Mauricio Sotelo, El público (2015)

Well, here's a Spanish opera, based on a play by Federico García Lorca, who was later murdered by Franco's fascists (fuck all fascists forever).  I think a lot of people only know him from the name-drop in the Clash song "Spanish Bombs."

I hardly know how to describe this.  This is not a play (or opera) with a straightforward plot.  To my primitive understanding: there's a theatre director, Enrique.  I got that much.  And he's doing <i>Romeo and Juliet.</i>  His former lover Gonzalo appears and accuses him of not being transgressive enough, or words to that effect.  There's a long scene with Juliet.  Enrique decides to recast with a boy in the role, which causes widespread outrage and violence.  Gonzalo is crucified, for some reason.  

You can read a much more detailed summary on the wikipedia page, with a lot more detail and a whole bunch of explanation of what characters (there are a lot of characters) symbolize.  And yet, I sort of felt like I felt during my abortive effort to read Finnegans Wake: I had a guidebook, and with its help, I could sort of dimly see some of what was going on, but I still had to take a lot on faith.  This is a thing: if there's any kind of work of art that you don't understand or appreciate, you want to just dismiss it as pretentious trash, because to do otherwise would be to admit that the problem was on your end; that you weren't smart or sophisticated enough to understand it.  Sure, I'm prey to that.  And then you get into the thing where you suggest that people who did like it are just, like, faking it, or trying to seem smart.  Jerks!  But I am extremely over that, so I will just say that this really didn't do anything for me and leave it there.

The music's, well, at least kind of interesting, melding traditional romantic stuff with a certain degree of atonality, and then a bunch of flamenco, which is apparently something Sotelo specializes in.  There's a prominent guitar part.  But to me, it's just not enough.  This is two hours and twenty minutes, which isn't that long, and yet I had to watch it in two sessions, because I just got too bored.  This isn't my worst operatic experience--it didn't make me viscerally angry the way Punch and Judy did--but it is surely in the bottom ten.  I wish I'd been able to appreciate it, and it's not inconceivable that I could with practice, but for now, blah.