In its two and a half centuries of history, the mythical Scala in Milan, the theater founded by Empress Maria Teresa of Austria, the culmination of the bel canto and the home of Verdian success, has not yet premiered an opera by a female composer. And when she has finally decided to order one of her own, she has done so thinking about the youth programming for her 2024-25 season. For high school students, go.
But it does not matter. The chosen one, Silvia Colasanti, an even-tempered and good-humoured Roman who is precisely part of the jury for the BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge awards in music and opera that will be delivered tomorrow in Bilbao, warns that her piece is suitable for young people and for everyone . And so the Scala has approved it.
With a libretto by Paolo Nori, Anna A., which is the title of the opera, 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 and who lived through the Stalinist terror and combined her talent with resistance to the tyranny that murdered her first husband and deported her second along with their son.
Chance has wanted Colasanti to coincide in the jury of the prize –which this year has gone to Thomas Adès– with the Barcelonan Raquel García-Tomàs, who recently made headlines for being the second woman to premiere an opera at the Liceu and also for the success of it: Alexina B . The result of a BBVA scholarship, this title – again a woman’s name with the initial of the last name – recreates the diaries of an intersexual who lived in France in the s. XIX.
“I am the first to premiere at La Scala but I hope not to be the last”, Colasanti declares to La Vanguardia, as it was also at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino a decade ago, with Kafka’s Metamorphosis. “Our world, the world of poetry, is a macho world. And not for today’s cultural reasons but for reasons of our history. Composition is a masculine story, women were relegated to other types of activities: we had performers but no composers. And the female composers that we remember are always the wives of someone who was already in that environment, like Clara Schumann or Fanny Mendelssohn, with important surnames that supported them”.
Indeed, the opportunities to become a composer were as rare in other times as those of being a painter or a sculptor. But in the XXI century the evolution is slow. And this feature is not only attributable to theaters from old Europe: when the recently deceased Finnish Kaija Saariaho premiered her celebrated L’amour de Loin (2016) at the Met in New York, it was also the first since in 1903 the American company will interpret Der Wald by Ethel M. Smyth.
“The world of poetry is a macho world, but above all it is conservative,” says Colasanti. “In Italy the lyrical tradition is very rich, and that is wonderful. We have 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”.
“However -she continues- there is a lot of mistrust. So 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 about literature and Russian poetry. Anna Akhmatova, he says, is one of the figures that has always interested him, “along with the thousands of other projects I have in my drawer.” And he approached her just before the war broke out in Ukraine.
“Art always speaks of the present, but I like to do it through the chronicle, through universal stories, myths or biography. Akhmatova’s is marked by her decision to remain in a hostile regime to be the voice of all those mothers whose children, like hers, had been imprisoned for no reason. It was at the gates of the Leningrad prison that a woman recognized her and, with her lips blue from the cold, told her: you can tell about all that pain. And she agreed. We already know what the relationship between art and power is like, and that story can be very iconic,” she concludes.
For his part, García-Tomás confesses that the operatic genre, which is what he likes the most, “is where I feel most useful as an artist, since it allows me to work with different disciplines that coexist. If you access the large halls, the opera is a perfect space, both for the public and for dissemination. And you can play with almost unlimited imagination. Because you have a story and a scene, with costumes, scenery, video (which she makes herself), lights, movement… And then there is the sound and the possibility of including electronics, which for me is a dream”.
However, getting to make large-format opera was not his sole objective, “as is the case with other composers,” he adds. “I was learning, doing small and medium-sized projects without thinking about the costs: I had no money and luckily I was able to count on people who collaborated altruistically. I’m very grateful”.
Being the second female composer to premiere at the Liceu shows that there is now, she says, a sensibility that allows it. “Before me there were talented women who could have premiered there. Being the second in the history of theater and the first Catalan is just a statistical matter. 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, this creator did not have references for female composers to make her way – “and not only in terms of gender, but of language, type of sensibility, how I approach the compositional fact”–; but she is aware of having become a benchmark for generations of young people.
“I made my way alone and I didn’t miss them either, I wasn’t aware of not having them; but I understand that today, a figure like me, extrapolated to the rest of my colleagues, can be stimulating, due to 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… that is false”.
García-Tomás could have been the third composer at the Liceu if the theater had not suffered the anarchist attack in November 1893. Lluïsa Casagemas was going to premiere Schiava e Regina, a title that the room has yet to recover. And we had to wait for Matilde Salvador to premiere Vinatea in 1974 to start the calculation. Currently, however, the Barcelona coliseum makes the new blood visible also through micro-operas: Núria Giménez-Comas, Marian Márquez, Itziar Viloria… or Montserrat Lladó next season.
El Real, in turn, has designed a 2023-24 season with an unusual presence of female composers. Joan Matabosch, the artistic director, rescues the important exception of the baroque, Francesca Caccini, and will stage La liberazione di Ruggiero dall’isola d’Alcina , which premiered in Florence in 1625.
“Caccini lived a very particular sociopolitical dynamic, in a kind of women’s court, and 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 valued at the time. Her adaptation of Ariosto’s Orlando furioso is profoundly feminist, with the hero reduced to a toy boy that the two magicians fight for,” she explains.
“Fortunately things have changed and the contemporary operas that are programmed are by composers and composers without distinction. Another thing is that the programming includes few contemporary works and this does not help”, adds the director of the theater that in October will celebrate the world premiere of La Regenta, by Marisa Manchado, with a libretto adapted by herself along with Amelia Valcárcel. A house order.
As in all disciplines, there has only been one history of monacal art, warns Victor Garcia de Gomar, artistic director of the Liceu. Belatedly, but without exception, the opera revises its referents to incorporate the gaze into feminine: from Caccini to Saariaho, through Pauline Viardot, Judith Weir, Sofia Goubaidoulina, Unsuk Chin or Missy Mazzoli.
“Her sensitivity shows us unusual corners of the soul. Surely we have to be proactive to reduce this discrimination. An unfair inequality that has hidden a creation of enormous importance that is only now being recovered. We are at a momentous moment in history, reviewing scores to determine their value: a new canon validated by a more open society.”
