
Julia Simpson
In the forground a woman is clutching her torso dramatically. Two people stand behind her.
Hailey Cohen (far left, ensemble), Lifan Deng (rear, ensemble) and Kelly Guerra (María) in rehearsal for Madison Opera's María de Buenos Aires.
The warm tango rhythms of the Madison Opera’s upcoming opera, María de Buenos Aires, is a good antidote for the winter blues.
The tango opera, with Astor Piazzolla’s music and Horacio Ferrer’s libretto, premiered in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1968. This will be a Madison Opera premiere with performances on Friday, Jan. 31, at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday, Feb. 2, at 2:30 p.m. in the Overture Center’s Capitol Theater. It will be sung and spoken in Spanish with projected English translations.
The Argentinian composer Astor Piazzolla was a man of many worlds. He spoke fluent Spanish, English, French and Italian. He was influenced by classical composers, especially Stravinsky and Bach, as well as jazz musicians, Duke Ellington and Miles Davis. But his love supreme was tango music and in the opera, that is what draws María to Buenos Aires.
In Horacio Ferrer’s libretto, El Duende (an otherworldly being, spoken by Kirstin Chávez) tells the story of María who moves from the slums to the city of Buenos Aires and falls in love with its tango rhythms. To make a living, she becomes a sex worker, encounters violence, and dies at the hands of underworld thugs. She returns as a shadow who roams the city and becomes impregnated by the word of El Duende. She gives birth to a girl child also named María.
Time in the opera is non-linear and moves freely between past and future. The veil between life and death is also thin.
Mezzo-soprano Kelly Guerra, who sings the María character, says the role is heady and complex, all while being earthy and instinctual. “As a native Spanish speaker, it is a delicious challenge to tackle the surrealist poetry of Horacio Ferrer,” she says. “I love María’s hunger for beauty and magic, even though she had a rough upbringing. ” To Guerra, the role also strikes a personal note. “María is a survivor,” she says. “I see María in so many of the women in my life and I dedicate my performance to them.”
Piazzolla’s music attracts Guerra to the opera first and foremost. “The first time I heard María’s theme, ‘Yo soy María’ (I am María), I couldn’t get the tune out of my head,” says Guerra. “The score is extremely beautiful and causes nostalgia for a culture that few have actually experienced.”
Despite his legendary success as a tango music composer, Piazzolla might instead have become a classical music composer if it hadn’t been for the advice of the famous French composer, conductor and teacher, Nadia Boulanger, with whom Piazzolla studied in Paris in 1954.
In a livestream presentation about the opera on Jan. 9, Madison Opera’s general director Kathryn Smith recounted Piazzolla’s meeting with Boulanger.
“He played a few of his classical compositions for her and after he finished, Boulanger said, ‘I hear Ravel, Bartok and Hindemith, but I have no idea who Astor Piazzolla is.’”
Piazzolla reluctantly told her that he had written some tangos and she asked him to play them for her. After hearing them, she said, ‘This is Astor Piazzolla. Don’t ever leave [the tango].’”
Piazzolla and Ferrer, who was a broadcaster and tango lyricist as well as a poet, met in 1955 after the composer returned to Buenos Aires from Paris. There were similarities between the two. Both played the bandoneon, an accordion-type instrument essential to the tango sound, and they were also interested in taking tango music to another level. Piazzolla eventually combined classical music and jazz with tango to create a new genre called nuevo tango which audiences will hear in María de Buenos Aires.
Despite its complexity, the opera is succinct and lasts only about 90 minutes, shorter by about an hour than some other operas that feature tragic heroines, like Mimi in La Bohème or Violetta in La Traviata.
The cast of characters represents the diverse milieu of Buenos Aires at the time. There is the poet/psychoanalyst El Payador (sung by baritone Laureano Quant). There are also pasta makers, construction workers and others.
The production will include members of Kanopy Dance with choreography by the company’s co-artistic director, Lisa Thurrell. Kamna Gupta will conduct members of the Madison Symphony Orchestra in her Madison Opera debut. The design team consists of Katy Fetrow (set), Karen Brown-Larimore (costumes), and Tláloc López-Watermann (lighting). Frances Rabalais returns to the Madison Opera as stage director.
In “Yo soy María,” Kelly Guerra will sing from Ferrer’s libretto that she is "María tango” and that she is also “her city.” María is not only a character in the work, but also a metaphor for Buenos Aires and the tango itself.
“The opera belongs to the city of Buenos Aires and to tango culture,” says Guerra. “But every audience member is invited to come for the ride.”