Il Postino: when a production is unintentionally timely

My chief daily paper is the Washington Post. Lately the Post has published several stories about political unrest in the nation of Chile. As I write this, my attention was grabbed by a story with the headline: Chile cancels international conference, in which President Sebastián Piñera announced that the conference, scheduled for Nov. 15, has been scuttled due to a wave of protests. Previous stories have detailed peaceful protests in the capital city of Santiago in which as many as 1,000,000 citizens gathered to demonstrate against "issues of inequality". It is said that other demonstrations had turned violent, forcing the government to declare a state of emergency.

Pablo Neruda (d. 1973)

So why am I providing this recap of current events in a land some 5,000 miles away? In an opera blog?

Because the timing of this news couldn't be more conspicuously timely and relevant to Virginia Opera's soon-to-open production of Daniel Catán's Il Postino.

The opera, of course, is a fictional account of a period of exile during which the Chilean poet and statesman Pablo Neruda found himself persona non grata in his homeland. Chile has, for generations, been a hotbed of political strife; democratically elected governments (such as that led by the Socialist Salvatore Allende) have alternated with ruthless authoritarian regimes like that of Augusto Pinochet.

In the opera, Neruda, living on the (fictional) island of Calla di Soto off the coast of Italy, receives word from Chile of a terrible event: a peaceful demonstration by miners was disrupted by government forces with violent gunfire, leaving many dead.

As he processes this catastrophe, Neruda sings an aria with text by Catán, who is his own librettist. Here's an excerpt:
Chile, the blood of your children once again has been spilled.
Dead, so many dead...
tied, wounded, bitten, buried.
Tell me, Earth, tell me, Sea,
How much blood will be spilled?
How many tears will be wept?

It is, perhaps, uncanny that an opera on this theme, an opera chosen by Virginia Opera's management long before the events of recent days, would be staged at such a time when Art and Life coincide and imitate each other.

Or is it?

Aren't injustice, inequality and the repression of human rights always appearing and reappearing at every moment of our times? Of every time period? During the whole of human history?

Darn right they are. These same concerns were the driving issue of the events dramatized in our most recent production, Puccini's Tosca. Cavaradossi and Angelotti, remember, were fighting with the same passion toward the same end about the same societal wrongs.

It is, after all, the function of Art to be a mirror of human nature and human society.

Of course, in an ironic finale to Il Postino, the once-hapless, formerly inarticulate dreamer Mario Ruoppolo, the postman of the title, becomes awakened to corruption and injustice in his corner of the world, represented by the sleazy and corrupt politican Di Cosimo. In a flashback sequence, we see how Mario suffered the same fate as those Chilean miners eulogized in Neruda's lament.


A word about that aria. It appears to me to have been modeled after a passage from Verdi's Otello, specifically Otello's monologue "Dio, mi potevi scagliar". In that solo, Otello, having been tricked by Iago into believing that his wife is unfaithful, is in a black hole of despair, asking God why he has been given such an unbearable burden. Here is a searing performance by Placido Domingo (who also created the role of Neruda). Note two features in particular:a short repeated 4-note figure in the strings:

1. a short repeated 4-note phrase in the strings: 
   
2. the halting nature of the vocal line in the opening phrases, as if Otello was in such distress that he gasps, unable to catch his breath.

In Neruda's grief-stricken solo, Catán employs similar devices. (Unfortunately, an audio example is not yet available to provide here) A solo cello plays a short repeated figure, now three notes instead of four; Neruda sings in halting, gasping phrases at the outset.

Both solos rise to shattering climaxes. 

Catán's Il Postino and the curious state of Spanish opera

Quick - name your five favorite Spanish operas.

"Easy", you think, and start to rattle off titles: Carmen, The Barber of Seville, Il Trovatore, The Marriage of Figaro...

Stop!  Sorry to interrupt, but I didn't mean operas set in Spain; I meant operas written in Spanish by Hispanic composers.

And we're not counting zarzuela, a music drama tradition that international houses generally neglect. I mean operas intended for an international audience.

Now it gets tricky. Virginia Opera actually has staged a Spanish-language opera before: Thea Musgrave's Simón Bolívar, presented in 1995. But that should only count for a half-credit; the Spanish version was a translation of the libretto, and Ms. Musgrave is a native of Scotland. If an American sets a poem of Goethe to music, that doesn't make it a German lied, at least in the normal sense of the term.

Thus, Daniel Catán's Il Postino (2010) will be the company's first truly Hispanic opera. Catán, a Mexican, adapted the film of the same name about the Nobel prize-winning Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. (While the title retains the Italian title of the popular Italian-language film for its marketing value, the libretto - also by the composer - is in Español.)

It's interesting to speculate on the reasons for the lack of a body of international operas from Spain and Mexico, especially in light of the fact that, just a few centuries ago, Spain was a global super-power.

One factor may be tied to geography. While Spain is part of the European continent, where opera flourished first in Italy but not long after in France and Germany, it's somewhat isolated from those regions by the barrier of the Pyranees as well as the Basque country. As the Basque people have been described as the least assimilated community of Western Europe, their culture has been something of a buffer between Spain and France.

As a result, Spanish culture absorbed other influences, such as Morocco (its nearest neighbor), Arab culture and the sizeable Sephardic Jewish population that was found in Spain prior to the Spanish Inquisition in 1492. Beatrice, the lead soprano role in Il Postino, sings an aria called "Morenica", a setting of an ancient Judeo-Spanish wedding song; it's text, about a girl whose skin has been darkened by the sun, is said to be traceable back to the Song of  Songs of the Old Testament. Daniel Catán himself was of Sephardic Jewish descent.

These influences help to explain why the most characteristic Spanish instruments (guitar, castanets) are folk instruments rather than those belonging to the European symphonic tradition.

The big irony in the lack of Spanish operas suitable for international opera companies like the Met (and Virginia Opera) is that the Spanish language is very grateful to operatic vocal production, possibly more than French with its sometimes nasal properties and German with its gutteral consonants. Like Italian, Spanish features bright, open vowel sounds that help enable forward vocal projection.

By the way, here are the operas you might have named at the top of this post: de Falla's Atlàntida, Granados' Goyescas, Bretón's La Dolores, Ginasteras' Bomarzo and another work of Catán's, Florencia en el Amazonas.  Florencia was the first Spanish-language opera to be commissioned by a major American country, premiering at the Houston Grand Opera in 1996. It has been produced over a dozen times since then and may prove to enter the standard repertoire.

"Tosca" and Puccini's fondness for tone poems of dawn

Puccini's three masterpieces created with librettists Illica and Giacosa (La Bohème, Tosca and Madama Butterfly) have various elements in common. For instance (as I noted in a recent post) in all three works the lead soprano character is heard off-stage before making her entrance.

Bell tower in Rome
(photo by Jorge Royan)

But did you ever notice that in all three, the third act begins with a musical portrait of dawn? I can't tell you if this was a theme dictated by Illica (who constructed plot lines) or if Puccini enjoyed composing atmospheric early-morning music and requested these scenarios.

Act 3 of Bohème begins at dawn with workers entering the outskirts of Paris with goods to sell while the orchestra paints a delicate and graphic depiction of frosty temperatures, icy snowflakes and a suitably bleak atmosphere for the sad break-up of Rodolfo and Mimi that soon follows.

Butterfly's third act (in the 3-act version most commonly staged) has a fully-developed orchestral tone-poem describing the first stirrings of life in Nagasaki as night passes to day. This includes the use of recorded bird calls, a feature that contributed to the colossal failure of the premiere performance when the audience broke into derisive laughter.

I've always enjoyed the particularly effective touch of the distant voices of sailors lading cargo onto ships in the harbor, their voices calling out the Italian version of "heave-ho": o-eh, o-eh. o-eh. (Confession: whenever I hear those sailors, it makes me think of the army of the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz: "o-ee-o, o-EEEE-o". But I digress...)

As for Tosca, Puccini's procedures are interesting; he did a lot of research and took great pains to present an authentic depiction of Rome at break of day. Here's a run-down on the chief points of interest. I'm providing a link to the Callas/Di Stefano audio recording of Act 3. The timings indicated refer to that recording.

• A distant song in dialect. (1:26) Puccini again utilized the device of a far-off voice to create the early-dawn ambience he wanted, this time in the form of a young shepherd boy tending sheep in one of the seven hills surrounding the city. This is the one moment in the opera NOT written by the librettists. The composer wanted a text in authentic Roman dialect. After asking around, he selected the writer Luigi Zanazzo (who went by the irresistable nickname "Giggi") who supplied something appropriate.
• The eerie orchestral introduction to that song (1:00) This is one of the coolest moments not just in Tosca, but in all of Puccini. It's a masterstroke of subtle musical meaning. The orchestra alternates playful, whimsical figures in dotted rhythm - a foreshadowing of the boy's solo about to begin - with a sotto voce sequence of three chords: 

As marked above, those three chords happen to be the chord progression associated with Scarpia's motif as well as (as posited in an earlier post) the musical symbol of the combined power of the Bourbon monarchy and the Roman Catholic Church, which Puccini portrays as agents of tyranny and oppression.

Here's the thing, though: at this point Scarpia has been dead for a few hours. Tosca murdered him the previous evening in his apartment at the Farnese Palace.

So what are these chords doing here? The shepherd begins his solo moments later. Is he an evil, tyrannical shepherd boy, oppressing his flock? Denying justice to his sheep?

Of course not. What's happening is a master-stroke. The presence of the Scarpia chords, heard in such a whispered, fragmentary form, drained of all their intimidating sonority, clearly suggest this:

Scarpia's malevolent spirit is hovering over Rome this fateful morning in the sense that his schemes will come to pass even after his death. He remains in control, his will outlives him. His essence, contained in these chords, hangs suspended in the mist.

He lied to Tosca. The firing squad will not use blank ammunition. Cavaradossi will die. The presence of these chords can produce chills when heard in context. 

And one more item of interest in our tone-poem of daybreak:

• Bells! (2:33) Once the shepherd is out of earshot, nearby Roman churches greet the dawn with a gentle cacophony of chimes, bongs and dings. For this effect, Puccini took pains that few composers would have bothered with, all for the sake of authenticity.

Bells are percussion instruments; every orchestra carries an arsenal of them, ranging from gongs to sleigh-bells at Christmastime. But generic bells would not recreate the specific sounds of the specific bells of the specific cathedrals that can be heard from the Castel Sant'Angelo in early morning.

So Puccini traveled to Rome. He listened. He took notes: pitches, timbres, the way in which they all combined in a mass sonority. Since borrowing the bells was clearly out of the question, he brought his specs to a foundry and ordered bells made that would duplicate the real things.

This was an extravagance! Giuseppe Verdi was thunderstruck; the composer and conductor Gustav Mahler (never a Puccini fan) was contemptuous, referring dismissively to the opera's "tintinabulation".

The bells die down. The jailer bluntly informs Cavaradossi he has one hour remaining to live. The sun has arisen on our hero's final moments. 

By the way, for all the attempts at natural, authentic realism throughout this piece, the jailer's pronouncement "Vi resta un'ora" is puzzling in light of the inescapable fact that Act 3 has a running time of less than thirty minutes. I guess his watch was running slow. Better get that thing repaired...

The photo above is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.