As per usual, it is good to see a production put on by the Pacific Opera in Victoria BC. Golijov’s Ainadamar (“Fountain of Tears” in Arabic) is a too little-heard opera that should receive more performances, especially in the production originally created at the Opéra de Montréal.
This opera has a number of attractions for new audiences. It has a major queer character. The text is in Spanish, a language that is becoming more a standard language for contemporary opera, and an obviously quite important language throughout the Americas. The opera’s setting, Granada during the Spanish Civil War, takes place in a situation that is all too resonant of current political differences in both the UK and in the Americas.
And Ainadamar has resonance with other great operatic and dramatic works. It is a work about revolution but also about the past and its shadows in its own future, our present. While the particulars of the situation in Spain’s Civil War are beyond my skill set and knowledge, Golijov’s representation in music of flamenco culture and revisiting of classical music both make Ainadamar very much an important work that needs revival and production now, in this time. In the poem by Yeats, his “The Second Coming”, the poet notes that:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
This adaptation of the story of Spanish poet and revolutionary Federico Garcia Lorca and his assassination in 1938 is set in that despair. The beginning of the Spanish Civil War became the impetus for staunch Modernists Yeats and Tennessee Williams’s recollections of that brutal and horrid war. Williams’s recollection of his own self in 1941 has Tom, a stand-in for Williams, say:
In Spain there was revolution. Here [the US] there was only shouting and confusion.
In Spain there was Guernica. Here there were disturbances of labor, sometimes pretty violent, in otherwise peaceful cities such as Chicago, Cleveland, Saint Louis...
This is the social background of the play. (The Glass Menagerie, Scene 1)
So too Golijov and Hwang have read Lorca’s story against a number of literary and religious sources, especially the death of Christ, which is referenced over and over in the way the opera is put together as a narrative; small surprise given that one of Golijov’s major works is his St. Matthew Passion, a deliberate reworking of Bach’s mightiest work. Lorca was dragged off with two others, a schoolteacher and a bullfighter, symbols all of Spain’s greatness in the arts, in education and in sports (if calling bullfighting a sport is not reductionist to a fault). In any case, these are also recollections or reworkings of the three men executed that day on Golgotha.
And there is another triangle, reminiscent of Tosca (artists Lorca and Carvadossi; military figures Ruiz Alonso and Scarpia; and actresses Tosca and Margarita) but perhaps also Faust (Faust, Méphistophélès and Margarethe): art itself is at the center of this opera. Over and over again, this work returns to other works, maybe even Lloyd-Webber’s Evita with its Eva Perón, her husband Juan Perón and the musical’s narrator Che Guevara, Argentines all, along with Golijov himself. Opera Wire noted that the “score [is] full of references [to] Poulenc’s Dialogue of the Carmelites, Puccini’s Suor Angelica, Verdi’s Aida and Wagner’s Das Rheingold intertwined with tape-looped gunfire, water droplets, mechanistic drones, and broadcasts, Golijov has achieved something monumental.”
Indeed. For an opera that is all about war and revolution, it is also a love affair with its own past. This is not to argue that the opera is derivative. Just the opposite: it is a rich re-imaging, especially of the great romantic trios of opera’s past and the Modernists’ concerns with war but also their literary tricks (to borrow a term from Williams’s great dream play, The Glass Menagerie), divided into scenes just as Hwang has divided Ainadamar into 'images'.
The opera is rare enough that its context is important; in this production, everyone was wonderful, everyone, the romantic duo at the centre was particularly memorable. Hanna Hipp’s Lorca was a trouser role that had real weight, reminiscent of Handel’s heroes (castrati then, mezzo-sopranos now); she did not play a boy like Cherubino but nothing less than a romantic lead. She was a match for Miriam Khalil’s very fine Margarita Xirgu, Lorca’s real life music and actress / creative associate.
The two principal males, Alfredo Tejeda (Ruiz Alonso, the right-wing activist who ordered the deaths of Lorca and his two companions); and Neil Craighead (Jose Tripaldi, the guard who takes the forced confession of the three executed in 1936) did great work. So did Sarah Shafer who played Nuria, Margarita’s dresser. The company were all excellent: the Victoria Symphony, the Alma de España Flamenco Dance Company and members of the Pacific Opera Chorus and Victoria Children’s Choir.
In the theatre that night, we were privileged to be in Granada at the Fountain of Tears. Let’s hope we don’t have to relive those times today, but this opera also has a lesson for us. While knowing our various pasts is essential, there are times when revolution becomes necessary, with all its losses. May we all escape such times. However, with art works such as Golijov’s Ainadamar available on stage at venues such as the Royal Theatre, we may learn to step back from our own brink of disaster.