De molinos, subastas y encantamientos / On windmills, auctions, and spells

By Juan Ángel Vela del Campo

(Article published in the newspaper El País, Madrid, February 17, 2000)


Contemporary Spanish opera will finally be able to present itself in our country on equal footing with traditional repertoire titles. At the Teatro Real and the Liceu, the most symbolic temples of lyric opera, two illustrious surnames steeped in history -Halffter (1930) and Turina (1952)- take Don Quixote as their muse and place on the table the limits and possibilities of new operas, here and now, to engage society in a direct dialogue. This time, they are not entering through the side doors but through the main one, with two heavyweight directors as allies: Herbert Wernicke for the Madrid production premiering next week, and the group La Fura dels Baus for the Catalan production in October, inaugurating the Liceu's second season since the fire.
This coincidence is significant in gauging how opera maintains its relevance, vitality, capacity to provoke, imagination, and ultimate meaning -a genre that is not currently in its golden age despite the stimulating works of Henze, Lachenmann, Berio, Ligeti, or Rihm, among others.
A protagonist in Sándor Márai's captivating novel The Last Meeting reflects: "Since music has no meaning that can be expressed in words, it likely has a more dangerous meaning, as it can make people understand each other". Cristóbal Halffter and José Luis Turina are well aware of this. Halffter speaks of utopia in reference to Don Quixote; Turina, of the symbiotic relationship between the myth and the music. The two will debate their motivations and solutions -by no means identical- at the Residencia de Estudiantes in a couple of weeks. It is precisely in their differing approaches that much of the appeal for the audience lies. Wouldn't it be possible for the Teatro Real and the Liceu to exchange these productions after their premieres?
Two Quixotes, two worldviews. For Halffter, Andrés Amorós has selected some of the most popular scenes from the novel, from the battle with the windmills to the protagonist's knighting, and has laid out a symbolic discourse that invites Cervantes himself into the ritual to explore the duality between the creator's nature and the culture of the literary character. Halffter's theories focus on the idea that the viewer already knows what they are seeing, making the music -not the words- the primary driver of the creative discourse.
For Turina, Justo Navarro emphasizes a futuristic component, a concept strongly linked to La Fura's spirit. The first act unfolds on the shores of Lake Geneva at an antiques auction where bidders compete for a 1605 edition of Don Quixote, set in an indeterminate future where books are rare and on the brink of extinction. The second act, in the garden of a Hong Kong skyscraper, plays with virtual reality and memory concentrators. In the third, the action focuses on a congress in honor of Don Quixote in Barcelona in 2004.
The Madrid Quixote emerged as a commission from the Teatro Real to Cristóbal Halffter, financed by Caja Duero. The Barcelona Quixote is an initiative of La Fura, which selected the composer and librettist before receiving the Liceu's invitation.
These challenges represent a significant leap forward in normalizing operatic creation in Spain without compromising quality. The fact that new operas by Luis de Pablo and Joan Guinjoan are scheduled for upcoming seasons at the Teatro Real and the Liceu guarantees continuity.
Bresson once remarked (his entire body of work is being revisited at the film library these days) that "sound cinema invented silence". A subtle paradox. What enchantments, inventions, paradoxes, and surprises will the new steps of Spanish opera bring? A fascinating question.