Whoever decided to hire a choreographer as the director of Osvaldo Goliijov’s Ainadamar at the Metropolitan Opera made an excellent choice, because the opera desperately needed the addition of dance to make it work. The plot is thin to begin with—an aging Catalan actress, Margarita Xirgu, recalls her early collaboration and friendship with the brilliant, martyred Federico García Lorca, and then passes his legacy on to her students in Montevideo, Uruguay—and is not helped along by its vague division into three “images.” The music, though pleasant, does little to propel the opera forward: a combination of Latin-inflected songs and weird sound effects (horses galloping, fans snapping open, heavy poles dropping onto the stage), it possesses crescendos but no high points and melodies without memorability. But the director/choreographer Deborah Colker, who enlisted an additional choreographer, Antonio Najarro, to help her with the flamenco bits, manages to use dance as the glue that keeps the piece together—until, at least, the point when it ultimately falls apart.
The performance I saw last night began with a single male flamenco dancer onstage, posing, turning, and stamping to a rat-a-tat sound that could have been either flamenco heels or simulated gunfire. Or no, the performance actually began before that, when the conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya sneaked into the pit and instantly started the overture, without pausing for the usual audience applause at his appearance. I liked that very much, and I also liked the way dance was incorporated everywhere in the scenes that followed: convoys of women who could move gracefully and in perfect unison to the flamenco-esque rhythms they were singing; soloists and chorus members who could sharply and simultaneously snap open their fans with skill and panache; and a whole stageful of people moving at once, on various levels of the complicated set, to the habanera-like tune they were giving voice to. I was wowed by the soloists, particularly Angel Blue as Margarita, Elena Villalón as her student Nuria, and Daniela Mack as Lorca himself. Some of my friends objected to the fact that Lorca was played by a woman—as if homosexuality were somehow being equated with girliness or effeminacy—but I found Mack’s portrayal both persuasive and powerful. Her rich contralto could plunge low enough to sound like a man’s register, and the way she stood and gestured in her white suit seemed perfectly masculine to me. Even her small size, especially when she stood next to the grand, maternally proportioned Angel Blue, felt right for Federico, who was only five foot seven in real life.
I can pinpoint the exact moment when the production lost me. It was about an hour into the intermissionless, eighty-minute opera. The scene was an imagined one (there is no detailed record of Lorca’s 1936 murder at the hands of the Falangists), in which a priest visited the doomed playwright and his two fellow condemned men—yes, three, as in the Crucifixion—and got them to “confess” their crimes, though they had not committed any. Then all three were shot at once and fell dead on the stage, silently. “Brilliant,” I thought. “How smart of Colker to eliminate the movie-cliché sound of an execution’s gunfire, and instead to leave us with the silence of a Goya or a Manet.” But I thought this too soon. Only minutes later, we got a full blast of percussive machine-gun fire incorporated into the music, complete with chorus members repeatedly throwing their arms about as if they’d been shot.
It was truly trashy, and from then on the opera was a mess, with people dying and returning from the dead, scenes changing as if within a shower (literally: there were huge droplets on a big circular plastic curtain), and wailing tributes to Lorca’s legacy that did nothing to enhance his seriously earned reputation. Even though this ending accounted for only a third or even a quarter of the opera’s brief length, it felt endless to me. As Dr. Johnson said about Paradise Lost (though with less reason, if you ask me), “None ever wished it longer.”
An opera like this is worth nothing if it doesn’t move you. Its creators have been handed all the materials for a wrenching emotional catharsis, and if it doesn’t get there, that is its own fault. I left Ainadamar feeling completely cold, completely untouched. And that is shocking, because in the natural course of things, even the bare story of Lorca’s fate—even just the sight of a plaque dedicated to his memory on the streets of San Francisco’s Castro District—can leave me feeling a bit weepy.