On the occasion of the centenary of the death of the peculiar Archduke Luis Salvador of Austria-Tuscany (1847-1915), the writer Carme Riera collected her knowledge about the "sovereign of Mallorca", cousin of Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria and his wife Sisi , to put together a novel that addressed the person behind the myth.
The Majorcan academic fantasized about finding a secret manuscript that the Archduke himself would have dictated to his secretary shortly before he died, in the Czech castle of Brandýs. Les darreres paraules (Edicions 62) now gives rise to an opera with a libretto by the author herself and music by another illustrious Majorcan, Antoni Parera Fons, which will premiere on the 25th at Palma's Teatre Principal, with a production by Paco Azorín.
In fact, the life of the first hippy in history, pioneer of Balearic tourism, navigator of the range of blues, polyglot, anthropologist and scholar of nature and the native beetle, was already enough for an opera before Riera invented the mysterious document that would have passed from heir to heir without transcending.
Authentic patron and environmentalist avant la lettre, who even bought shoes from an adorable peasant girl – his beloved Catalina Homar – who acquired olive trees threatened by felling, Luis Salvador had been, in turn, according to Riera's novel, a spy in the service of the emperor , an activity that he naturally camouflaged in the trips he undertook with his yacht through strategic points in the Mediterranean, since he also lived in Alexandria or Trieste.
His extravagant demeanor and his tendency to look like an Adam –“I have been told that in the court of Madrid they closed the door on you by mistaking you for a beggar”, his mother, María Antonieta de Borbón-Two Sicilias, scolded him– made him the closest royal highness. Of course, he was appointed honorary academician of Fine Arts in Palma or illustrious son of Mallorca and adoptive son of Sóller, for whose railway he had donated land.
The revealed secrets address, on the one hand, a bombastic bisexuality and a sensitivity that collided with the rigidity of the Vienna court, oblivious to the passing of time. The archduke was aware of the end of the old Habsburg house that he himself represented. And his alleged suspicions about the death of Prince Rodolfo, the only son of Francisco José and Sisí, who allegedly committed suicide with his lover, would be revealing... According to the archduke drawn by Riera, it would have been the empire's own CIA, so to speak. , who behind the monarch's back had the heir killed due to his papal request for divorce and his liberal proclamations for the independence of Hungary.
Not only that. The opera also deals with the assassination of the next heir to the empire, Franz Ferdinand, and his wife Sofia Chotek, who was not blue blooded. In this fictitious examination of conscience, the archduke does not forgive himself for having allowed his nephew to go to Sarajevo, where Sofia would receive the treatment of royal highness that Vienna denied her. Had she entrusted him with her spy status, he might have persuaded her and prevented her death at the hands of Serbian nationalism, and with it the First World War.
"In the plot there is a splitting of the character: the young archduke who lives in the present and the old man who evokes his life and leaves his last wishes", explains Riera about the imminent premiere. She also loves that the character is polyglot: the archduke spoke 17 languages and had a facility for Majorcan. After all, this is an icon from Riera's childhood, when the family spent the summer near Son Marroig, land that his father inherited when his father died. "My great-grandfather was the engineer of the first train in Mallorca, from Lluc to Inca, and he had a relationship with the archduke because he was related to everyone who could give him information for the books he wrote," she says.
For his part, Parera Fons has enjoyed putting music to a personality "with chiaroscuro and a hectic life, full of doubts, a complexity that attracted me a lot," he says. After the success of his opera Maria Moliner, this could be one of the titles that, due to its lyricism and historiographical spirit, would add followers to the new opera.
