Catán's 'Hija de Rappaccini' by Vulcan Lyric

Catán’s operatic version of the film Il Postino, starring Placido Domingo, had a successful debut in 2010 in Los Angeles and was produced by Center City Opera in Philadelphia in 2012. His La hija de Rappaccini (Rappaccini's Daughter) was the first opera by a Mexican composer produced professionally in the United States, in San Diego in 1994. This piece is receiving its Philadelphia-area debut as part of Vulcan Lyric’s festival of cutting-edge musical theater.

Catán was inspired dramatically as well as musically by Debussy, who was attracted to spooky symbolist tales, such as Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande, Poe’s Fall of the House of Usher, and the French mythic Engulfed Cathedral, about a sanctuary that rises mysteriously from underwater then descends again. In this work, Catán’s source was the Gothic short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne, "Rappaccini’s Daughter." Hawthorne reveled in evil and mystery, with mysticism bordering on Sleepy Hollow surrealism.

Desperately seeking eternal life

Botanist Dr. Rappaccini cultivates exquisite flowers that are poisonous, using them for his efforts to find the key to eternal life — a quest that raises questions about the people who may be injured in the course of his experiments. (There are relationships between this 1844 story and Thomas Gibbons’s 2014 play Uncanny Valley, which warned about infusion of the DNA of dying individuals into robots.)

Here comes the problem: Rappaccini’s Daughter, the short story, is a good read, but it does not make for dramatic theater. Hawthorne describes exotic plants whose fragrances injure whoever breathes them and whose dew can kill. His prose shocks us with his descriptions of insects and reptiles going into convulsions and dying after touching the plants. On a proscenium stage, such minute actions would be invisible to the audience. This adaptation doesn’t even try to show them.

Without such details, the story devolves into a romance between Giovanni, a curious new student in the city of Padua, and a mysterious and beautiful woman, Beatriz, whom he sees in a garden. Catán wrote a conventional love duet for them, plus a good confrontation scene at the end.

A choppy sing-song

The rest of the two acts are filled with repetitious and unmelodic exchanges between Giovanni and a professor who warns him to stay away, between Giovanni and his housekeeper, and between the professor and Rappaccini. While the instruments crest and subside in restless waves, much like Debussy’s La Mer, the vocal lines are a choppy sing-song.

Eventually, Giovanni develops a wound where his hand touched a plant. The professor gives him an antidote, and Giovanni has Rappaccini’s daughter drink it too. But her lifelong contact with the plants has made her immune to their poison, and the antidote kills her.

Insufficient drama

It’s a long opera with insufficient drama to sustain interest. The imprecations against such medical experimentation are philosophically challenging, but they don’t provide sparks on stage. The orchestral writing supplies the main reason for attending. Originally scored for a large orchestra, Rappaccini was performed here in a chamber re-orchestration by the composer. Andrew Kurtz lovingly led an ensemble consisting of two pianists, two percussionists, and a harpist.

Jennifer Braun was a lyrical Beatriz, Marco Panuccio displayed a plangent tenor as Giovanni, and Maximiliano Marques was a vigorous professor. The good work by baritone Paul Corujo as Rappaccini pales in comparison with his exciting achievement as the devil in the company’s production of Maren of Vardø: Satan’s Bride.

Stunning slide projections designed by Buck Ross were the most outstanding feature of the production. They displayed the colorful foliage from a variety of angles, plus the architecture of Padua. These visuals set a mood for a work that depends on atmosphere more than on theatrical drama.

Try, try again

Hawthorne’s story has been adapted before, without lasting success. An opera by Charles Wakefield Cadman premiered at Carnegie Hall in 1925, and the Pennsylvania Opera presented a version composed by Margaret Garwood in 1983. I attended the latter but have no vivid memories of it. Monica Rappaccini, a fictional villain and biochemical genius in the Marvel Comics Universe, is modeled after Hawthorne's protagonist. Perhaps this opera would work if it were produced for television, with generous use of close-up shots.