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First-timers
Zuidam and Golijov at Tanglewood
BY DAVID WEININGER

Working independently, the composers of the two BSO-commissioned operas that premiered a week ago Sunday at Tanglewood chose Spanish subjects for their libretti. Both Robert Zuidam and Osvaldo Golijov assembled works with a dreamy, mystical atmosphere that were long on narration and short on action. Both felt more like Passion settings than operas. Neither proved wholly convincing, at least not on first hearing.

Set in the early 16th century, Zuidam’s Rage d’amours centers on Juana, daughter of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabelle of Spain and the wife of Habsburg prince Philip the Handsome. Grief-stricken after Philip’s sudden death, Juana is told by a seer that if she takes Philip’s body to the site of her own mother’s grave in Granada, he will be resurrected. Desperate and on the verge of madness, she has his body exhumed and brought to Granada, where, after embracing his remains, she lays him to final rest — sans revivification.

Rage d’amours tells more than it acts. Zuidam wrote the libretto as a series of discrete tableaux depicting various stages of this story, with a narrator to fill in background and negotiate changes in scene. And like the drama, Zuidam’s atonal music is dark and irregular, a series of jagged outbursts alternating with unsettled surfaces. On one level descriptive of events in the plot, it’s also his way of portraying the unquenchable passion for Philip that eventually drives Juana into insanity and isolation. Into this knotty instrumental writing, the composer weaves some beautiful unadorned vocal ensembles in a reference to the opera’s Renaissance setting. Zuidam pushes the fragmentation even farther by writing three separate soprano parts for Juana, an apt though clumsy way of portraying her inner disintegration. At Tanglewood, the piece never achieved overall coherence, but it made for compelling listening thanks to its use of orchestral color and internal variety of styles.

The same can’t be said of Golijov’s Ainadamar ("Fountain of Tears"), which, with a libretto by David Henry Hwang, is loosely built on the life of the great poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, who was murdered during the Spanish Civil War, at a place in Granada that Arabs called the Fountain of Tears. The "action" takes place in the realm of memory and imagination. And if Rage d’amours has the feel of an ancient rite, Ainadamar carries the aura of magical realism. The three-part story is told through the eyes of Margarita Xirgu, the lead actress in Mariana Pineda, García Lorca’s first play, whose subject is also a revolutionary martyr. Like Zuidam, Golijov and Hwang make use of narrative discontinuity, jumping between Xirgu’s first meeting with García Lorca to her last performance of the Pineda role to Lorca’s shooting. The work aims less to tell a story than to reflect on the overlapping identities of Xirgu, Pineda, and García Lorca and to contemplate the intersection of life, death, and fate for all three.

Such an actionless and meditative plot needs music that is uncommonly rich and sophisticated, and I found Golijov’s fountain less than overflowing. All of his music is direct and communicative, and he writes melody as beautifully as any composer today, but Ainadamar’s melodies have no musical substance to support them, so that long stretches sound almost monotonous. Golijov incorporates flamenco styles, but the orchestration is reticent and almost colorless, and the rhythmic snap and fierce invention of his best works seem largely absent. He does make interesting use of recorded sound, especially the water sounds at the beginning, from which the opening music emerges, and the burst of gunfire that announces García Lorca’s murder. And there are some lovely moments, especially the ecstatic final scene, where Xirgu performs the Pineda part for the last time, realities converge, and the whole stage is bathed in the "delirious light of sunset in Granada" Lorca indicated in the play. Here the music, suffused with flamenco guitars, surges inexorably toward Xirgu’s death. But the conclusion, though it sounds gorgeous, is weighed down by some ham-handed symbolism, as Xirgu and García Lorca touch each other across a square of light on the bare stage.

The principal performers in each work — sopranos Lucy Shelton and Dawn Upshaw, conductors Stefan Asbury and Robert Spano — did heroic work, as did their Tanglewood Music Fellow colleagues in coping with music of considerable complexity. But beyond any praise or nagging criticism, what remains after a week of reconstructing (and deconstructing) both pieces is the simple desire to hear them again. These days, second performances of new music are often harder to negotiate than premieres. Let’s hope these two break the mold.


Issue Date: August 22 - 28, 2003
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