Curtis Opera's 'Ainadamar'

Homage to Garcia Lorca

STEVE COHEN

Ainadamar, "the fountain of tears," is a beautiful piece of music. The singers and orchestra of the Curtis Institute give us a taste of its power in this staging, co-sponsored by the Opera Company of Philadelphia and the Kimmel Center. But they fail to reveal its full potential.

Osvaldo Golijov’s score is lush and melodic with Spanish, gypsy and flamenco flourishes. The drama encompasses the life and times of the poet Federico Garcia Lorca, but it’s much more than that, and the main character actually is Lorca’s colleague, the actress Margarita Xirgu.

Lorca was a supporter of the Spanish Republic (modeled largely on the U.S.) that emerged in 1931. The republic wasn’t communist, but it was anti-clerical and favored labor unions and greater rights for minority groups and the poor. It also emphasized the arts. Manuel Azana y Diaz, the prime minister, was an author and playwright as well as a friend of Lorca.

With government support, Lorca started a "people’s theater" company that presented plays about social issues, "taking them out of the hands of academics and restoring them to the sunlight and fresh air of the village square." He wrote and adapted plays whose villains were the wealthy, the military and the church. Naturally, he became a hated target of those groups.

Many Spaniards were not ready for such changes to their traditional, church-dominated society. Military forces led by Francisco Franco surrounded the capital city of Madrid. Supported by the Catholic Church and by Hitler, Franco defeated the Republicans, who were supported by communists sent by the Soviet Union and by idealistic American volunteers who called themselves the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.

Franco’s troops shot Lorca to death on August 19, 1936, along with a bullfighter and a schoolteacher who also were condemned as enemies of the state. Franco ruled as dictator of Spain from then until his death in 1975. Lorca’s most famous play, The House of Bernarda Alba, was produced after his execution.

Plenty of time-travel

The story of Ainadamar exists in four time periods– in 1831, when a revolutionary woman named Mariana Pineda is executed for opposing the repressive monarchy of Fernando VII; in 1927, when Lorca writes a drama about Pineda and Xirgu portrays the heroine; in 1936, when Lorca is killed by the fascists in the Spanish Civil War; and in 1969 in Montevideo, Uruguay, where the exiled Xirgu looks back on her relationship with Lorca.

All this time-travel could be confusing. Chas Rader-Shieber’s direction and David Zinn’s scenic design clarify the drama by placing us in the dressing room of a theater where Xirgu is about to perform Lorca’s play about Pineda, and where another performance is about to begin at the opera’s end. This specificity is a plus, making the opera even more understandable than Peter Sellars did in the excellent Santa Fe production of 2005.

But it comes with a cost. This staging choice deprives us of a vision of the Spanish landscape and of the plaza in Granada where some of the action takes place. We miss the Spain that was the subject of Lorca’s own poetry and plays. And we miss seeing the arena, so to speak, where Lorca dueled with the fascists and where he was executed.

Golijov’s score emphasizes this conflict through its use of bullfighting trumpet calls and flamenco music. David Henry Hwang has written an ambitious play about history repeating itself.

Lorca’s style is lost

Corrado Rovaris conducts with panache– or, I should say, with brio– combining the sounds of gurgling water, chorus, poly-rhythmic percussion, clapping, chimes, guitar and improvised brass. The orchestra of Curtis students plays beautifully. The singing is respectful rather than exciting. An observer could praise this as being reverent, but I regret the loss of fiery drama that is within the score, and which would reflect Lorca’s own dramatic style.

Layla Clare as Xirgu, for example, sings so softly that she was sometimes inaudible from my seat in the second row. As the opening-performance evening wore on, she became more forceful. She certainly appears beautiful as the star actress. Katherine Lerner sang very well but with a dignity and reserve that failed to reveal enough of the person she is portraying. With her short hair and man’s suit, she definitely resembled Lorca. Amanda Majeski sang exceptionally in her supportive role.

Even while I differ with these interpretations, I concede that they suit the quiet, elegiac tone of Hwang’s libretto. But his contemplative threnodic text does retain imagery like: "How tragic when young flesh is mangled and blood spurts!" I wish that feeling came through more in the performance.

This opera is not everybody’s cup of tea, or glass of sangria. If you come to the opera with prior knowledge about Lorca’s time, it’s an exciting and moving evening of musical theater. TV would be an excellent medium for this opera, where historical film and explanatory captions could clarify things. Enterprising broadcasting producers should seize this opportunity.