Mercurial but Resilient, Argentine Opera Perks Up
It took three architects to complete the acoustically superb and richly detailed Teatro Colon here -- one died early in the construction, another was murdered by his butler, who was involved with his wife -- before the scheduled inaugural performance of 'Otello' in 1908. Then, taking Verdian melodrama to another level, Antonio Paoli, the great Puerto Rican tenor who was to sing Otello, came down with the flu, forcing in a last-minute slapdash 'Aida.'
This was the start to a tumultuous century of Argentine opera, plagued by long periods of mismanagement and Peronist labor unrest but also blessed, sometimes simultaneously, with the finest operatic productions in Latin America.
This year, as always, the Colon has been operatic offstage as well as on. The theater's workers and performers have repeatedly blocked the Avenida de Mayo by singing and dancing in front of City Hall to protest wages and other labor conditions. 'La Boheme' and several other otherwise workmanlike productions were faulted by critics for the casting of aging or overweight stars as young lovers. And the season's opening performance, 'La Traviata' with the soprano June Anderson, was marred by a heat spell that overwhelmed the air-conditioning system and left the audience's tuxedos and the divas' costumes drenched.
But despite that, with the current opera season at the Colon three-quarters complete, critics are calling this a year of relative stability and rising artistic merit. Jose Cura's return to Argentina to perform 'Otello' was the talk of Buenos Aires, and the career of an exciting young Argentine star tenor, Dario Volonte, was propelled with his stirring performance in the patriotic Argentine opera 'Aurora.'
Critics raved about the productions of Debussy's 'Pelleas et Melisande,' Mozart's 'Cosi Fan Tutte' and Arrigo Boito's 'Mefistofele,' which produced perhaps the season's most entertaining moment when its star, Samuel Ramey, climbed to the presidential box to sip Champagne with devilish delight. With scandals enveloping President Carlos Saul Menem in his last months in office, the audience took the hint and laughed uproariously.
The staging in September of 'Die Tote Stadt,' the Latin American premiere of that 1920 Erich Wolfgang Korngold work, has been a surprise hit that several Argentine critics say will help further polish this Czech-born composer's reputation as more than a writer of movie scores, albeit one who won Oscars for 'The Adventures of Robin Hood' and 'Anthony Adverse.'
The season is expected to end strongly with the reliable crowd pleasers 'Salome' and 'Lucia di Lammermoor,' unless mounting labor threats interrupt rehearsal schedules.
'We've stabilized a bit,' said Federico Monjeau, opera critic of the Buenos Aires newspaper Clarin. 'But the unions still run the show.'
It may be too early to declare a renaissance for Argentine opera, but there are reasons to cheer, not the least being the art form's increasing popularity, particularly among the young.
Several provincial opera houses are reopening or expanding their seasons. The Teatro Argentino in La Plata, traditionally Argentina's second most important opera house until it was virtually destroyed by fire in 1977, is scheduled to reopen in October. A new opera company has been founded in Rosario, and its inaugural production of 'Tosca' in August was a critical success.
Opera broadcasts are proliferating on the radio, including two new weekly shows. Their host is Victor Hugo Morales, Argentina's most prominent soccer announcer, who is helping to make opera fashionable among a younger audience. The radio shows have helped create new Argentine stars like Patricia Gutierrez, a young soprano in the Colon chorus whose sudden popularity sold out the 1,200-seat auditorium in Mar del Plata in September.
A new opera company, Juventus Lirica, was started with help from the Colon this year as a home for young singers, and it has already won critical acclaim, especially for a delightful production of 'The Barber of Seville.' Meanwhile opera recitals in San Telmo and other bohemian neighborhoods in and around Buenos Aires have become virtually nightly affairs. In July 47 young Argentine singers staged an opera marathon that lasted more than six hours and packed a theater in a lower-middle-class neighborhood just outside Buenos Aires until 1 A.M.
'Despite the bad economic situation, opera and operetta activity seems to growing constantly,' said Alfredo Cernadas Quesada, manager of classical music labels at Warner Music Argentina. 'Cities that haven't had opera for decades are having opera again.'
Opera has been deeply entwined in the culture of Argentina for more than a century, following several waves of Italian immigration. There were five opera theaters in Buenos Aires alone in 1900. Caruso and all the great European stars performed in Argentina regularly in the early decades of the century, attracted by the acoustics of the Colon and the huge contracts the theater then offered.
Argentine performances of opera and classical music in general reached their pinnacle in the 1930's and 40's, when the German conductors Fritz Busch and Erich Kleiber fled the Nazis and took refuge with many other European artists in Argentina.
But over the next 40 years, with the exception of a decade of artistic flourish in the 60's, economic, political and labor turmoil took its toll.
The comeback for Argentine opera started in 1989, when Sergio Renan was appointed general manager and artistic director of the Colon. Mr. Renan, a respected film director with international contacts, attracted a host of stars, including Placido Domingo, back to Argentine opera and staged lavish productions.
But unable to control the unions, Mr. Renan was pushed out in 1996. The current management -- the jobs of general manager and artistic director have been separated -- is considered less creative by most critics, but performances of the last two seasons have generally been viewed as more even in quality.
'The condition of Argentine opera isn't bad,' said Horacio Sanguinetti, author of a soon-to-be published book on the history of Argentine opera. 'It's been worse, and it's getting better.'
ARTS ABROAD