The first operatic adaptation of the great classic of Spanish romantic literature that is La Regenta premiered this week in Madrid with music by Marisa Manchado and a libretto by the philosopher Amelia Valcárcel. There have been five functions – today the last one – at the Fernando Arrabal hall in Naves del Español, with excellent reviews. But, with a capacity of 600 seats, three thousand people must have attended, no more.
Contemporary opera is still the terror of programmers in Spain. They want it, but fear it won’t attract the public. An evil that afflicts the Old Continent, because the United States is now experiencing a boom in commissions from the great opera houses.
“I’m glad that in Europe they program me so much, so I leave room for young composers in my country”, said John Adams to this newspaper. Will this trend reach this side of the Atlantic? Or is it easier there to generate an audience for the new creation because the creators are open to more direct styles, which are sometimes even more like the musical? La Vanguardia poses these questions to Barcelona composers.
“It’s true that musicals are very successful in the US, but it’s a matter of language and willingness to communicate with audiences,” explains Marc Migó (1993), author of the celebrated The Fox Sisters at the Liceu’s Òh!Pera cycle and connoisseur of American reality, since he is finishing his doctorate at Juilliard. “After the world wars, the aesthetics of Darmstadt, Boulez, Stockhausen, etc. prevailed in Europe. They followed the maxim that you can’t write poetry after Auschwitz. And the composers were faced with a bleak panorama, a veto that allowed minimal tonal deviations or minimal references to tradition. John Corigliano, an American composer I have had the privilege of knowing well, premiered The Ghosts of Versailles in 1991 at the Met. But it could not be seen in Versailles until 2019, because Boulez had banned it in Paris. And it was moving to see him in front of that premiere: with his status as a legend, with an Oscar, a Grammy, he was still afraid of the critics. But it was very well received, and this is a symptom that the atmosphere is changing and that audiences and programmers, except for the turn snobs, are more open to quality works that establish genuine communication. Because in the USA, quality works, beyond labels, have this desire to excite. And there’s entrepreneurship, indie opera commissions and big-money theaters. It’s a resurgence that started in the nineties. And Antony’s arrival here
Of another opinion is the composer Fabià Santcovsky (1989), trained in Germany, Italy…, or in Paris, with George Benjamin. His forte is the realm of the avant-garde, although “without attachment to a mannerist experimentalism”.
“We cannot expect what happens in the US to be transferred here, unless the programmers begin to assimilate the logic there, which has always been independent of the European ones. In the end it depends on whether music and the arts are a product of taste and consumption, as there, or of knowledge and research. Because if anything aspires to have a large audience, it is the market. Knowledge or science does not take into account the general public and for a time this had to be the case with the arts: since Beethoven emancipated himself from the commission”.
But today’s prescribers are programmers who need to predict whether the public will go there, which is why opera commissions that tend towards the musical abound in America, reflects Santcovsky. “They move through an aggressive class of economy, and if you introduce ethical and aesthetic values ??of recognition they don’t seem to have a real effect. While in Europe we still give value to values”.
Ferran Cruixent (1976) also sees differences between the two worlds. “They don’t have the weight of history that we have here and are more open to consider art and culture, even film music. This has meant that they did not deviate so much from emotion throughout the 20th century, with more minimalist and direct languages. American colleagues at my publisher, Boosey
Albert Guinovart (1962) says that he suffers from this European prejudice towards opera that appeals to the public. “Everything will depend on the courage of the theaters in Europe, because it seems that going towards something that pleases the public is a sin, when the musical has inherited this from the romantic opera. Verdi composed for the maximum audience and, on the other hand, today we are in the middle of the third world war and it is still time to program the heirs of Darmstadt. It is shocking that entertainment and the immediate thing beyond transcendence have been stopped. All in all, I detect that the sensibility is changing, Sondheim is starting to be made, but in the academy the old avant-garde is the one that determines the criteria. It could be said that they aspire to communicate with the society of the future rather than with today’s.”
