December 11, 2007

Golijov's Ainadamar: Hybridity and Cosmopolitanism on the Operatic Stage

"Contad mi triste historia a los niños que pasen."
Mariana Pineda.[1]

"I still don't know who I am. I think what I do is truthful."[2]
Osvaldo Golijov

Osvaldo Golijov has been named the 'it' composer by New York's press in 2006.[3] In February of that year a month long festival dedicated to his music was held at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York and the following season he was the first composer-in-residence of the Mostly Mozart festival at the same institution. Among Golijov's output, two recent works have allowed him to achieve that privileged position: La Pasión Según San Marcos (2000) and the one-act opera Ainadamar (2003, revised in 2005). On the footprints of the notable success of the St. Mark's Passion and sharing some characteristics with it, Ainadamar has also attracted the attention of both critics and public and has already received multiple productions with a few more programmed in the future. A 2006 recording of Ainadamar won Grammy Awards for Best Opera Recording and Best Classical Contemporary Composition and although Golijov himself says that "in the world of classical music they don't mean much," they show the popularity of his music. [4] This paper will explore some aspects of the opera that may lead to a better understanding of the reasons for its success.

Osvaldo Golijov was born in 1960 in La Plata, Argentina. His family was of Eastern European Jewish origin. He studied piano at the local conservatory and composition with Gerardo Gandini in Buenos Aires. In 1983 he moved to Israel and studied with Mark Kopytman. Three years later he moved to the United States, studying with George Crumb and Oliver Knussen. In the 1990s he started to collaborate with the St. Lawrence and Kronos quartets. The work with Kronos led to contacts with such diverse artists as the Romanian group Taraf de Haidouks, the Mexican rock band Café Tacuba, the tabla player Zakir Hussain, and the Argentinean rock musician, film composer and producer Gustavo Santaolalla. The 2000 work La pasión de San Marcos is his most successful work to date and combines Afro-Cuban music, bossa nova, tango, rumba, and flamenco in a sort of Biblia Latinoamericana version of Christ's passion. David Henry Hwang was the librettist for Ainadamar. He was born in 1957 in Los Angeles and studied in Stanford and Yale. His work M. Butterfly (1988) on the stereotyping of Eastern cultures by Westerners, earned him a Tony Award.

Ainadamar was premiered at the Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music on August 10, 2003 with Dawn Upshaw as Margarita, and Kelley O'Connor as Federico. After the premiere and, as a critic put it, a "rather muted reception,"[5] Golijov heavily revised the score and collaborated with Peter Sellars for a new production at the Santa Fe Opera that opened in the Summer of 2005. This same production was staged in January, 2006 at the Lincoln Center. All American performances counted on Upshaw and O'Connor in the roles of Margarita and Federico. The same two singers will continue to tour presenting the opera in the United States but will also perform in London and Adelaide, Australia during the first half of 2008. The opera has already crossed the Atlantic: a new production with a different cast opened on November, 2007 at the Darmstadt Staatstheater in Germany. And finally another production is underway that will premiere on May 2008 in Philadelphia.

The opera

The political conflicts of the Spanish Civil War are at the center of Ainadamar's plot but from there it radiates to other times and places when and where injustices against freedom were committed. The title means 'fountain of tears' in Arabic and refers to the place in Granada where the playwright Federico García Lorca (1898-1936) was executed:

It's a real fountain that witnessed beautiful harmony in the 12th century; it's a fountain to which Arab poets quoted by Lorca wrote poems to the beauty, to the peace, to the inspiration, that that fountain provided to people, when these three cultures coexisted in the soul of Spain: the Moslem, the Jewish and the Christian … It's a fountain that is the witness of harmony and the witness of barbarity. [6]

Hwang presents the events leading to the tragic death of Federico García Lorca through the narration of an old age Margarita Xirgu to a young disciple, Nuria, a fictional character.[7] Margarita Xirgu (1888-1969) was the actress who inspired Lorca some of his greatest female characters. Since the Spanish Civil War she lived in exile in Chile and Argentina before finally settling in Uruguay, where she acquired that nationality and where she spent the rest of her life. Xirgu is presented as the mythic figure that she is especially in Argentina and Uruguay.

Ever present through the opera is Mariana de Pineda Muñoz (1804-1831), a republican who was executed for conspiring against the monarchy and refusing to reveal her accomplices and who inspired the play Mariana Pineda (1925) by García Lorca which was performed countless times by Xirgu. The plot combines these three time frames (early 19^th C, early and late 20^th C) but also alludes to those more remote times conveyed by the title: the Arabs and Jews, expelled from Spain, have no words but remain present in the music. Future injustices are alluded through the inclusion of Nuria's character, who will have to face her own struggles for freedom.

In his play, Federico García Lorca presents the death of Mariana as a reenactment of Christ's passion. The opera stresses the parallels between the passions of Jesus, Mariana, and Federico's own death:

In her vision, Margarita describes Lorca almost as Jesus being led to Golgotha. Also the fact that he was murdered with two other people, one to his right and one to his left, not to mention that he was unjustly accused, associates him to Jesus."[8]

Ainadamar is structured in three sections titled 'imágenes', representing three generations: Mariana, Federico, and Margarita. Therefore, in the general form of the opera Federico is also flanked by two other characters that die and experiment their own passions: Mariana to his left and Margarita to his right.

Each section begins with the popular ballad that opens Lorca's play Mariana Pineda, recalling and mourning the day of her execution:

¡Ay, qué día tan triste en Granada, que a las piedras hacía llorar al ver que Marianita se muere en cadalso por no declarar!

What a sad day it was in Granada; that even made stones cry, upon seeing Marianita dying at the scaffold for not confessing!

The second and third sections end with the death of the characters after which they are named. Hwang and Golijov present each section as a passion in itself with its narrator dying in the next image: García Lorca tells us about Mariana and Xirgu about Federico.

The music of Ainadamar shows a new approach to the endless search of some opera composers for a language that continues operatic traditions and builds bridges to popular music styles, trying not to scare away the traditional opera dilletante while appealing to a wider audience. The main popular music ingredients for Ainadamar are flamenco and Cuban music. It is in Spain where the struggle for freedom starts and in Latin America where it continues. Latin America is the place in Margarita's imagination where Federico and her can flee and start a new life in the number 'A La Habana' and the real place where she is and has been for many years in the other Latin American flavored sections.

Flamenco threads all other musical styles: it is in the opening trumpets, in the balada, the instrumentation with flamenco guitars and cajones, and figures prominently in the vocal lines. It also has a dual role when presented in its most pure form: it represents both the falange in its fanatic nationalism and the most primal expression of suffering. Golijov explains that: "Lorca loved flamenco, but flamenco was also associated with very reactionary times in Spain."[9] Lorca's killer, Ruiz Alonso, is the most 'authentic' flamenco character, the role requires a cantaor, not an opera singer, but the same performer sings "this heart-breaking lament on top of the gunshots, but he is not Ruiz Alonso any more: he is the flamenco voice of pain."[10]

Flamenco is also cleverly adapted to operatic traditions. The meeting of Margarita and Federico in 1926 is depicted in the scene 'Albor Bar in Madrid', probably the most narrative scene in the whole opera and consequently set as a recitativo secco, with the sole accompaniment of guitar and cajón. The guitar is notated in true Baroque/popular music style as chord symbols and the dialog between the characters leans towards baroque or classical recitativo.

Arabic influences are strong too, not just in the title or as a remnant embroidered in flamenco. Federico sings 'Quiero cantar entre las explosiones' (I want to sing amidst the explosions), expressing his desire to stay in Spain despite Margarita's implorations, to, in the composer's words, an "almost Egyptian" orchestral crescendo.[11]

One of the most fascinating and original aspects of Golijov's music in Ainadamar and its reception is that he seems to have found a musical vocabulary remarkable for its absences. American opera composers have tried to reach out to consumers of popular music through the hybridization of opera and musical or opera and jazz. Golijov reaches to the same audiences and makes use of similar procedures but largely bypasses American popular music in his opera. The work sounds contemporary and popular without resorting to music comedy, jazz, or rock. Any American popular music overtones that we may hear in the music are mediated by contemporary flamenco or Latin American music, it is jazz returning to the United States not just with a Latin color, but mutated through the reinterpretation of Spaniards or Latin Americans.

It is interesting to note also the absence of music from Uruguay or Argentina, given Golijov's admiration and frequent use of tango in his music. This void may be just a coincidence but can also mean something: Nuria has not yet gone through her passion and does not yet have a voice. We see and hear Latin America through Margarita's eyes, not Nuria's. From Latin America we only hear the music of Cuba, the place imagined by Margarita and Federico as the destination where they could continue to be free.

Immediately after the flamenco recitativo described above comes the aria 'Desde mi ventana' ('From My Window'):

I didn't know if it [Ainadamar] would work as an opera, but I wanted at least to have one great aria. And I was listening both to a lot of Handel great arias and Italian-you know, Donizetti, Bellini, all these people that knew how to write a great tune with a beautiful climax and tear your heart - so it's a very old fashioned concept."[12]

It also has some vocalizations that remind of Villa-Lobos' Bachianas brasileiras No. 5, while the support of the voice in the climax through strings could very well be Puccini's. Although some melismas suggest flamenco or Arabic music, the predominant language is that of classical music. Another predominantly classical moment is the trio 'Doy mi sangre' ('Here is my blood'):

The music starts almost in a Straussian manner to me, Rosenkavalier-like, but then it goes on to Purcell. To me it resembles the death of Dido: that majesty, that love, that grace. It's a number about finding grace right before death, finding the serenity to die.[13]

The lyrics for both the last two numbers in the opera are based on a few lines at the end of García Lorca's Mariana Pineda. In the play, Mariana says to her captor:

Amas la Libertad por encima de todo, pero yo soy la misma Libertad. Doy mi sangre, que es tu sangre y la sangre de todas las criaturas.

You love Freedom more than anything else, but I am Freedom itself. I give my blood, which is your blood and that of all creatures.

We can almost sense that the passion of Mariana, Federico, and Margarita, who offer their lives for freedom and become freedom themselves, is also Nuria's destiny. The dark period of oppressive dictatorships had already started both in Uruguay and Argentina by 1969, and countless artists such as Nuria suffered persecution, many of them having to exile or facing a certain possibility of disappearing, just for 'being freedom,' as Federico and Margarita had experienced before her. It is not a coincidence that in the trio all of them sing "Here is my blood/shed for thee,/drink it and tell my story." Hwang and Golijov take their characters' words as a gospel, they are the latest generation to which the torch has been passed and they are compelled to tell their story, to spread their word.

What are the peoples to be evangelized and converted by the authors? Who is that audience?

Message and reception

When asked if Ainadamar carried a lesson for today, Golijov answered:

Wishful thinking. In the opera, Lorca, through one of the characters, says "You love freedom, but I am freedom." And that to me is the main point. That people who love freedom feel entitled to kill others for that love, but those people who are freedom are actually killed."[14]

The audience for Ainadamar is the developed world. All performances of the work to this day and programmed in the near future have taken or will take place in the United States, Europe, and Australia. The primary site where the fate of the opera would be decided was the United State s.[15] It may be wishful thinking but Golijov is not alone in trying to send a message across to the developed world. He seems to be part of a larger frame of recent Latin American cultural production (cinema, popular music) that challenges American hegemony from within American cultural industries and institutions.

Gustavo Santaolalla is an Argentinean rock musician, producer, and film composer who has collaborated with Golijov in numerous projects. In Ainadamar, he has credits as sound designer for 'Interludio de balazos' (Interlude of shots), a furious electronic montage with sounds of bullets as flamenco percussion. They both have collaborated in a series of projects, such us the album Nuevo by the Kronos Quartet, featuring all Mexican music arranged by Golijov, and which was produced by Santaolalla.[16] In an interview to an Argentinean newspaper he talks about a "powerful movement" ("una movida muy grossa") that defies the notions of 'Latin artist' as defined by the American markets.[17] We can take a guess at who conforms this movement: cinema directors such as Alejandro González Iñárritu (for whose movies Santaolalla wrote various scores), Guillermo del Toro, Alfonso Cuarón, the visual and performance artist Gronk (who did the set design for the Santa Fe/Lincoln Center production of Ainadamar).

How was the opera received? What did American audiences make of Ainadamar? The commentaries on the press and the internet have dealt with a few issues raised by this opera but which are not at all new: how much should an opera follow traditions or incorporate popular music? Where is the secret for the appeal of an opera? What is the political message in Ainadamar? Is this opera an incoherent postmodern pastiche or a fertile hybrid? Will the opera become part of the standard repertoire?

The New York Times critic Anthony Tomassini says Ainadamar, in the revised version, has a "newfound intensity" with "arresting musical passages." but also that "there are passages that seem like filler: long film-scorish spans of moody, flamenco-tinged music over droning pedal tones, with melodic lines that make too much of prolonging the half-step resolution of the tune into the tonic tone." Richard Dyer, from The Boston Globe, agrees: "If there is a liability, it is that Golijov relies too much on repeated patterns; the opera lasts about 75 minutes, but without the repetition, it would probably last less than an hour."[18] It seems these critics think Golijov has crossed the border too far into the popular music realm. On the other hand, Peter Davis, from New York Magazine, does not think there is anything superfluous: "there's scarcely a measure that doesn't grab the ear, as Golijov turns the sounds of galloping horses, rifle shots, and Granada's gurgling waterways into powerful musical images."

Across the Atlantic, after the German première of Ainadamar, the critic Jörn Florian Fuchs objected to the kitschness of Hwang's libretto and the postmodernism of Golijov's music. "The music is a succession of beautiful effects that don't fit a big picture"[19]. Dyer explains the deconstructive postmodernism of Golijov's music: "He understands better than his exoticizing European predecessors-think of Bizet, with his castanets-that the so-called 'Spanish sound' is a fiendishly complex blend of European, Arabic, and Hebraic influences, and he teases out all of them in turn."[20] Despite Dyer's opinion Golijov's music cannot escape completely from exoticizing his own characters and heritage. When characters want to sing about universal and abstract concepts such as love in 'Desde mi ventana' or freedom in the final trio, as is frequently the case in opera that makes use of popular music styles, the characters rely on classical music traditions that provide neutral territory, a realm without allusions to localization.

It is interesting to note that the goal of opera critics is to place Ainadamar in relation to operatic traditions but as a blogger put it they hardly talk about politics: "Can it really be that no one is responding to Golijov/Sellars/Hwang's potent condemnation of totalitarianism-not just in its historical manifestations in Spain (or Argentina, for that matter), but also in its latent form in contemporary America?"[21] Golijov would agree that that is the main point.

Talking about the multiculturality of Ainadamar Golijov said:

The image that I had when I started composing the opera was of a floating pomegranate, bleeding melodies of the three civilizations that were in Spain-Jewish, Muslim, Catholic. The Arabs were translating the Greeks, and Maimonides was in touch with Averroes, and all of that. People were having a dialogue. It's not like it was all rosy, but there was creative tension. (Golijov and Zuckerman 2007)

The philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, in his attempt to define an ethical position worth assuming in a globalized world, where these dialogs and tensions have become inevitable, says that a partial cosmopolitanism may be the answer. The qualification 'partial' means that cosmopolitans "expect that different people and different societies will embody different values,"[22] but contrarily to positivists they also believe there is a universal truth: every human being has obligations to every other. The world has gone from relatively isolated and small communities to global interconnection and this requires responsibility because anything we do can affect other people in remote places. In Ainadamar that universal truth manifests in Lorca's idea of 'being freedom,' in the sense of letting others and ourselves have their and our own values, and live their and our own lives. "Cosmopolitans think that there are many values worth living by and that you cannot live by all of them." These values mutate and recombine because of the global interconnectedness.

The Argentinean critic Diego Fischerman says that "Golijov delights on the possibility of hybridity and allows himself things that thirty years ago would have been unthinkable." Golijov explains the reasons for this hybridity:

Influences are multiple and a little by chance. The fact of moving in different realms, arranging for Café Tacuba, preparing a program for the Chicago Symphony, or transcribing tangos for Kronos Quartet, made many things appear before me and many of them hit me."[23]

This brings the issues of identity and authenticity. What do they mean when both ourselves and our products are a hybrid from multiple cultural realms? Golijov said in a recent interview: "I still don't know who I am. I think that what I do is truthful."[24] This apparent contradiction between fuzzy identity and truthfulness can be approached through the concept of hybridity as proposed by some anthropologists such as Néstor García Canclini. His central idea is that the concept of 'identity' has lost its significance. The speed at which the exchanges between cultures take place has increased due to globalization and it has become impossible to locate essential characteristics: "When an identity is defined through a process of abstraction of features (language, traditions, certain stereotyped conducts) there is a tendency to cut these practices from the history of blending through which they conformed."[25] It is impossible to treat identity as a fixed set of features or as the essence of an ethnic group or a nation. Canclini therefore proposes to displace the emphasis from identity to heterogeneity and hybridation. If we do that we may find that it is not important to Golijov (or even to his audiences) that he finds who he is, and if we agree with Canclini he probably never will. This does not preclude his music from being truthful. As one critic put it:

His works arouse extraordinary enthusiasm in audiences. The composer is triumphing not because he uses an accessible language-anyone can string together superficially pleasing chords-but because he speaks it with dire conviction. His sincerity is avant-garde.[26]

Golijov is therefore a composer that embraces hybridity as the only possible way of being truthful to his spread-out cultural roots and to his convictions as an artist. He has become the next hope for those who long for a symbiosis between popular and classical music. He also thinks his role is somewhat prophetic:

I feel that I'm pretty minor. But I'm opening a door. I think I'm John the Baptist, except I never want to end up with my head on a platter. But I am kind of announcing a new era in music, an era in which boundaries will disappear. But I think a much greater composer than me will come soon.[27]

Score

Golijov, Osvaldo and David Henry Hwang. 2005. Ainadamar. Ytalianna Music Publishing.

Recording

Golijov: Ainadamar. 2006. (Upshaw/O'Connor/Spano/Atlanta Symphony). Deutsche Grammophon CD B0006429-02.

References

Appiah, Anthony. 2006. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: W.W. Norton.

Davis, Peter G. 2006. He Reigns In Spain. New York Magazine, February 6. http://nymag.com/arts/classicaldance/classical/reviews/15621/ (accessed November 22, 2007).

Dyer, Richard. 2006. Recording liberates Golijov's 'Ainadamar'. Boston Globe, May 28. http://www.boston.com/news/globe/living/articles/2006/05/28/recording_liberates_golijovs_ainadamar/ (accessed November 22, 2007).

Fischerman, Diego. 2007. "Amo los momentos en que el artista nada en mar abierto". Página 12, March 2. http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/suplementos/espectaculos/3-5537-2007-03-02.html (accessed December 9, 2007).

Fuchs, Jörn Florian. 2007. Schöner sterben mit Lorca. Dreh Punkt Kultur, November 28. http://www.drehpunktkultur.at/txt07-11/5573.htm (accessed December 8, 2007).

García Canclini, Néstor. 2000. La globalización: ¿productora de culturas híbridas? http://www.hist.puc.cl/iaspm/pdf/Garciacanclini.pdf (accessed September 24, 2007).

García Lorca, Federico. 1991. Mariana Pineda. Madrid: Cátedra.

Garvey, Thomas. 2007. The Hub Review: Of Golijov and global schmaltz. October 25. http://hubreview.blogspot.com/2007/10/golijov-and-global-schmaltz.html (accessed November 22, 2007).

Golijov, Osvaldo and Adelina Sire. 2006. Ainadamar Listening Guide. http://www.osvaldogolijov.com/ainadamar_listening_guide.pdf (accessed December 6, 2007).

GRAMMY.com - 49th Annual GRAMMY Awards Winners List. http://www.grammy.com/GRAMMY_Awards/49th_Show/list.aspx (accessed December 8, 2007).

Kennicott, Philip. 2005. 'Ainadamar': Agony And Ecstasy in Santa Fe. The Washington Post, Monday, August 15. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/14/AR2005081401271.html (accessed October 11, 2007).

M.C. 2006. The Standing Room: Ainadamar: My $0.02. http://www.thestandingroom.com/blog/2006/01/ainadamar.html (accessed October 11, 2007).

McKinnon, Arlo. 2005. Ainadamar's Architect. Opera News, August. http://www.metoperafamily.org/operanews/issue/article.aspx?id=1262&issueID=50&archive=true (accessed December 4, 2007).

Nordlinger, Jay. 2006. The 'It' Composer. New York Sun, January 24. http://www.nysun.com/article/26327 (accessed December 8, 2007).

NPR Music: Composer Golijov Tries Opera with 'Ainadamar'. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5406874 (accessed December 5, 2007).

Osvaldo Golijov. Ainadamar (2003). http://www.osvaldogolijov.com/wd7.htm (accessed December 6, 2007).

Ross, Alex. 2003. Deep Song: Ainadamar. Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise, September 1. http://www.therestisnoise.com/2004/04/osvaldo_golijov.html (accessed December 9, 2007).

Sellars, Peter. Ainadamar's plot. http://www.osvaldogolijov.com/wd7s.htm (accessed November 5, 2007).

Smith, Craig. 2005. 'Ainadamar' still a work in progress. The New Mexican, August 1. http://www.freenewmexican.com/news/30762.html (accessed December 7, 2007).

Tommasini, Anthony. 2006. Seeing Life as Passion Play, in García Lorca's Shadow . The New York Times, January 24. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/24/arts/music/24goli.html?_r=1&oref=slogin (accessed December 8, 2007).

Zietsch, Heinz. 2007. "Ainadamar" von Osvaldo Golijov. November 25. http://www.echo-online.de/4/template_kritik_detail.php3?sshl=5147 (accessed December 8, 2007).

Zuckerman, Alicia. 2004. Bleeding Melodies. Nextbook, April 18. http://www.nextbook.org/cultural/feature.html?id=264 (accessed December 9, 2007).