An Argentine piece, as the you might've guessed from the title. I just randomly found it while looking for some more Spanish operas. It's freely available (with subtitles in seven languages!) until the end of the month.
Certainly not a typical opera, if there is indeed such a thing. It's very abstract, with a lot of dancing, and along with the singing, a lot of reciting of the abstract and somewhat hermetic yet evocative libretto. The title character is sort of seduced by the allure of the tango and becomes a prostitute; she dies at the end of the first act, but reappears in the second as "Shadow Maria," and is revived, bodily or otherwise, and has a child, who may be herself. This is very much of a piece with the Latin American Boom fiction that was, uh, booming at the time.
And of course, it's all tango-based, Piazzolla having been known as a tango pioneer. That's cool; I like a good tango just fine. And I liked this just fine, or even loved it. Such lush music, and even if the specifics of the plot are obscure, it's fine to just let it wash over you. Am I a vile hypocrite for disliking the obscureness of El público but liking this. Possibly, possibly. I may just have to live with that. But I also liked the music a lot better, so there's some justification.
I genuinely don't know what to think about the production, or how it might compare to another. It's very minimalistic, involving a huge amount of black paper (?) being dropped and spread around the stage. The dancing, I don't know. I probably could've liked it more; this may be because I'm a philistine, but a lot of it struck me more as flailing than anything else. However, this did not meaningfully affect my enjoyment of the whole, which was extensive.
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