In its two and a half centuries of history, the legendary Scala in Milan, the theater founded by Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, where bel canto culminated and where Verdi premiered his hits, has not yet premiered not a single opera by a female composer. And when he finally decided to commission one, he did so with the youth program in mind for the 2024-25 season. For high school students, well.
But that’s it. The chosen one, Silvia Colasanti, an even-tempered and good-humored Roman, who happens to be part of the jury for the BBVA Fronteres del Coneixement awards that will be presented tomorrow in Bilbao, says that her opera is suitable for young people, but it is designed for everyone And this is how Scala has approved it.
With a libretto by Paolo Nori, Anna A., which is how the piece is titled, is a story about art and power based on the life of Anna Akhmatova, the Russian poet who was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in 1965 , a year before he died. The writer lived through the Stalinist terror and combined talent and resistance against the tyranny that murdered her first husband and deported the second, along with their son.
By chance, Colasanti coincided on the BBVA jury – which this year fell to Thomas Adès – with Barcelona’s Raquel García-Tomás, who recently made headlines for being the second woman to premiere an opera at the Liceu and also for his success: Alexina B . As a result of a BBVA grant, this other title, also with a woman’s name and the initial of the surname, recreates the diaries of an intersex person who lived in France in the 19th century.
“I am the first to premiere at La Scala but I hope not to be the last,” Colasanti declares to La Vanguardia, as he was already at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino a decade ago, with Kafka’s Metamorphosis turned into an opera. “Our world, that of lyrics, is a sexist world. And not for cultural reasons today, but for reasons from our history. Composition is a male story, women were relegated to another type of activity: they had performers but not composers. And the composers we remember are always the wives of someone who was already in that environment, like Clara Schumann or Fanny Mendelssohn, with important surnames behind them”.
Indeed, the opportunities to become composers were as scarce in other times as those of becoming a painter or sculptor. But in the 21st century, evolution is slow. And this trait is not only attributable to theaters of old Europe: when the recently deceased Finnish Kaija Saariaho premiered the celebrated L’amour de Loin (2016) at the Met in New York, it was also the first since 1903 the company from the United States performed Ethel M. Smyth’s Der Wald.
“The lyric world is a sexist world, but above all it is conservative”, points out Colasanti. “In Italy the lyrical tradition is very rich, and that is wonderful. We have the billboards full of Verdi, Puccini and Rossini, but current authors are missing. Because if Italy has such a rich artistic heritage, it is because in the past someone knew how to believe in the present of that moment. But there is a lot of mistrust. In other words, I am delighted that the theaters realize that today’s opera can communicate with a very wide audience and not only with specialists in the sector”, adds this passionate Russian literature and poetry. Anna Akhmàtova, she says, is a figure that has always interested her, “along with the thousands of other projects I have in my drawer”, she says. And he addressed it just before the war broke out in Ukraine.
“Art always talks about the present, but I like to do it through the chronicle, through universal stories, myth or biography. Akhmatova’s is marked by the decision she made to remain in a hostile regime, to be the voice of all the mothers who, like her, had their children imprisoned for no reason. It was at the gates of the Leningrad prison that a woman recognized her and, with blue lips from the cold, told her: you can explain all this pain. And she nodded. We all know what the relationship between art and power is like, and this story can be very emblematic”, he concludes.
For his part, García-Tomás emphasizes the fact that he can work with several disciplines that coexist in the operatic genre. “If you access the large halls, the opera is a perfect space, both for the public and for broadcasting. And you can play with your imagination almost without limits. Because you have a story and you have a scene: costumes, scenography, video (which she does), lights, movement… And then there is the sound and the possibility of including electronics, which for me is a dream. Opera is what I like the most, it’s where I feel most useful as an artist.”
However, he says that getting to make a large-scale opera was not his only goal, “as it happens with other composers”. “I was learning, doing small and medium projects without thinking about the costs, since I had no money and in many cases I was lucky to have people who collaborated altruistically. I am very grateful”.
Being the second female composer to debut at the Liceu considers that it shows that there is now a sensibility that allows this. “Before me there were talented women who could have debuted there. Being the second in the history of the theater and the first in Catalonia is just a matter of statistics. And I don’t want to go down in history for that. I have worked hard to achieve this and I would not like people to attribute my presence at the Liceu to the fact that I am a woman and suddenly there is a rush to program women”.
Born in Barcelona in 1984, García-Tomás had no reference female composers to pave the way for her – “and not only in terms of gender but of language, of the type of sensitivity, of how I approach the compositional fact”–; but she is aware that she herself has become a point of reference for generations of young people. “I made my way alone and I didn’t miss references either, I wasn’t aware that I didn’t have them; but I understand that today, a figure like me, extrapolated to the rest of my colleagues, can be stimulating. For our plurality of languages ??and proposals. Because this image that has been projected of artists or writers or composers as gentlemen who have everything very clear… this is false”.
García-Tomás could have been the third composer at the Liceu if the theater had not suffered the anarchist attack of November 1893. Lluïsa Casagemas was to premiere Schiava e Regina, a title that the theater knows she has to recover. It was necessary to wait until 1974, when Vinatea de la Matilde Salvador from Castellon arrived, to count a woman. Currently, however, the Barcelona Coliseum makes the saba nova visible through micro operas: Núria Giménez-Comas, Marian Márquez, Itziar Viloria or, next season, Montserrat Lladó.
Real has designed a 2023-24 with an unusual presence of female creators. Joan Matabosch, the artistic director, rescues who was an important exception in the Baroque, Francesca Caccini, and will stage, in co-production with Teatros del Canal, La liberazione di Ruggiero dall’isola d’Alcina, premiered in Florence in 1625 .
Caccini lived a very particular socio-political dynamic, in a kind of women’s court, and he was lucky that his father, Giulio, gave him an education in the humanities, letters, mathematics and philosophy. She was a true intellectual and her services as a musician were highly sought after at the time. Her adaptation of Ariosto’s Orland furioso is deeply feminist, with the hero reduced to a toy boy who the two magicians are fighting over”, she explains.
“Fortunately, things have changed and the contemporary operas that are scheduled are by male and female composers alike. A very different thing is that the programs include few contemporary works and this does not help”, adds Matabosch. In October, in addition, the Real has the absolute premiere of La Regenta, by Marisa Manchado, with a libretto by Amelia Valcárcel, commissioned by the house.
“As in all disciplines there has only been one history of monastic art”, warns Víctor García de Gomar, artistic director of the Liceu. Late, but without exception, the opera reviews its references to incorporate the female gaze: from Caccini to Saariaho, via Pauline Viardot, Judith Weir, Unsuk Chin or Missy Mazzoli.
“His sensitivity shows us unusual corners of the soul. And surely it is up to us to be proactive to reduce this discrimination. An unfair inequality that has hidden a creation of great importance that is only now recovering. We are at a transcendent moment in history, reviewing scores to determine their value: a new canon validated by a more open society.”
