I got lucky with this one: it was available on Florida Grand Opera's youtube channel; it was only supposed to be up until July 5, but it was still there when I chanced upon it a few days after that. It's gone now, but not before I downloaded it. This is a pretty well-known/well-regarded opera, but there's otherwise no video of it anywhere, so I'm very glad to have had the chance to see it. Catán was a Mexican composer who did a lot to add Spanish-language opera to the repertoire. Cool, cool. It opens with a very odd disclaimer:
I mean, I think I get what they're trying to say: nobody involved in this knew that the recording would be made publicly available, so it's not fair to judge the singers or producers based on it. But really now: if they were doing a half-assed job, I don't think "I was only half-assing it because I didn't know there would be any visual evidence of my half-assing!" is going to get you much of anywhere. Not that they were. But still.
Now I'm convinced that every opera--at least every one performed in, I don't know, the twenty-first-century exists on film in some archive. Like that Hamilton video they recently released. But will I ever be able to see Bomarzo or Mourning Becomes Electra? Who knows? Life is full of mystery.
This is a story inflected with Garcia-Marquez-esque magical realism, although to say that it's "based on" Love in the Time of Cholera--as the wikipedia entry does--is pushing it, and kind of suggests that whoever wrote that has never actually read Love in the Time of Cholera. It's about a group of people traveling in a riverboat down the Amazon to the town of Manaus to see a performance by Florencia Grimaldi, a famous, reclusive soprano. These passengers are Rosalba, a woman writing a book about Florencia; and Alvaro and Paula, a bickering couple. Another woman on the boat is actually, unbeknownst to the other passengers, Florencia herself: she's still obsessed with her lost lover Cristóbal, who disappeared years ago in the jungle while hunting butterflies. Rosalba begins a romance with Arcadio, the captain's nephew, who is unsatisfied with his lost and wants to become a pilot. There's a storm and in saving the boat, Alvaro is thrown overboard and they're grounded. The boat gets back on track, as Paula mourns her husband, realizing how much she loves him in spite of their fighting. But then, thanks to the river gods (or something), he's returned to the ship. Hurrah! Anyway, they reach Manaus, but there's a cholera outbreak and they can't land, but the two couples are united, and Florencia is reunited--either bodily or in spirit, it's ambiguous--with Cristóbal.
There's this whole thing with the first mate, Riolobo ("Riverwolf"--even my nonexistent Spanish is enough to suss that out), who's some sort of magical being; that's the main "magical realism" part of the opera, and to be honest, it feels tacked on to me and doesn't really work. Other than that, however, I found it very engaging; maybe the ending is overly sentimental, but fuck it, life is goddamn hard right now, and I will take happiness where I find it. This production also has really gorgeous painted backdrops of the river.
And the music, MY GOODNESS: this is really absolutely gorgeous romanticism. It doesn't do anything new, but what it does, it does brilliantly, and I love it. Sure, I like innovation, but tradition can be good too. That's why I like Menotti, and it's why--on the basis of this--I like Catán. I'll be sure to see his operatic version of Il Postino soon.
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