“An Enemy of the People” Becomes a Spanish Opera
Perhaps Rigola should have been more willful in his handling of the text, since his libretto unfolds more like a selection of highlights from the play than like a freestanding adaptation. Ibsen’s five acts are compressed into two, with a total running time of less than ninety minutes. As a result, the collapse of Stockmann’s crusade feels rushed—especially in the pivotal town-meeting scene, in which his brother, the mayor, outmaneuvers him and fellow-citizens shout him down. We don’t get to see Stockmann losing composure by degrees; instead, he lurches almost at once into his incendiary speech condemning the stupidity of the majority. The final scenes, in which Stockmann resolves to reëducate the people on his own, unfold in even more precipitate, sketchy fashion.
All the same, “Enemigo” made for a gripping evening, largely on the strength of Coll’s stem-winder of a score. The opera begins with a kinetic, frantic prelude in the form of a paso doble, the quick march often heard at bullfights. Here, though, the meter is mainly a lopsided 7/8, the harmony a mangled G major. Such folkloric touches occur at intervals throughout the work, signalling the popular energies that will consume Stockmann. The doctor himself is characterized sometimes by boisterously chattering lines, sometimes by semi-Wagnerian bombast; at the end, his music turns elegiac, implicitly undercutting his dreams of beginning anew. The crowd scenes, however abbreviated, unleash explosive energy. Pummelling orchestral passages hint at the neutral rage of nature itself.
The opening-night cast, while capable and engaged, struggled at times to make itself heard above Coll’s potent orchestration. José Antonio López, as Stockmann, showed a handsome, limber baritone, yet he had trouble breaking through the sonic melee. The American soprano Brenda Rae, as Stockmann’s supportive daughter, Petra, managed to hold her own, combining brilliant high notes with an expressive chest-voice. The composer conducted, and, even if he overindulged his players, he led with a clear, confident beat. Not surprisingly, he received the evening’s loudest ovation. It wasn’t just a home-town audience embracing a native son; it was a cosmopolitan public saluting a significant new creative force in the opera world.
In Madrid, the Teatro Real, Spain’s flagship opera house since 1850, was offering an all-Bartók evening: the one-act ballet “The Miraculous Mandarin” and the one-act opera “Bluebeard’s Castle,” with the first movement of the Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta as a weighty intermezzo. The Teatro Real has vigorously supported contemporary opera in recent decades, mounting twenty world premières since 1997. (The company co-produced Coll’s “Enemigo” and will present it in February.) Since 2013, the Teatro Real has been led by the Catalan impresario Joan Matabosch, who has a flair for balancing progressive ideas against conservative tastes while placating political overseers.
The Bartók production was the work of the veteran German director Christof Loy, who has lately moved to Madrid and founded a company dedicated to reviving zarzuelas. Loy’s staging, which was first seen in Basel in 2022, has no hint of local color: the sets, by Márton Ágh, evoke a nondescript urban wasteland, with a beat-up telephone booth on one side, a hulking warehouselike structure on the other, and junk strewn about. That milieu is an organic match for “Mandarin,” in which desperadoes use a girl to entrap passersby until the indestructible title character complicates their scheme. It’s more of a stretch for “Bluebeard,” in which Judith, the newest bride of a sinister nobleman, discovers the fate of her predecessors. Still, Loy’s gritty minimalism, enlivened with bleak, Beckettian humor, established a convincing continuity for the evening.
Loy choreographed “Mandarin” himself, in a free, athletic style that often suggested a sexualized boxing match. Carla Pérez Mora played the girl with self-possessed ferocity; Gorka Culebras made the mandarin a soulfully suffering martyr. In “Bluebeard,” the dominant presence was the perennially riveting German soprano Evelyn Herlitzius, who sang Judith with cutting force and fleshed out her portrayal with pinpoint actorly gestures. Not since Anja Silja have I seen a singer embody the workings of fate simply by folding her hands resignedly in her lap. Christof Fischesser, as Bluebeard, could not match Herlitzius’s intensity, but his polished, deep-set bass provided a strong musical anchor. Gustavo Gimeno, in the pit, showed an instinctive command of Bartók’s rhythms and colors. Those pioneering Florentines would have found the whole thing incomprehensible, yet it came close to fulfilling their theatrical ideal—a seamless fusion of text, music, image, and feeling. ♦
