It is nothing if not ingratiating. The Orchestra of St. Luke’s, conducted by Robert Spano, brought its concert version of Osvaldo Golijov’s and David Henry Hwang’s opera Ainadamar to Carnegie Hall on Sunday afternoon, and all the composer’s usual charms were in evidence: the vital pan-Hispanic rhythms, the grateful singing lines, the clean textures. Flamenco vocalism is intrinsically histrionic, and Golijov, quoting it in full here, spurs Dawn Upshaw to a performance of such scenery-chewing extremism that she makes Aprile Millo seem like Vanessa Redgrave in The Year of Magical Thinking. Lamenting female choruses magnify the characters: dabs of musique concrète sprinkle them with a shimmer of the new. What’s not to love?
Its inertia; and its glibness. David Henry Hwang’s libretto, unusually, suffers from brevity rather than overlength, announcing with children’s-theatre obviousness just enough of the actress Margarita Xirgu’s relationship with Federica García Lorca to set up the big numbers for the soloists. (“Margarita, tell me about the first time you met him at the “Albor” Bar in Madrid!”) Virtually every interesting moment in the story is either told but not shown, or shown but not accurately. Kelley O’Connor swaggers onstage as a Lorca played by Antonio Banderas, all put stripping Dawn Upshaw’s Margarita of her mantilla: only later, in a one-sentence throwaway, do we learn that Lorca was, in fact, homosexual. “He has done more damage with his pen than others have with their pistols,” shouts a fascist officer. Really? But Hwang’s and Golijov’s Lorca, explaining “My play is not political,” sings a long paean to a statue of Mariana Pineda (Xirgu’s signature rôle) as a symbol of love, not revolutionary purity. How such an innocent soul came to be executed by a Spanish firing squad is a story worth dramatizing, but in Ainadamar that story will be bullet-pointed, asserted, and mourned—not explored. As a result, the piece feels both lightning-quick and stuck in place: too scattershot to maintain the attention, even at a brisk seventy-five minutes. (I wonder if its writers were aware of this. Certainly their designating Ainadamar “an opera in three images” beards us but-there’s-no-drama! lions in our den: since “images” are, by definition, static, aren’t our expectations of theatrical vitality now our problem, not theirs?) No one’s saying that Hwang and Golijov needed to do a three-hour extravaganza on the Spanish Civil War. But its ingénue-on-the-train-tracks blatancy and its tempo-di-Cliff’s-Notes narrative ultimately make Ainadamar feel unserious. The all-too-real martyrdom of a dissident playwright seems used only to give a whiff of solemnity to what is otherwise a diva-centric melodrama with flamenco décor—an Adriana Lecouvreur of the Spanish left.
And Golijov doesn’t help much. I wish this artist’s work bespoke the creator more than the importer. All the elements of pan-Latino musical sensibility deeply familiar to us from so many other mass-culture contexts—from the Buenos Aires nightclub to the South Beach discotheque to Jazz at Lincoln Center to West Side Story—materialize in Ainadamar. But if you compare what Golijov does to refresh these tropes with what Silvestro Revueltas or Carlos Chávez or Alberto Ginastera did fifty years ago—to say nothing of what Gabriela Lena Frank or Gabriela Ortiz are doing now—you find yourself bewildered by his prestige. The music always has a sheen, a warmth, an openness, which counts for much: and there are orchestrational touches that bespeak a less limited ear, like those female choristers silvered with harp and vibraphone in their “fountain of tears” music. But much more characteristic of Ainandamar are the bullfighters’ trumpet riffs that open the score: if these are fresh composition, I don’t know what cliché is. His sound design—yes, Rick Jacobsohn is credited with the actual work, but the ultimate responsibility is Golijov’s— buries his musique concrète touches in the orchestra, and inflicts on his singers miking that gives them a dynamic range from pantomime to echo-chamber. More importantly, Golijov’s dramatic technique is inconsistent. Lorca’s aria to the statue, “Desde mi ventana,” written for Kelley O’Connor’s sumptuous, almost baritonal low register, is rhythmically square, but at least has some harmonic range, some direction—the sonorities seem to encircle the Mariana image much as the enraptured narrator does. But how does a composer of any sensitivity set “Spain is a river of mourning, a people draped in a black veil” to an upbeat dance arrangement that could easily back a new Marc Anthony single? It’s charming, and Ned Rorem will tell you that there is no art without charm: but charm isn’t the whole of art, either. Argue, if you will, that flamenco is to Latin-American mourning what the blues is (are?) to African-American mourning: a way of making suffering endurable by freeing the body to move to it. But is this a viable dramatic method? If so, where are the great blues operas?
One hates to typecast oneself as the eternally disgruntled DaPonte of the bløgösphere, but the fact remains that no major practitioner of operatic composition, in any country, in any era, has ever been blasé about the rôle of the libretto in crafting an expressive music-drama: and Ainadamar seems yet another example of what I have come to call the Peter Sellars method of operatic composition; this consisting primarily of choosing a premise so politically weighty that questioning the inadequacies of its musico-dramatic execution comes to seem small-minded. The audience is bullied out of its critical responses by the spectre of tragedy. (You were bored? Well, Lorca was slain. By Fascists!) I respectfully suggest that a comprehensive narrative technique, wielded in both music and word, makes politically charged subjects more, not less, intellectually confrontational: more, not less, emotionally immediate. Important opera companies are considering Golijov for major commissions, and I have every hope that given the right topic, the right collaborators, and the right approach, he’ll rise to the occasion. But if he’s going to compose for the world stage, he needs to incorporate, personalize, and expand upon—not simply quote—his musical sources: and to choose very carefully between the thorough and the merely impressive. Craft is politics.