Alberto Ginastera, Bomarzo (1967)

Hey, remember how I wanted to see this opera?  WELL GUESS WHAT!  I bet you would not guess what if you had one billion guesses.

Yup.  So obviously (obviously!), this is based on the novel by Manuel Mujica Láinez about the sixteenth-century duke Pier Francesco Orsini, who is best known for having commissioned this weird park full of giant stone monsters.  It is a large novel, so naturally the opera is much streamlined: it starts with Orsini drinking a drink that's supposed to make him immortal, followed by flashbacks to his previous life, followed by him inevitably dying from being poisoned.  So there you have it.

The libretto here is written by Mujica Láinez himself, so presumably it's his vision for how the staged version of the story should go, but there are big differences between this and the novel.  The most noticeable and fundamental of these is that Orsini here comes across as really hapless and whiney in a way that he didn't there.  And THAT is largely because it completely axes the conceit that Orsini, in a magical-realist kind of way, is narrating the story from the vantage point of the twentieth century, which enables him to historicize and put events in perspective.  It's been a few years since I read the novel, so maybe my mind is distorting things, but this obsession with immortality really wasn't a thing in the book, as I remember it.  I don't think there was the suggestion that he would be <i>actually</i> living forever.

Hmm.  Be that as it may, I am very impressed by Ginastera's music, which is a largely serialist kind of thing that nonetheless really doesn't recall Berg of Schoenberg.  There are some really mesmerizing rhythms here, some spooky supernatural stuff, combined with a bit of early-music flair appropriate to the setting.  I'd say it's one of the more distinctive contemporary or near-contemporary operas I've seen.  

But I'm just not sure about that libretto, whoever wrote it.  It feels very detached to me, without providing much in the way of character interest.  There aren't any sympathetic characters of anything nuts like that.  I will say, however, that this movie version is rather a cool thing.  It was filmed in 2007 to commemorate the opera's fortieth anniversary, in the city of Bomarzo itself, including parts in the actual Gardens, and it does this thing where the action switches between period costumes and settings and present-day stuff.  That might seems a little arbitrary if you only know the opera, but I think it's an effective way of at least gesturing in the direction of the book's temporal disjunction.  The only problem here is that there's some really annoying sonic feedback when the music gets too intense.

But anyway, for reasons that only barely make sense, this had been one of those hard-to-find operas that I really, really wanted to see, so I feel quite fulfilled right now.