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.