Opera From Mexico Aims High in Houston

On Friday night, Houston Grand Opera, which can be counted on to present at least one noteworthy premiere each season, unveiled Daniel Catan’s “Florencia en el Amazonas,” the first Mexican opera ever commissioned by a company in the United States. And it was about time. Interesting composers live and work in Mexico, yet we too little hear them.

Houston has aimed high, turning to one of the most prominent Mexican composers. Catan’s previous opera, “Rappuccini’s Daughter,” was produced by San Diego Opera to considerable acclaim two seasons ago, and it will be performed by the Manhattan School in New York later this season.

If Houston aimed high, Catan reached for the stars, going straight to the man that everyone hoped he would for libretto and inspiration, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Nobel-prize winning Colombian novelist who keeps a home in Mexico City. Marquez’s so-called magic realism, the incorporation of mythic events into everyday life, has had a tremendous impact on literature the world over. Even President Clinton has said that Marquez’s most famous novel, “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” is one his favorite books. And what better medium for this than opera, whose favorite oxymoron has been magic realism from the very first operas produced in Florence at the turn of the 17th century?

But Marquez apparently remained unconvinced. He sent Catan to an assistant, Marcela Fuentes-Berain, who valiantly attempts to capture Marquez’s style and who proudly told the press that the novelist had complimented her on how well she imitated him in the final libretto.

The result is an opera that tries to look at love the way Marquez looks at it, full of promise and disappointment, and needing, from time to time, a little help from the gods. Florencia Grimaldi, an opera singer, attempts to find a butterfly collector she had met on a boat trip down the Amazon 20 years earlier. Having chosen career over romance but never having forgotten him, she retakes the trip now to sing in the opera house in Manaus, thinking he will surely reappear from the jungle.

The love boat this time includes a young couple who learn to overcome the same fears that Florencia and her collector had and an older couple who have to recapture the love they have lost. Thanks to a bit of magic, here and there, from the river god Riolobo, who appears in various guises, all are wiser, transformed by love and the mystical Amazon, at the end.

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This, of course, is as much the stuff of old opera as it is of modern magic realism, and that is pretty much how the opera sounds. Fuentes-Berain’s labored libretto carefully spells out its symbolism. And Catan’s music sounds far closer to the realm of Puccini and Richard Strauss than to the Amazon.

It is this music that disappoints the most. Catan’s earlier opera, with a truly sophisticated libretto by Mexico’s great poet and another Nobel-winner, Octavio Paz, reveals an equally sophisticated composer with a style all his own, full of instrumental color and substance.

But Catan has explained in interviews and program notes that he has been drawn more and more into a romance with the voice. Occasionally in “Florencia,” there are still some moments of musical character, especially when folk music and folk instruments are used for Riolobo.

But mostly the composer has produced an opera full of anonymous soaring phrases. There is always a climax ready for us just when we expect it. It is an opera meant to please--it is comfortable for singers, comfortable to listen to; it at least will not displease audiences.

If Marquez appears at all it is in the production, which is a beauty. Robert Israel’s intentionally simple (but in no way simplistic) stage is filled with a steamboat constructed of basic wood-block shapes that revolves and tilts and seems to take on different shapes in different lighting and different angles. The intense lighting by Paul Pyant may be a bit obvious in its use of brilliant primary colors in the first act, when the dramatic situations are being exposed, and brilliant pinks and oranges and greens in the second act when the characters become more complex, but it sure looks great.

Francesca Zambello directs with a sure hand, often helping out with clear-headed dramatic sensibility when the music threatens to turn mawkish. Best of all she turns the magic into realism, the river spirits anthropomorphized as shadowy acrobats.

Though consciously a singers’ opera, the singers, hard working and capable, make the smallest impression, in part because the lack of character of the vocal music. Sheri Greenawald is appropriately prima-donna-ish as Florencia. Yvonne Gonzales and Greg Fedderly as the young lovers, Rosalba and Arcadio, were suitably dashing; Hector Vasquez and Suzanna Guzman, as the older married couple, were suitably cranky and emotional. Gabor Andrasy was the captain, but it was Frank Hernandez as the river god Riolobo who had the most interesting music and automatically became the most interesting character. Vjekoslav Sutej conducted with passion.

“Florencia en el Amazonas” will have a life. It is a co-production with L.A. Opera (which will mount it next October), Opera de Columbia and Seattle Opera. Opera de Bellas Artes in Mexico City also plans to produce it. And although the music is more disposable than one might like, the opera sends an audience away relatively happy. Better still, it opens the border, too long closed, to music. This should be just the start.

* “Florencia en al Amazonas,” Houston Grand Opera, Brown Theatre/Wortham Center, 550 Prairie, Houston. 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 5, 8, 9. $20-$175. (800) 828-2787.