La construcción de una ópera hoy / The construction of an opera today
By Juan Ángel Vela del Campo, Justo Navarro, and José Luis Turina(Free transcription of the presentations included in the roundtable of the same title, held during the course Opera transcending its own limits as part of the "Summer Encounters 2003" at the University of Valladolid, and published by the Buendía Center of the Vice-Rectorate for Institutional Relations. Valladolid, July 2007)
As an introduction, by Juan Ángel Vela del Campo
DQ. The libretto, by Justo Navarro
DQ. The music, by José Luis Turina
As an introduction
By Juan Ángel Vela del CampoMusic Critic
Álex Ollé, from La Fura dels Baus, highlighted a truly unique aspect of this project: the initiative for the entire undertaking, which culminated in the premiere of D.Q. at Barcelona's Teatro del Liceo, came not from the composer or the librettist -as is typically the case- but from the stage direction team at La Fura. Once they decided which opera they wanted and that its premiere would open the Liceo's season, they sought out both the composer and the librettist. How the project originated, how they approached the subject, and through what reasoning or intuitions, will be explained by the protagonists themselves.
What can be revealed in advance is that La Fura dels Baus had two candidates in mind for the librettist: John Berger and Justo Navarro. The selection process for the librettist, which lasted about six months, sought to find a writer whose work conveyed the intricate rhythms, phonetics, and inherently musical qualities of literature. They first reviewed some of Berger's books, such as Lila and Flag, but once they delved into To the Wedding, they had no hesitation in contacting Justo Navarro, who had never before written an opera libretto. When the writer received the phone call at his home in Nerja, he described it -as he will explain- as the call he had always been waiting for: a call to create an opera about Don Quixote. In the end, even if Justo Navarro sees the libretto for Don Quixote in Barcelona as a kind of "mistake", as we'll hear, it is a mistake well worth celebrating. It represents a phase in the creative process, and in creation, there is risk, and in risk, the satisfaction or dissatisfaction of achieving the desired outcome.
As for José Luis Turina, hailing from a distinguished family of composers and known for a fascinating body of work that includes La raya en el agua (premiered at Madrid's Círculo de Bellas Artes), he suddenly found himself embarking on the adventure of composing a lyrical work to open a season at the Teatro del Liceo at the request of a group as "overwhelming" as La Fura dels Baus. From the outset, La Fura was intent on collaborating with a "classical" composer, someone who could integrate diverse languages and masterfully handle all the formal essentials of opera construction -qualities epitomized by the artistic and professional rigor of José Luis Turina.
Finally, it should be noted that Don Quixote in Barcelona broke records in terms of press coverage in the history of the Liceo. No opera has ever been as widely discussed at the Liceo as this one -a fact I personally verified in the theater's statistics. Moreover, it became one of the most censured operas in Liceo history by the Catalan press, while simultaneously being lauded by Central European critics. This duality led to the release of a DVD that garnered numerous international awards. With that, the floor is now theirs.
DQ. The libretto
By Justo NavarroWriter
I believe that what makes our encounters with others interesting is that, occasionally, we are fortunate enough to be transformed by them. The people worth meeting are those who change us, who modify us, who cause a kind of mutation -much like what happened to Don Quixote when he read chivalric novels. Something similar happened to me when I met José Luis Turina and Álex Ollé and Carles Padrissa from La Fura dels Baus. I recall that our first meeting, arranged by Juan Ángel Vela del Campo, was at the Sociedad General de Autores in Madrid, in the Buñuel Room. I saw it as a premonition, a good sign: a space named after an artist whose films transform those who watch them. And so, I found myself swept up in the adventure of Don Quixote in Barcelona.
The risk I see when we are asked to create something based on Don Quixote is that we might become mere illustrators of a unique and inimitable work -one that continues to fuel our imagination yet remains forever unattainable. Like any classic, it is inexhaustible and never truly finished. I did not want to write anything that would simply illustrate or expand upon Cervantes' imaginative episodes because I feel that such territory does not belong to me; it belongs to everyone. It is a shared realm that, in my opinion, we must not "profane". Instead, I began to reflect on how we perceive Don Quixote today -a figure chasing phantoms, the ghosts of chivalry, so to speak. And in turn, we all become "Quixotes", forever pursuing the ghost of Don Quixote, knowing we will never finish reading that book, which will always remain inexhaustible.
Since I was tasked with writing about Don Quixote, I started by thinking about how we approach this masterpiece. First, I believe that today, very few people have actually read the novel. It is more familiar to many through cinematic imagery or even comic books than through Cervantes' text itself. I wanted the opera -and my writing- to address this estrangement, this distance we feel from Cervantes' work. The opera begins in a world utterly alien to Cervantes and Don Quixote -a world so detached that even the intoxicating force that captivated Don Quixote, the book, is no longer understood. This is the starting point of the opera.
In the first act, the libretto opens in a world where antiques are being auctioned, and one of the items is a book -though no one knows what it is. They recognize it as a marvelous, almost science-fiction object, described as something that, when looked at, lets the viewer see in their mind the thoughts of someone else from the past, even hearing the voices of people who lived long ago. From this premise, I decided that my imagination and representations of Don Quixote would be rooted in specific episodes of the novel, but not to illustrate or retell them. Instead, I approached them from this perspective.
For example, in the first act, the protagonist's entrance is connected to one of Cervantes' episodes: Don Quixote's descent into the Cave of Montesinos.
In the second act, I imagined that someone had already purchased their Don Quixote and incorporated characters from Cervantes, specifically the Trifaldi sisters. These characters are tied to a fantastical moment in the novel: the appearance of a flying horse. In my libretto, Don Quixote appears in Hong Kong, in what could be described as an amusement park or an antique garden owned by the Trifaldi sisters. However, instead of portraying a heroic Don Quixote, I envisioned him as old, decrepit, and set in his outdated ways -a Don Quixote who resents the visitors coming to the Trifaldi sisters' "garden of monsters". I imagined Don Quixote as a kind of monster, with his monstrosity stemming from his old age. I thought of Don Quixote as a mutant, akin to Kafka's cockroach, transformed into a knight-errant in the same way others become monsters by injecting themselves, like Dr. Jekyll with his alter-ego, Mr. Hyde. Thus, I imagined Don Quixote turning into a monster, aged and deformed by reading chivalric novels.
In the third act, I envisioned a conference of specialists on Don Quixote in Barcelona in 2004, where they debate the true authorship of the work. This ties to another Kafka episode -a short piece about Sancho Panza- in which Kafka suggests that Don Quixote was actually Sancho's demon, brought to life to roam the world and live the adventures Sancho himself could not. This links to the episode of Don Quixote in Barcelona, tied to a bronze talking head, a kind of "Golem," which reveals the true author of Don Quixote. This portrayal reflects how Don Quixote had become an element in the spectacle of scholars dedicated to literature.
Earlier, I mentioned regretting having embarked on this adventure, but in truth, I am proud of how profoundly I erred. I believe that when I agreed to write the libretto for D.Q., I was not prepared to write an opera libretto. I made the same mistake as many contemporary librettists: I failed to fundamentally understand that opera is theater. Theater requires narrative attention, with a setup, conflict, and resolution -elements my libretto lacks.
When I arrived at the Liceo in Barcelona, during the final rehearsals of the opera, I felt somewhat overwhelmed. I usually write novels, a genre where the novelist acts as producer, actor, director, editor... everything. Three days before sending the manuscript to the publisher, the novelist can cut forty-eight pages or add sixty, and it's fine. Even during the proofreading stage, they can do the same. They can turn a hundred-page book into an eight-hundred-page novel or shrink an eight-hundred-page novel into a twelve-page short story -or decide not to publish it at all.
But when I arrived at the theater and saw this terrible and marvelous machine in full operation -featuring Enric Miralles' stunning set design- I felt like my world collapsed. This was especially true when I started hearing the singers, and I realized I needed to cut twenty pages from a twenty-two-page libretto. But by that point, it was impossible to stop this world that was devouring me. It was like a cartoon where a massive weight falls on a character, and they only realize it when they see their silhouette printed on the ground. I saw that silhouette, and it wasn't mine -or at least, not the one I had expected to see.
DQ. The Music
By José Luis TurinaComposer
Writing an opera is, fundamentally, writing for the voice over a text that must be spoken and understood. I needed to figure out how to handle those requirements according to my own criteria and in line with what I wanted to achieve. I also recognize that I made mistakes with that first opera, just as Justo Navarro did with his first libretto. But the experience was magnificent. All of this highlights a characteristic trait of artists: chronic dissatisfaction. If you achieve a masterpiece, something perfect, at the age of thirty, you stop writing and move on to other things -like Rossini, for example. If not, you keep trying until the day you die, and you may never achieve it. It's a bit like the carrot dangled in front of the donkey to keep it moving forward; as you evolve and discover new things, the goal you aspire to always seems a bit further out of reach. I'm on that path myself, as I am still not fully aware of having written what I truly want to write. The ideal of perfection we aspire to is unattainable; it's a mirage, a trap that art sets for the artist to keep them creating.
After Ligazón, I swore to myself that I wouldn't work again not only for opera, but not even for the voice. The great challenge for composers today is working with the voice; instrumental composition is relatively manageable, with many solutions and as many approaches as one might wish to explore. But the voice is something entirely different: it has rigid parameters of behavior and adds the challenge of the text -how it is spoken, how it is sung. Treating the voice instrumentally so that the text becomes just an excuse for the singer to utter a few syllables (which ultimately become unintelligible) didn't interest me as a premise. This is despite the many illustrious examples in the operatic literature of the twentieth century, where the voice is treated as just another instrument. This approach interested me even less for opera, which, as has often been said during this course, is theater. It is therefore subject to dramatic action that must be intelligible to the audience. I spent several years doing rather chaotic, disorganized, anarchic, and highly self-taught work, studying what interested me about the voice and then applying it to setting texts to music. In a word, I was studying the musical aspects of spoken language.
I encountered many surprises. In reality, it's a subject that has been little explored -or, if such studies exist, I am unaware of them, or they have been conducted inadequately, at least from a musician's perspective. Much of what I found failed to convince me. These studies seemed overly descriptive but failed to delve into the heart of the matter, which is logical since most existing analyses were carried out by philologists with little musical training or interest. Beyond semantics, there's also the issue of accents, rhythms, intonations, dynamics -elements that a musician can perceive much more pragmatically than a philologist and then use as a foundation for artistic work, manipulating the knowledge gained to create something artistic. When I finally felt reasonably prepared, I applied these concepts to all my vocal works from that point on. This period of preparation lasted ten years, during which I wrote absolutely nothing for the voice.
Nevertheless, the topic of opera, always from the perspective of my Ligazón experience, filled me with a great deal of respect. However, the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid made me a proposal for the reopening of its theater, the Fernando de Rojas Hall. Their wish was to present an opera, something solemn to mark the reopening of a venue with a rich tradition in Madrid. I declined the offer to compose a large-scale opera but suggested something different: a stage-musical spectacle titled La raya en el agua (September 1996). This spectacle, which Juan Ángel Vela del Campo refers to as "variety theater", is a definition I find perfect. Naturally, it's not a variety show in the style of Zaragoza's Oasis theater, but the format is based on isolated and separate tableaux, or scenes, held together by a common thread yet independent and even interchangeable. Some of these scenes later took on a life of their own, while others were reworked in different ways. The performance combined dance, music, theater, and recited poetry in a sequence of 21 scenes -the same number as in La Celestina by Fernando de Rojas, which served as a structural pretext for this work.
La raya en el agua was a great success and garnered significant attention, although it has never been staged again due to its logistical complexities. Shortly afterward, I received a call from La Fura dels Baus, instigated by Juan Ángel Vela del Campo, expressing interest in meeting me for a new project. At the time, the group was exploring stage productions applied to oratorios. They had already worked on Atlantida, The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, and The Damnation of Faust, but they wanted to take the leap into opera -not with a repertoire piece, but with a completely original work. This is what made the entire production process of this opera particularly exciting: it originated with the producers, not the authors.
Naturally, it was an offer I couldn't refuse; saying no would have been madness. After La raya en el agua, I felt quite capable of tackling the genre. The discussions began, initially with Álex Ollé and Carles Padrissa, and later with Justo Navarro. These eventually evolved into working sessions between Nerja and Madrid, often at a distance. If Navarro now says he wasn't prepared to write the libretto and that it contains twenty unnecessary pages, I absolutely disagree. As he delivered the libretto to me in stages, I grew increasingly excited about the project. I found his treatment of the text to be highly evocative, poetic, and metaphorical, which suited me perfectly. Of course, with his experience now as a librettist, Navarro likely has a very different perspective on the opera compared to mine. For him, opera is theater, while for me, it is theater set to music. Which aspect takes precedence? I believe the genre is elastic enough to stretch in any direction, as long as each of its components (for me, opera is a monumental intersection of sets: music, text, scenography, lighting, staging, etc.) observes and respects the necessary rigor of its respective conditions. In fact, when one component dominates the others, opera as a genre is at risk -just as any other genre that combines different elements would be.
There was indeed an initial hesitation, which Navarro has explained from his perspective as a novelist, and I will explain from mine as a composer. Navarro noted that as a writer, he controls -or at least has the illusion of controlling- every last detail of what he wants to put into writing. Before delivering a work to the publisher, he selects at will. But he found this wasn't the case with opera. His creative rhythm had to be subordinated to a series of other creative rhythms that didn't always align: mine, and the ideas proposed by La Fura to steer the project in the direction they envisioned. The result was a kind of synthesis of forces, a "composite motion", as it's called in physics. I experienced something similar; any composer would.
Moreover, if one takes a general look at the evolution of composition, especially over the last fifty years, it becomes clear that the composer's ambition has been to exert maximum control over all the parameters of composition -every single one. In Bach's era, these parameters were rhythm and pitch, but over time, other elements emerged that composers began to rigorously control: dynamics, timbre, and so on. The paradigm of this is what is known as total serialism, a trend that emerged in the 1960s and lasted nearly two decades. In this approach, composers believed they controlled everything, as every aspect was subject to their will in the score. Of course, this is far from true, and this discrepancy is an enormously interesting problem, as it directly impacts the aforementioned elasticity of artistic genres. However, when a composer takes on the task of writing an opera, they realize they've entered a collective production where they are just one part of the whole. By the time they understand this, it is usually too late to back out. They must then exercise humility to navigate the process gracefully. Once Justo Navarro handed me the libretto, I composed the music and delivered it to La Fura dels Baus. From that moment on, I was La Fura's musician, and Navarro was my librettist. This relationship had to be accepted, especially when working with a company so powerful, so creatively potent, and so influential.
On the other hand, the great appeal of this project was, precisely, La Fura dels Baus. Not only because of the accumulated tradition of years of daring, interdisciplinary, and often scandalous stage proposals but also because of the level of technological perfection they had achieved. Most importantly, they were a well-established company, nearly twenty years old, making a 180-degree shift in their aesthetic to embrace opera as one of their objectives. From a composer's perspective, the situation was highly attractive. Thus, I had no hesitation then, nor do I now. The final product wasn't exactly what I expected, but I am very pleased with what was achieved. A significant portion of it closely resembled what I had envisioned, and in some areas of the remaining percentage, it even improved upon my ideas. Of course, in other aspects, it didn't, which is naturally what tends to weigh on one's mind.
As I mentioned earlier, Navarro's libretto was full of suggestions that, for a composer like me, were ideal -especially given the type of artistic product I was attempting to create. It was an approach to opera without an excessive concern for the theatrical aspect. Clearly, every opera must have a theatrical dimension and must maintain a certain agility in this regard. But as I said before, as long as the genres remain recognizable -as long as certain minimums in action and representation are respected- the artistic object works. One cannot expect to see the theatrical conventions of an 18th-century opera in a 20th-century one. Personally, I believe that contemporary opera, at least the kind that interests me, should aim to provoke reflection in the listener on certain aspects of creation while still being representable. Otherwise, it would cease to be opera.
The question lies in determining how far the genre's elasticity can stretch. Earlier, I mentioned total serialism, whose approach was thought to be highly rigorous, as every aspect of its creation was predetermined by the composer and then simply executed with greater or lesser imagination. However, what initially seems like a valid aspiration -strictly governed by the composer's criteria- over time reveals numerous gaps, particularly concerning parameters that are less controllable and harder to regulate, such as intensity (always subjective) and timbre. It is precisely through this latter gap -timbre- that, at a certain point, the antithesis of total serialism emerged: spectral music. This compositional approach is simultaneously its antithesis and its counterpart. Spectral music focuses on the physical phenomenon of sound itself, highlighting timbral impurities and internal conflicts among different harmonics, which composers had previously suppressed. Spectralism reclaims these qualities as intrinsic aspects of the sound's very essence.
All of this is to say that what we often perceive as highly rigorous isn't so rigid after all -it possesses an elasticity that allows it to be stretched up to a certain point. However, once that point is exceeded, the structure breaks and transforms into something else. I believe opera operates in a similar way: it is both theater and music. As long as the music retains its specific gravity and the theatrical elements within the opera are preserved, the genre will remain valid for centuries to come. If what remains is merely theater, with music reduced to a few sparks here and there, then opera as a genre loses its purpose. Conversely, if music takes precedence to the extent that the text is disregarded or phonetically disintegrated, the result will also fail to be opera -no matter how much the production is dressed up with dazzling costumes or elaborate sets. The key lies in ensuring that each of the contributing elements retains its integrity and personality to the extent possible, without being dissolved by the others. In this sense, Don Quijote en Barcelona is safeguarded because the music -my contribution- remains intact. The music functions as it should in an opera, and, at the same time, the libretto -despite the opinion of its author- fulfills its intended purpose.
And how should it fulfill that purpose? During the process I undertook to study how suprasegmental features of spoken language (intonation, stress, etc.) are produced and how to treat them musically, I discovered that the matter was relatively straightforward. In spoken language, the sequence of stresses is what gives meaning to the chain of speech. This sequence determines the melodic contour and the rhythm between one stress and the next. This can be studied from a simplified perspective, disregarding what happens between stresses, or, as a musician hears it, by granting full importance to what happens between them. My conclusion is that what truly matters lies not in the stresses themselves but in what occurs between them, as this is what allows the stresses to be perceived as such. Here, the linearity of the melodic curve arises in the strong points; that is, it forms a kind of skeleton connecting one stress to the next (a sequence that, in spoken language, is often comprised of intervals of a second).
Another point of great interest lies in the pitch range in which the spoken discourse is delivered. This is what allows us, even if we don't understand a language, to grasp the linguistic universals that scholars identify -whether the general tone of the utterance is affirmative, interrogative, commanding, and so on. Interestingly, the great composers of history before the 20th century, when trying to mimic spoken language in their operas, often did the opposite of how spoken language actually works. Perhaps in an effort to create contrast with singing, they typically keep the voice on a single note in the middle register, much like a liturgical tenor chant, and hold it indefinitely.
Returning to the main argument, once I had acquired the necessary knowledge about all these aspects and how to manipulate them, I found that the text provided by Justo Navarro, as an operatic libretto, was truly outstanding. It was exactly what I needed at that time, as it struck the perfect balance to justify itself as theater. It offered a narrative thread, dramatic agility, and moments of reflection -all woven together with numerous linguistic games involving alliteration, phonetic repetitions, and more, which endowed the text with extraordinary literary richness.
The collaboration between us was very cordial, although we had very different rhythms, which at times led to curious situations. There came a point where I had already completed the first act and was waiting for Justo to deliver the second. The major challenge with this opera was that it had to be created under a tight deadline. Since Justo was delayed, I continued composing and gave him directions (based on the direction La Fura wanted to take) to adapt the text to my music. For Don Quixote's arias, which close the second act, we resorted to what in literature is called a monster- a kind of placeholder text. I would provide a draft with false lines, and based on their rhythm and stress patterns, Justo would write the final text. One specific request he made was not to receive meaningful text, as it might influence his work, which was quite reasonable. Instead, he preferred series of numbers. For instance, the sequence "two three two six, three fourteen sixteen, twenty-two" would become "I know who I am, and I am not who I want to be, and I know it".
The first act of D.Q. lays the groundwork for the entire opera. It takes place in the year 3000-something, when no one knows what a book is anymore. The setting is an auction house in Geneva that specializes in priceless artifacts from the past, ranging from the Sacred Heart of Jesus to the Tomb of King Arthur. The attendees, described as "opera and antique lovers", are introduced to a machine -the "temporal locator of ancient marvels"- which is programmed to retrieve objects from the past by sifting through layers of time to bring them back for auction. In this way, the book appears. Among the audience, someone asks about Don Quixote, and the machine is programmed to retrieve a copy of the novel. However, instead of bringing back a book, the machine retrieves the character himself. It captures Don Quixote at the moment he is descending into the Cave of Montesinos (Chapter XXII of the second part). Don Quixote believes he is entering the cave, but in reality, he is being abducted. He is eventually auctioned off and bought by a millionaire from Hong Kong as a gift for his daughters, who lock him inside a cage of air and time.
For La Fura, Miralles, and me, this premise was brimming with possibilities. In fact, the cage became the iconic symbol of D.Q.: a zeppelin-like structure, 17 meters long, with a central sphere where Don Quixote was trapped. This cage of air was represented by the uncovered framework of the airship, while the concept of time tied seamlessly to the formal elements of the opera (the alternation of recitatives and arias; an old-fashioned scherzo in ternary meter; a passacaglia; a grand choral passage...). The second act is far more reflective, while the third is structured as a grand divertimento. This structure aligns with the three-movement format of Classical-period sonatas.
In D.Q., there is also a synthesis of what likely motivated Cervantes to write Don Quixote in the first place: a super-parody of the chivalric novels circulating in his time. Today, I personally haven't read a single one of the titles Cervantes references, yet it doesn't matter. Don Quixote stands as a work of art, even without those contextual references. Similarly, D.Q. incorporates a triple parody: of opera as a genre (the score is filled with winks and citations -an echo of Tristan's harmony, the first chord of The Marriage of Figaro, a fragment of Parsifa- especially in the first act); of the novel itself and the pathos of its protagonist in the second act; and finally, of meta-Quixotism -all the speculation, studies, and analyses surrounding the novel- in the third act.