Amelia Valcárcel had been cherishing the dream of adapting La Regenta to the operatic genre for exactly three decades. The philosopher, former State Councilor and peerless reference for feminism had come up with the pressing idea after verifying that the film adaptations of Leopoldo Alas’ work, Clarín, could only fail.
“There is no way to contain such a choral novel in a film. That’s what I thought when I saw Gonzalo Suárez’s version. And I had more hope that the series would achieve it. But no. I thought that only an opera could be made of that novel. Because “Music is another language, which allows you to make enormous elisions, as long as you know how to choose what is important about the steel core. Then music will take you,” he says into the phone.
Being Minister of Education, Culture, Sports and Youth of the socialist government of the Principality of Asturias, she thought in 1993 that she could commission an opera. But “they told me that she could commission whatever she wanted, but that an opera was not planned.” She was dejected, she explains, but the idea did not go away. “If no one wanted to do it, I would have to do it.”
It was after listening to Marisa Manchado’s music and meeting the composer in person that she thought she could be the author of the story of Ana Ozores. “I told him, he wasn’t surprised, but we saw that we didn’t have the time or a penny, and that no one was going to subsidize us. So we met on summer and Christmas vacations to intensively arm ourselves with pentagrams and paper,” point. “It’s been epic.”
They have worked these years without coverage, but they say they have had a better time than Mozart and DaPonte. “We argued incredibly, but we came to an agreement. The best part was when Marisa got angry and told me that what she wanted was for her to compose like Puccini,” laughs the Asturian philosopher. “I’m surprised. The thing stands up. Although it’s true that she looks more like Alban Berg than Puccini,” she adds.
Valcárcel has declared himself a fan of the opera since he was 16 years old and attended one for the first time. But he confesses that contemporary opera, from the 20th and 21st centuries, “disheartens me, it gives me tachycardia,” he points out. I try to sit in a location that allows me a quick exit when the attack comes on, and do so without disturbing. I am very sensitive to opera. I and Benjamin Britten are already running away. And the great songwriter that Britten overshadowed, Ethel Smith, does that to me too, because she is even stronger and more powerful. Contemporary music is very demanding for the soul and the heart muscle.”
The absolute premiere takes place this Tuesday at the Teatro Español in Madrid, co-producer of this new one along with the Teatro Real. Jordi Francés conducts Manchado’s music, performed by the Teatro Real’s Main Orchestra and its choir, while Barbara Lluch has been in charge of giving stage form to Valcárcel’s libretto.
“The first inspiration comes from a masterful work, a novel about the environment, a novel about power, evil, human ignominy and baseness that never stops destroying what is ‘not like them’, ‘what is different’, not! “They support it!” Manchado argues in the hand program.
For Joan Matabosch, artistic director of the Real, the adaptation has the success of “turning the monumental novel into an almost chamber work. Ana Ozores is in the center, treated like a doll. And all of Vetusta watches it like a spectacle, encouraging and organizing that ends up falling into shame”.
“It is an adaptation focused on what is the axis of Clarín’s work, the moral misery of a people. There is anticlericalism and so on, but the axis is the way in which a young woman becomes the entertainment of the whole world until that make it fall into the mud. A good adaptation and a good libretto, which does not intend to compete with the monumentality of the novel, but the other way around. Faced with a huge piece, the adaptation is minimalist, focused on the essence, what Because of the enormity of the literary text, the reader can get lost along the way,” he concludes.
The soprano María Miró gives life to the protagonist of this novel who, unlike Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary, has the sympathy of its author. “Clarín pities Ana Ozores,” Valcárcel concludes. She dies, like all the other heroines of 19th century operas… Tosca, La Traviata, Madama Butterfly, Carmen, Aida, Turandot, Lucia di Lammermoor, Isolde, Desdemona… “They all die. But it lives. Because here the work of art asks the world, ‘what are you doing with that woman!'”
