca or Xirgu's sexuality, nor does it particularly say anything about the 18th century use of the trouser role. The biggest actual mechanical effect of the change is that the opera's 'good guys' all have female voices and the 'bad guys' all have male voices, but this is a differentiation without a clear message behind it, and certainly the classical flamenco undertones of much of the music imputes certain kinds of Spanish masculinity to Lorca in spite of the gender of his performer.
With all of that being said, with the clear statement on my part that Ainadamar is one of the greatest in that small and unusual set of things we call 21st century opera (I put it second after John Adams's Doctor Atomic, personally), I was frustrated, confused, and disappointed by the second half of the third act in its Philadelphia Opera staging. In this part of the story, Lorca, Xirgu, and Mariana have been reunited, the power of art to keep positive ideas alive has been affirmed, and the trio is journeying toward Heaven together while trying to keep enough of a foot in the temporal world to ensure that their vision is being transmitted to the next generation. When the journey ends, the final line of the play Mariana Pineda will be stated as a capper- on this iteration of the story, at least.
The visuals used in this staging for this consisted of a group of dancers carrying a large, long green cloth and waving it in undulating patterns around the stage to the tune of a pulsing, almost Philip Glassian dance. When this passage completed, another set of dancers moved in a formal, structured circular folk dance while periodically throwing blue sheets of paper on the ground. It was a little break from the story, ten minutes or so where I could make neither head nor tails of the symbolism and movement of the narrative. Ultimately, it led to the completion of the journey in a 'Heaven' that to my untrained eye appeared Elysian, of all things, and then a return to the temporal world and a revisiting of the 'Ainadamar' theme- the fountain of tears that asks the question they began the story with: what does it mean that Lorca had to die for his art? and supplements it with an answer to a deeper question: How can we keep Lorca and his art alive?
I haven't taken SEPTA's regional rail in several years, because it went from extremely slow to impossibly slow a few years ago when they were doing track improvements. The track improvements are now done and the train impressed by having moved past extremely slow to normal slow. It is still a local-only affair but it is still a way, way better deal than Amtrak to Philadelphia.
Second, I got super-cheap tickets by buying the limited view seats. They weren't really limited view. They were "you can get a decent view if you're willing to lean over the rail for the whole opera." So that was fine while it lasted, and now my back hurts.
In slightly less mundane preface, Osvaldo Golijov is a contemporary Argentine Jewish composer that I first encountered on some Kronos Quartet recordings from the '90s, when I was first learning about avant garde classical. He blends Latin music inspirations like Villa-Lobos and Piazzolla with Jewish music inspirations like Bloch and Bernstein, but that's a really ungenerous way of describing his influences. Though those voices are undoubtedly crucial in his musical style, it feels quite often like Golijov has gone back past those symphonic writers to find their original sources in folk music and then reinterpreted them. He is in dialogue both with the great 20th century folk-classical masters and with the whole folk tradition as a separate entity. I saw David Krakauer and a handpicked ensemble play his "The Prayers and Dreams of Isaac the Blind" last fall, a cycle of Jewish folk melodies carefully structured to sketch a narrative of Jewish history, and what struck me most was that Golijov managed to be both dark and meditative, and at the same time extremely funny.
Ainadamar is the story of playwright and poet Federico Garcia Lorca's death, layered through multiple retellings and time and perspective shifts. The libretto is by playwright David Henry Huang.
It stems from a strange and troubling question about coincidence in art: Lorca wrote a play called Mariana Pineda in which the title character is martyred for her political beliefs, and then Lorca himself became a political martyr when he was murdered by the Franco regime. The question Ainadamar begins with is what is the meaning behind this coincidence? Did Lorca prophesize his own death?
By careful musical echoes and theatrical cues, Huang and Golijov suggest that perhaps there is some cosmic connection between art and death. We watch again and again as actress Margarita Xirgu, a close friend of Lorca, dresses as Mariana Pineda, is shot on stage, and then undresses from her costume. Again and again she relives this moment, again and again (as the third act suggests) she keeps this idea of art as revolution alive. Long after Lorca has been slain, Xirgu continues to become, briefly, Mariana Pineda the martyr, and by extension Lorca the martyr.
In the second act Golijov borrows from ecclesiastical music to echo Lorca's death further back to that original martyr for truth, Jesus Christ. In the third act, when Xirgu is dying and being at last reunited with Lorca and Mariana, the other parts of her deific trinity, they reenact the Last Supper.
But Golijov does not appear to be saying that Lorca is Jesus, his death for art salvific. In perhaps the opera's most striking moment, the gunfire that kills Lorca and two other enemies of the state gets taken up in the tapping flamenco dancing feet of his murderers. Art is not truth, the music claims. Art is a powerful force of life and death that serves whoever wields it. Be wary of putting too much faith in the power of music to heal, because music can also destroy. And Golijov managed to sneak that idea into the central scene of an opera about artistic martyrdom! The artistic complexity of Ainadamar is astonishing when you give it close attention.
Along those lines, it's worth talking about the way Ainadamar converses with operatic history, because it's a 21st century opera and there are no worthwhile 21st century operas that don't speak to 20th and 19th century operatic tradition. Usually this happens in winking moments, where a composer says "look, I'm playing with Mozart here, but I've transposed a gender or a mood or a theme." Golijov never, ever winks in Ainadamar. You more often sense that his callbacks are the notes of a careful student of the master: His soprano trio in the third act recalls, of course, Strauss's famous third act soprano trio in Der Rosenkavalier, but you don't get the sense that he's stuck this reference in as an easter egg for opera nerds. The subtextual message is "Strauss made this work, and I aspire to learn from the best." Golijov makes these borrowings his own without any kind of irony, the student becoming the master and assuming his place in the tradition of transmission. It's amazingly retro.
The most important of these callbacks is Lorca as a trouser role, a technique Golijov and Huang appropriate from the 18th century without specific determinative intent. It complicates Lorca's gender and the sexual charge of his relationship with Xirgu, but not in any particular way that is strictly necessary for the advance of the story, and the libretto doesn't do very much with either Lorca or Xirgu's sexuality, nor does it particularly say anything about the 18th century use of the trouser role. The biggest actual mechanical effect of the change is that the opera's 'good guys' all have female voices and the 'bad guys' all have male voices, but this is a differentiation without a clear message behind it, and certainly the classical flamenco undertones of much of the music imputes certain kinds of Spanish masculinity to Lorca in spite of the gender of his performer.
With all of that being said, with the clear statement on my part that Ainadamar is one of the greatest in that small and unusual set of things we call 21st century opera (I put it second after John Adams's Doctor Atomic, personally), I was frustrated, confused, and disappointed by the second half of the third act in its Philadelphia Opera staging. In this part of the story, Lorca, Xirgu, and Mariana have been reunited, the power of art to keep positive ideas alive has been affirmed, and the trio is journeying toward Heaven together while trying to keep enough of a foot in the temporal world to ensure that their vision is being transmitted to the next generation. When the journey ends, the final line of the play Mariana Pineda will be stated as a capper- on this iteration of the story, at least.
The visuals used in this staging for this consisted of a group of dancers carrying a large, long green cloth and waving it in undulating patterns around the stage to the tune of a pulsing, almost Philip Glassian dance. When this passage completed, another set of dancers moved in a formal, structured circular folk dance while periodically throwing blue sheets of paper on the ground. It was a little break from the story, ten minutes or so where I could make neither head nor tails of the symbolism and movement of the narrative. Ultimately, it led to the completion of the journey in a 'Heaven' that to my untrained eye appeared Elysian, of all things, and then a return to the temporal world and a revisiting of the 'Ainadamar' theme- the fountain of tears that asks the question they began the story with: what does it mean that Lorca had to die for his art? and supplements it with an answer to a deeper question: How can we keep Lorca and his art alive?
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Date: 2014-02-10 05:09 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-02-10 05:20 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-02-10 05:46 pm (UTC)