As the Metropolitan Opera reveals, via the New York Times, that new operas are on the way from Osvaldo Golijov and Thomas Adès, one can reflect on both. If English composer Adès has been sparing with his vocal works, few recent composers have had to bear the weight of Potential (with a capital P) as heavily as has Argentinian Osvaldo Golijov.
He burst into music fans' view with a sensational contribution to the Bach 2000 project in Stuttgart, La Pasión según San Marcos. It remains an amazing piece of work and set the stage for several more pieces that burst with ideas and are suffused in Golijov's many influences--musical theater, klezmer, Arabic music, film soundtracks.
And the Lorca-themed kind-of opera Ainadamar and its successor Ayre swirled around Golijov's muse, soprano Dawn Upshaw. Then, Azul in 2006 was premièred by Yo-Yo Ma in Boston.
And yet, fertile as all of these works are, there was an expectation that The Big One (note, capitals again) was yet to come. But the last few years have been rather plagued for Golijov by deadlines that came and went, and a much-publicized plagiarism accusation around the work Sidereus (Golijov contended that the other composer, Michael Ward-Bergeman, knew all about his colleague using some of his music as source material and that this kind of reinvention was sometimes his process).
So much is riding on this Met show. It is scheduled for the 2018-19 season and will be based on Euripides's Iphigenia in Aulis. One thing is for sure--an opera is an opportunity to show on the grandest possible scale the state of a composer's art. Time for Golijov to be Golijov (to paraphrase TV's The West Wing).
Thomas Adès knows well the scale of an opera. He's done it, twice, to great acclaim and finds the whole thing so all-consuming, he doesn't do it that often. Which is a shame as Powder Her Face and The Tempest, both so different from each other, are marvellous theatrical creations (Tempest to my mind is the finest new opera of the last decade).
But here we go again, somehow he has been tempted back to the opera house, and this time it will be a long-nurtured plan to compose an opera around Luis Buñuel's Exterminating Angel. That will be a co-production with the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden and the Salzburg Festival and will hit the Met in 2017-18.
"For opera to be significant as an art form, it's absolutely essential that we do present new work, and new works for our audiences," Met general manager Peter Gelb told Michael Cooper of the New York Times. He's right, of course. And when those new operas are so eagerly anticipated as this pair will be, it becomes something more than something a company has to do, it becomes the thing that can define everyone involved. Not least the composers.
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