I have mentioned before that I was interested in all 6 versions of Rappaccini’s Daughter, operas based on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story. The latest version (which ignores in the notes any other previous treatment) is by Daniel Catán, and has a lot to recommend it. After listening to it several times, I am still confronted with a style that is by turns thick and impenetrable, then transparent and very flexible. Perhaps the one standout aria in it is so good that it throws the rest of the piece into being a lesser work.
Mexican musicians, as Argentines and Brazilians fall into a much more interesting category to me than those from Spain. I find Spanish music in all its manifestations to be visceral and their rhythms—by way of Moorish Africa—to be enormously influential in the history of music. But the actual music from Spain I find very difficult to assimilate. To me it seems very fragmented and episodic. Perhaps this is why the Zarzuela is the more popular form than opera there (can you think of any Spanish opera? I suppose “La Vida Breva” by DeFalla falls into that category, but what else in the repertoire? All the others seem to come from Latin America, where I think they have flourished far beyond their colonialist antecedents. Thus we have Gomes, Ginastera, and Catán topping my list of listenable Spanish operas.
(My knowledge of Spanish opera isn’t encyclopedic by any means. If anyone has more information on the subject, please write in and talk about it).
“La Hija de Rappaccini” has an interesting libretto by Juan Tovar, but it is in turn based on a play by Octavio Paz. Instead of using Hawthorne’s ‘fantastic’ device of keeping the reader in the dark so far as what’s going on, we learn almost immediately that Dr. Rappaccini has poisoned his daughter Beatriz as a sort of vaccination against life. She lives, but is poisonous to other people, and she lives on poisonous plants. When she falls in love with Giovanni, the young student, he tries to save her by giving her an antidote, and it is the antidote that kills her. Is it a tragic opera? I suppose, but the story is so slender as to be very evident when it is being padded. The story is told from Giovanni’s point of view; the opera treats everyone equally, which I think is a weakness. It truly suffers from a lack of viewpoint.
The music seems to have a veritable romantic core, with a solid base of delicious tonal passages; these have layered on top of them a sort of filigree, or spiderweb, of string harmonics, floating tone clouds, low clarinet grounds. The vocal intervals are often challenging; against a simple accompaniment, the voice will angularly climb and dip without repetition or theme, which I find annoying, as it is a difficult opera to find an anchor in, generally.
However, in the first act there is a moment separate from the rest of the work. Once Giovanni has seen but not met Beatriz, he sings a love aria (“Beatriz, puerta del mundo”) that is so exquisite it is nearly worth the purchase of the CD to hear (or if you are lucky enough to have a library buy a copy, it’s worth the borrowing). Sounding much like a swirling, ultra-romantic score from an MGM film, it is reminiscent of Korngold at his most effusive. One can’t help but hear Turandot’s “In Questa Reggia” behind its inspiration, and maybe Salome’s final aria, but it’s all to the piece’s benefit in comparison. Full of ninths and sixth chords, it is deeply passionate, and as the keystone of the work, stands out as a superb piece that any tenor would give his eye teeth to sing before an appreciative audience. The only downside is that perhaps its climax with cymbals, arpeggios in strings contrapuntally to the arpeggios in the woodwinds is too big and out of proportion with the rest of the work!
At the end of the aria, expressionistic devices are called in, with Beatriz’ voice echoing in the distance, and voices—perhaps of the poisonous plants (more delicate shades of “Little Shop of Horrors”!) and the voice of Giovanni’s housemaid, waking him from his reverie, all lapped together. In a strange fusion of Hawthorne and the Bible, Beatriz calls to Giovanni to “pluck the fruit.” and the flowers sing out, “It is time!” – a wonderful use of language and music together. At the wake up call the act ends with chimes, tympani, a recorder (or an ocarina from the sound of it), and xylophone bringing us back to reality.
The second act is filled with much the same as the first (this is when we know the work runs a little long), meaning a warbling, restless texture of woodwinds and strings, and the vocal line eternally pingponging back and forth without anything like the lyricism we were just left with at the end of act one. The eternal chittering of the strings and winds is applicable to birds as well as plants, and without seeing it performed is a little odd to think about, musically. In the second act the two lovers come together, and you’d think that this was the opportunity for the music to reclaim itself as in the tenor aria, but the eternal recitative continues, and it’s a long time before the flames are rekindled.
This is part of a review by Henry Fogel:
“The opera gets off to a somewhat slow start, rather talky and a bit directionless for its first few minutes. But when the title character (Beatriz) is introduced with a powerful aria, the music takes flight, and it maintains a high level of inspiration and intensity from that point on. There are sections where the characters revert to repetitive and undistinguished declamatory patterns, but they are relatively few and brief. And whenever the two lovers (Giovanni and Beatriz) are onstage, separately or together, the music soars.
“How to describe Catán's style? Although I can enumerate other composers as reference points, I don't believe Catán is a copy of anyone. His style neatly assimilates the musical antecedents with which he feels comfortable, but he blends them into a unity of his own. This work is no pastiche. I would begin by referencing Richard Strauss, not so much as an influence (though Catán shares Strauss's innovative and colorful use of the orchestra to depict everything from sheer psychological terror to erotic ecstasy), but simply to make the point that if you respond to Strauss's operas, this basically tonal and conservative score will appeal to you. One can hear in this score touches that remind one of Debussy, of Catán's important Mexican predecessors Chávez and Revueltas, of the Bartók of Bluebeard, and even of Wagner and certainly Puccini. (Incidentally, one does not hear anything of one of his teachers at Princeton, Milton Babbitt!) Let me, however, repeat myself: this is no pastiche. This is beautiful, evocative, wholly integrated musical and dramatic writing. You are not lurched from style to style, but rather swept up and carried along.”
In my opinion, the shape of the musical structure in this interesting opera is a pyramid; at the apex it is worth the climb up; afterward, it is a progressively less interesting slide down.
CATÁN Rappaccini's Daughter • Eduardo Diazmuñoz, cond; Olivia Gorra (Beatriz); Brandon Jovanovich (Giovanni); David Alan Marshall (Dr. Rappaccini); Julian Rebolledo (Dr. Baglioni); et al; Manhattan School of Music Op O • NEWPORT NPD 85623/2 (2 CDs: 90:11 &). Live: New York, Spring 1997
http://www.cdnow.com/cgi-bin/mserver/SID=1974097127/pagename=/RP/CDN/FIND/popsearch.html/clickID=tn_srch_txt
John Mucci