True Events Become History and History Becomes Art in the Met’s ‘Ainadamar’

“Oh, the dead,” the artist Lily Briscoe thinks in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. “One pitied them, one brushed them aside, one had even a little contempt for them. They are at our mercy.”

Osvaldo Golijov’s opera Ainadamar (on at the Met through November 9) follows one artist, the actress Margarita Xirgu, as she comes to terms with the death of another, the famed Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, who was assassinated by Fascists in the early months of the Spanish Civil War. Ainadamar, the place where Lorca is thought to have been executed, means the “fountain of tears.” The opera is not about Lorca’s life, as much of the promotional material suggests, but about his afterlife—how he is mourned and how he lived on, in part due to tireless work from Xirgu, who championed his works for the remainder of her life.

We meet the actress backstage, about to revive her role of Mariana Pineda in Lorca’s play of the same name for what must be the hundredth time. Pineda, who was executed a century before Lorca, is a symbol of resistance to fascist and authoritarian power. She died for her beliefs without giving up her comrades. Playing Mariana Pineda this evening sends Xirgu into an extended reverie about the war and about Lorca, a figure who has dominated her artistic and psychic landscape.

Told through imagistic visions and in a non-linear fashion, David Henry Hwang’s libretto leaves much to the imagination but has a clear moral thrust, depicting Lorca’s death in the manner of a passion play. Brazilian director and choreographer Deborah Colker gives the production a deft and beautiful visual poetry, pouring moving bodies and striking vignettes into the spaces around Hwang’s words. One particularly gorgeous moment saw white statues pull off their togas to reveal bare legs as the now-women wrap themselves in shawls against the night air. The arched back of a flamenco dancer speaks both beauty and pain. Jon Bausor’s set is stunning. A circular scrim made of thousands of strings, like the trim on the edge of a parasol, encloses the center of the stage. Projections dance on it, and dancers move through the tendrils that recall beams of light and strands of hair and water flowing from the circular basin of a fountain. The fountain is always there, a reminder of what awaits Lorca. Later, a stream of red threads descends from the sky like bloody rain or crepuscular rays of warm sun. These visual ambiguities only add to the poetic sensibility, where meanings shift in the blink of an eye or the subtle turn of a phrase.

Golijov’s musical language combines lush romantic passages, electronic segments, and environmental sounds, but this score has Flamenco in its soul. Ainadamar pulses with a visceral intensity and percussive fervor. It grooves threateningly, making audible the mounting violence and the sense of bad history repeating itself. A large female chorus comments on the action, repeating their praise of Mariana Pineda; their reminders become more jangling, more dissonant. As Lorca’s murderer, Ramón Ruiz Alonso, veteran flamenco singer Alfredo Tejada (who has sung this role in other productions of Ainadamar) cuts through the texture like a garrote; the nasal, forward sound that’s familiar in flamenco becomes downright shocking when set against the operatic technique of the other characters. Tejada’s voice is an unearthly battle cry, the screech of Death as he bears down upon Lorca. This and other startling, intelligent choices—the clop of hooves turning into a lively percussion riff to the decision to cast Lorca as a trouser-role mezzo-soprano and the chatter of voices that lurk around moments of calm—make for an absorbing, visceral sound world for much of the opera. When Golijov turns away Flamenco’s insistent rhythms, however, the score can slip into a wearying stasis; a confession scene that otherwise should have been the height of tension felt more pensive than frightening.

Conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya drove the orchestra forward with gusto whenever he could, allowing the percussion and brass to shine.  But the balance was off throughout the evening, largely a result of Golijov’s occasionally challenging vocal writing, which sets soloists in tricky ranges and then doubles down the large choral, orchestral and electronic forces around them. Unaided by score or conductor, the singers were forced by the overloud sound mixing to shout or simply to remain unheard.

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As Margarita, Angel Blue felt somewhat underutilized until the opera’s final number. Her warm, generous soprano is best when she’s allowed to soar above it all. Blue’s chest voice is powerful but less expressive; thankfully, the final trio allowed her voice to reach heroic heights. Mezzo-soprano Daniela Mack brought a buttery, vulnerable sound to Lorca but similarly strained against the orchestration. Rounding out the major characters as Nuria, one of Margarita’s students who becomes the bearer of both Lorca’s and Xirgu’s legacy, is Elena Villalón, whose silvery, lucid sound was a welcome addition.

We meet Lorca as a reflection, an image in the mirror of his actress-muse Xirgu, and the picture we get leaves much out of the frame. It is not a biography, as that would likely deal more specifically with Lorca’s homosexuality, his collaborations with other prominent artists like Dalí or his own style and works. Instead, we glimpse him in vague flashes as Margarita struggles to pull apart the man and the martyr. Lorca never comes into the picture as a full person, even if his presence (or really, his absence) haunts Margarita. Similarly, if Lorca is glimpsed darkly through Xirgu’s looking glass, then Margarita herself is relegated to always reflect and repeat Lorca and the character he creates for her. By the end of the opera, Margarita Xirgu dissolves entirely into Mariana Pineda, an apotheosis directed by the spirit of Lorca himself.

When Lorca sings of his desire to write about Mariana Pineda, he does so from an impulse to humanize her, taking her from statue, image and icon to flesh, blood and bone. He denies a political motive in favor of a personal one. Little does he know, as Xirgu herself points out, that Pineda’s fate—both execution and subsequent transfiguration from person to symbol—is also his own. But in rendering all three figures as the ultimate symbol—Christ—Ainadamar cannot resist the inevitable pull of myth-making, as real events become history, and history becomes art.

Colker ends her production with one of Lorca’s poems, spoken by Nuria, as if to address this very tension. These lines especially struck me: “My silken heart/ Is filled with light/ the lost tolling of bells/And bees and lilies.” The pleasure of hearing Lorca’s voice—the only time we access his words outside of Margarita’s memory—felt marvelously refreshing. As the dead Lorca was allowed to speak again, we were finally at the mercy of the poetry.