Shaping a Soul’s Conflict

Composer Myron Fink was a bit nervous as he sat down at the piano in a rehearsal room on the campus of UC San Diego one hot July afternoon in 1993. His back was turned to a roomful of people who were waiting to hear his one-man play-through of his latest opera, “The Conquistador,” a piece about the “hidden” Jews of colonial Mexico that he’d been working on for the last 10 years.

If it hadn’t been for the palm trees and sunny weather without, the scene could have passed for an old-fashioned backer’s audition. In the audience were Fink’s closest supporters: his wife, Bonnie; librettist Donald Moreland; and members of UC San Diego’s Friends of Judaic Studies, who had organized the run-through.

Fink had known there might be some heavy hitters there, too--in part because the president of the Friends of Judaic Studies had asked if she could bring along some “company” to hear him play. The company turned out to be San Diego Opera General Director Ian D. Campbell and his wife.

In fact, Campbell even spoke to Fink before the composer sat down to play.

“The first thing Ian Campbell said was ‘I can only stay a very short time,’ ” Fink recalls. But the composer wasn’t prepared for what actually happened after that. He ran through the story of conquistador Don Luis de Carvajal’s secret history as a Jew and his betrayal and downfall during the Inquisition in New Spain in the 16th century.

“I played, croaked, choked and sang my way through the first act,” Fink says. “They stayed. I finished the second act. They stayed. I finished the third act and . . . applause.”

Says Campbell: “I found the story totally engrossing. Also, it was a bit of history with which I was not familiar. I found the music very theatrical, very appropriate for the words that were there. As a former singer, I could sense the joy of the vocal line.”

Campbell also knew right then that the piece was right for San Diego Opera.

“He came up to me and said if we were to do this opera, it would be in the 1997 season,” Fink says. “He said, ‘You’ll hear from me,’ and two weeks later I was in his office.”

“[Campbell] had the courage to make a decision based on his own reaction, not in committee,” Moreland says. “Something remarkable was happening in that room, and this is the result of it.”

Fink and Moreland’s “The Conquistador,” which opens Saturday at the Civic Theatre in San Diego, is the first new work to premiere at San Diego Opera since 1979. “ ‘The Conquistador’ is not only a North American work but written by a living composer and with cross-border interest,” Campbell says. “Every ingredient that is right for Southern California is there.”

‘The Conquistador” is well-suited to the San Diego Opera in part because it’s related to regional history. It’s also in keeping with the company’s standing commitment to works that speak with “North American voices,” in Campbell’s phrase.

The Fink-Moreland opera is also a timely choice because it addresses racial and religious intolerance.

“There’s a reason why this is all coming together now,” says tenor Jerry Hadley, who has been committed to play the lead role of Carvajal since 1994, the first time in his career he will create a role on the operatic stage. “ ‘The Conquistador’ is a real indictment of the kind of narrow-minded self-righteousness that certainly grips our country today.”

Perhaps what makes the presentation of the opera most opportune, though, is that it caters to the current American passion for uncovering religious and cultural heritage.

Don Luis de Carvajal is a historical figure, founder of the Mexican city of Monterrey and a “pacifier” of the northern frontier of New Spain. Sent away from his home in Spain as a boy and raised a Catholic, he finds out as an adult that he comes from a family of Conversos, Spanish Jews who converted to Catholicism to mollify the forces of the Spanish Inquisition.

The opera begins when Carvajal, already a success in the colonial army, brings his sister and her family to New Spain, unaware that they continue to practice Judaism in secret. Then, when Carvajal begins to attract a bit too much attention to himself--criticizing his own government’s treatment of the Indians and acting on his ambitious desire for the hand of the viceroy’s daughter--his enemies look more closely at his background. Ultimately, he and his family are arrested, denounced as Jews and imprisoned. Carvajal dies in prison; his family is burned at the stake.

In telling its story, “The Conquistador” shines new light on a little-known chapter of Jewish and Mexican history.

“A quarter of the army of Cortez that conquered what is now Mexico City was of Jewish ancestry, possibly more,” Fink says one recent afternoon, as his opera was preparing to go into rehearsals.

Many of them were fleeing the Inquisition in Spain, only to find that, as its practices spread to Mexico, they had to flee once again.

“A favorite escape route for Jews fleeing Mexico was through Texas,” he says. “I grew up with stories of family members escaping from Russia and Germany, but Mexico through Texas?”

“The Conquistador,” however, doesn’t focus only on New Spain’s hidden Jews. It also shows the clash between the Spaniards and the indigenous peoples of North America.

“The persecution of the Jews was part of the larger mosaic of the displacing and the destruction of the native population,” says Moreland, seated alongside Fink in a conference room in the downtown offices of San Diego Opera. The opera views the Jewish plight against that background, he says.

In the hero Carvajal, all these conflicts come together.

“He had so many contradictions built into his personality and life,” Fink says. “He is a Jew by blood and a Catholic by faith. He’s a soldier who in many ways regrets what he has to do, a conqueror who has qualms about conquests.”

These conflicts are part of what makes Carvajal an effective dramatic figure for grand opera.

“Carvajal is someone who is highly controlled and who has denied his Jewishness for his entire life,” Hadley says. “Through the course of the opera, he is forced to come to terms with himself. The greatest conquest that Don Luis ultimately makes is of his own heart.”

But the Carvajal character wasn’t nearly that complex when Fink discovered him--in Martin A. Cohen’s 1973 book “The Martyr.” The historical study, which Fink first read in 1983, focused not on Carvajal but on his nephew, a secret Jew who was martyred.

Fink, now 64 and then teaching music at Hunter College in New York, had composed three other operas, including “Jeremiah,” which was produced at Tri-Cities Opera in Binghamton, N.Y. He gave the book to Moreland, his friend (and sometimes collaborator) since their student days in the early 1950s at the University of Illinois. The two men quickly agreed that the material had the makings of opera, but who should be the hero?

“My initial reservation was that while [the nephew’s story] was fascinating, it didn’t intrigue me,” says the Chicago-based Moreland, 67, who is primarily a theater and opera director, with credits at Washington’s Arena Stage and the Opera Assn. of New Mexico.

The uncle was only a peripheral character in Cohen’s book, but Fink and Moreland saw potential in his double identity and his role as a conqueror in New Spain. As they fleshed him out, their additional research also turned up another historical character of the same time period, whose association with Carvajal in the opera is purely fictional.

“One figure that kept popping up was Bernardino de Sahagun, a Franciscan scholar and ethnologist,” Moreland says. “He wrote 14 volumes on all aspects of the Aztec and Indian cultures, works that were eventually confiscated by the state because they were too supportive of the Indians. By the end of his life, he said he felt the arrival of the Spaniards was a cosmic tragedy.”

This humanistic and surprisingly modern perspective was in sync with what the real Carvajal believed, and both men lived in New Spain at the same time. “They could have known each other,” Moreland says.

In the opera, it is Carvajal’s support for Sahagun’s radical ideas that opens the door to his troubles. And Fink and Moreland also use Sahagun as a dramatic device, a narrator, who sets up and closes the story.

There were, of course, kinks to be ironed out as Fink and Moreland’s work progressed. In particular, they didn’t want the figure of Carvajal to be merely a victim.

“If you read accounts of the Inquisition, it happened, as with the Holocaust, to people,” Fink says. “We had to turn it into a story where the hero becomes a truly tragic hero”--that is, Carvajal had to have a hand in his own downfall.

The solution was simply a matter of providing Carvajal with a motive that would bring him into conflict with those in power.

“We found the engine for his destruction in his ambition, which leads him--and this is fictional--to press for the hand of the viceroy’s niece,” Fink says. “By reaching that high, with his unpopular views that the Indians should be educated, not enslaved, he becomes [dangerous].”

Like the insertion of Sahagun into the tale, having Carvajal aspire to wed above his station may not be historically accurate, but it is historically plausible. “This was not an unusual pattern for the period,” Moreland says.

“The more successful the conquistadors became, the more they conflicted with the needs of the state,” he continues. “At a certain point, the state stepped in and said, ‘We have to curtail his power.’ ”

In Carvajal’s case--and this is historically accurate--the state and the church didn’t just curtail his power, they completely destroyed him. His career, his family and his identity are stripped away.

“He who was once the victimizer is now, in a sense, the victim of his own culture,” Moreland says.

And the tragedy extends even deeper than that.

“He’s a 16th century man, so religion is a crucial matter to him,” Fink points out. But which religion?

“Alone at the end in the cells of the Inquisition,” Fink says, “to what god does he pray as his career, standing and world lie in ruins?”

‘The Conquistador” was largely completed by the time Fink retired from teaching at Hunter and relocated to San Diego in 1990. Yet the greatest problem still lay ahead: getting the work produced--and produced well.

If Campbell hadn’t attended the 1993 play-through, “The Conquistador” might still be on the shelf today--opera premieres are few and far between. More important, the extent of San Diego Opera’s support since then has been remarkable.

Soon after inking a deal with Fink and Moreland, Campbell wrote to Hadley to persuade the noted tenor to participate. Premieres are career risks for all the participants, but, as Campbell argued, it is also “incumbent for first-rate singers to do premieres.”

And Hadley, who had declined a number of similar offers in the past, decided that this was the right one: “This was very different,” says the singer, a self-described rabid history buff who was already familiar with the obscure Carvajal. “It was such a powerful piece of drama.”

Premieres are particularly costly, since all of the design components must be created. And San Diego Opera has mounted a massive outreach campaign, including a lecture series before the opening, to generate interest in “The Conquistador.”

Fortunately, San Diego Opera’s patrons and donors have come through, Campbell reports, noting that “more than $700,000 of special money has been raised, over and above what we normally need for an opera.”

This helps explain why Fink and Moreland praise their San Diego experience.

“You can’t imagine what a well-run company this is,” Moreland says. “Every promise [Campbell’s] made he’s fulfilled.”

And it also suggests that there may be future projects in store for the musical team here.

“There’s a good possibility that I and my wife may end up here in another year or year and a half,” Moreland says. “[Fink and I] already have another opera in mind.”

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* “The Conquistador,” San Diego Opera, Civic Theatre, 3rd Avenue and B Street, San Diego. Saturday and March 4, 7 p.m.; March 7, 8 p.m.; March 9, 2 p.m. $25-$100. (619) 232-7636.