It took nearly 20 years, but the music of Osvaldo Golijov has arrived at the Metropolitan Opera. And it’s not the work that he originally expected.
In 2006, Peter Gelb, before taking over as the company’s general manager, announced that Golijov, celebrated at the time for his jubilantly multicultural hit “La Pasión Según San Marcos,” had been commissioned to write a new opera for the Met. The company later said it would be based on Euripides’ “Iphigenia in Aulis,” with a premiere set for the 2018-19 season.
Then, in 2016, during a dry spell for the composer, who had developed a reputation for missed deadlines, the project was called off.
There was another Golijov opera readily available for the Met to program, though: “Ainadamar,” a fantasia about the Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca. It’s a seemingly sure bet, so frequently performed since its 2003 premiere that it has appeared in New York multiple times already.
So Golijov finally got to take his bow on the house’s stage, with the opening of a new production of “Ainadamar” on Tuesday. A fluidly staged dream heavy on flamenco spectacle, it was assured in its movement, but not in its musical performance. After all these years, the Met still doesn’t appear quite ready for Golijov.
To a degree, that’s understandable. Golijov’s brand of freely associated idioms doesn’t come naturally to classically trained musicians, nor is it persuasive without a fully inhabited performance. And “Ainadamar” is an absolute melting pot of influences. David Henry Hwang’s libretto has aspects of memory and passion plays, with episodes of ritual that transcend theater. The score draws not only from flamenco, but also from klezmer, folk traditions and too much else to list here. At times, Golijov fits a style to a scene; at others he is intriguingly counterintuitive, depicting Havana with a three-beat dance rather than the more obvious choice of two-beat, duple-meter habanera.
Golijov’s score gives a lot of freedom to performers, which can be a challenge. Pages go by with the direction “senza misura,” or no clearly defined measures. Guitars are given chords and moods rather than notation. The vocal writing, far from traditionally operatic, is encouraged to sound like the music of the streets; one character sings entirely in the cante jondo, or deep song, of flamenco.
All this comes together for a dramaturgically slight, 80-minute tale in three “images” about the actress Margarita Xirgu, the star of García Lorca’s breakthrough play, “Mariana Pineda.” In 1969, she is reminiscing about the poet with her student Nuria, a role with so little purpose, she may as well be in Xirgu’s mind, too.
In those flashbacks, we meet García Lorca, Xirgu’s physically awkward, gay, artistically daring friend. “Ainadamar” means “fountain of tears,” an evocative image for a requiem, and the name of the natural spring near García Lorca’s native Granada where he is believed to have been killed by Nationalists in 1936, in the early days of the Spanish Civil War.
Golijov and Hwang equate García Lorca and the political martyr Mariana Pineda, with ritualized mourning and a mythic treatment of their murders. Each “image” opens with or includes a chorus of “niñas” singing a ballad from “Mariana Pineda” about the sad day in Granada when “the stones began to cry.” Elsewhere, Golijov evokes Andalusia with electronic tracks, including galloping hooves and gunfire distorted with the intensely rhythmic drive of baile flamenco.
On Tuesday, the chorus adopted the vibrato-free sound of street song, and mixed seamlessly with an ensemble of dancers woven throughout the production. The most authentic voice onstage was that of Alfredo Tejada, a flamenco singer who plays the Nationalist Ramón Ruiz Alonso with the spine-tingling Granadan soul that García Lorca described as “el duende.”
Compare that with the relatively straightforward soprano voice Angel Blue, in the role of Margarita. A regular at the Met, Blue has a mighty sound and a genial presence, but that kind of loveliness has little place in “Ainadamar”; her lower range, rather than earthy and teeming with “el duende,” was underpowered and indistinct.
Blue did blend gracefully, though, with her fellow stars: the soprano Elena Villalón, bright and penetrating as Nuria, and the mezzo-soprano Daniela Mack as García Lorca. Both singers had excellent outings at the Met earlier this year, Villalón in “Orfeo ed Euridice” and Mack in “El Niño.” (Encouragingly, the Met, after nearly a century without a Spanish-language production, has now had three within a year with “Ainadamar,” “El Niño” and “Florencia en el Amazonas.”)
García Lorca is written as a trouser role, emphasizing, for better or worse, the poet’s youth and femininity, but can also be sung by a high tenor or countertenor. Mack, with a creamily rich sound, lends the part true heft, while appearing uncannily like García Lorca. Near the end, she and the sopranos are united in a gorgeous, “Rosenkavalier”-esque trio that exemplifies Golijov’s gift for irresistible beauty.
The Met’s orchestra, conducted by Miguel Harth-Bedoya in his house debut, was at its best in those kinds of passages, but often struggled with Golijov’s stylistic mélange. Offstage trumpets at the start, instructed to play freely, instead had a soulless rigidity short on Andalusian atmosphere. Harth-Bedoya is a veteran of this score, but whatever comfort he has with it didn’t extend to the instrumentalists.
Deborah Colker, a choreographer known for her Cirque du Soleil productions, makes her opera debut with this staging, which ran at Detroit Opera last year. Deceptively simple, it unfolds around and within a towering circular curtain of individual strings, designed by Jon Bausor, and under the dramatic spotlights of Paul Keogan. Tal Rosner’s video art, projected onto the curtain, is both decorative and literal-minded; in the section “Fountain of Tears,” he provides images of water drops that streak on glass, yes, like tears.
With constant flamenco choreography by Colker and Antonio Najarro, the production leans into the abstract qualities of Golijov’s score. The result, though, is often music in service of dance. Throughout the staging, there are elements of theater, but not of drama. Maybe that problem is inherent in the piece, which is too thin to satisfy as drama, yet too dramatic to satisfy as ritual.
You could picture a more successful presentation of “Ainadamar” as an oratorio in the concert hall, in the vein of “La Pasión Según San Marcos.” But as written, and as performed at the Met, the opera doesn’t crackle and smolder like the García Lorca works it so earnestly tries to honor.
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