Features
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New Opera from the New World
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 Five centuries have passed since the discovery of the Americas, and still we are amazed at the wonders of this New World. For example, while opera in old Europe seems dead as a doornail, in the Americas it is giving birth to magnificent things. In bourgeois Europe it was first of all democratised, and then, after the perverted popularism of Hitler, taken over by the intellectuals. In the USA the princes came from the aristocracy of wealth; they built giant opera houses with equally impressive ticket prices. Here though, there is an unwritten law – definitely no avant-garde music.
But at the 1996 first performance the opera Florencia en el Amazonas by the Mexican composer Daniel Catán at the Grand Opera, Houston, Texas, a new, singular and very powerful aroma began to filter through from the stage. Old realism replaced by magic realism of Latin America: the libretto inspired by themes from Gabriel Garcia Márquez, sung in Spanish. Here the nineteenth century is the starting point, which means that the expression is carried above all by the voices.
Grand, easily memorable phrases, with dramatically effective high notes, catch the listener by surprise, just as much as the almost minimalist flow of the orchestral part – the whole bathed in Amazonian lushness and tropical sultriness, presented in the gigantic dimensions of river and jungle. Catán’s instrumental palette draws on Mahler and Skryabin, through Richard Strauss, Zemlinsky and Schreker through to John Adams, so that the powerful melodic writing shimmers with all the colours of an exotic butterfly.
Daniel Catán was born in Mexico City, and educated in England and at Princeton. Between 1977 and 1983 he worked in the arts administration of the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City. His musical thinking was imprinted by many American and European influences – in opera, principally Mozart and Strauss – mingled with the fragrances of the Caribbean. These drift through his early orchestral work En un doblez del tiempo (1982) and the cantata Obsidian Butterfly for soprano, chorus and orchestra (1984).
In 1988 came Catán’s first opera, Rappaccini’s Daughter, after Nathaniel Hawthorne and Mario Paz – the production at San Diego Opera in 1994 marked the first performance of an opera by a Mexican composer in the USA. After the success of Florencia en el Amazonas, leading to a revival in 2001, Houston commissioned Catán to write his third opera, the Cuban comedy Salsipuedes, which was premiered there in Autumn 2004. At the moment Catán is working on his fourth opera, after the story Il Postino about Pablo Neruda by Antonio Skármeta, a commission from the Los Angeles Opera, with Placido Domingo booked to head the cast.
The operas of Mozart and Strauss are an inexhaustible source for all opera composers, said Catán in interview: for instance, when it comes to the drawing of characters and the setting out of dramatic situations. Stravinsky was the stimulus for the forming of sounds and instrumentation, also Ravel. But the great, impassioned vocal lines would have been unthinkable without Puccini. Florencia is an opera about a journey – the journey of life. The steamer ‘El Dorado’ sails downstream from Leticia in Colombia to Manaus. There, after a gap of twenty years, the diva Florencia Grimaldi will once again step onto the stage. Grimaldi is travelling incognito – striving continually with her splendid voice, part self-celebrating, part velvet-soft, for extreme sensations. Catán combines the voices wonderfully with the swelling orchestral sounds: as we are on a boat, here everything has to do with water, the burgeoning waves of love between Rosalba and Arcadio just as much as the spray of icy droplets between the squabbling pair Paula and Alvaro.
The ship’s captain is the calming influence, while the ghostly Riolobo gives the story a fantastical touch. Part Amazonian good spirit, part waiter, he marks – or perhaps brings about – the turning point. He may not be able to prevent the shipwreck at the end of Act One, but he does save Alvaro’s life when he falls overboard, and, in the process, Alvaro’s marriage. Then, after the catastrophe, everything takes a new turn. Grimaldi sings of her longing for the butterfly-catcher Cristóbal, for whom, twenty years ago, she gave up her career. Rosalba and Arcadio whisper sweet words as they free themselves from each other, while Alvaro, moved by Paula’s confession, falls back in love.
It’s obvious! This river is none other than the river of love, and it is the waves of love that inspire the music. Rosalba, who has written a book about the mysterious Grimaldi and now prepares to meet her at last, must experience the loss of her work in the wild water. But she recognizes Grimaldi in her own words, encouraging her in her love for Arcadio – an intimate moment of great beauty.
On arrival in Manaus comes the realization that the city is gripped by cholera, and one can only escape by staying on board – so no one will hear Grimaldi sing! And she will never find Cristóbal again. So she walks onto the deck and sings her last aria, a Liebestod that is also a moment of rebirth: ‘I feel the beat of your heart in my song – here, in my singing.’ Thus one of the secrets of opera, long ago fallen into decline, is understood afresh.
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