Ahead of the Scottish premiere and first fully-staged UK production of Ainadamar in Glasgow and Edinburgh this November we caught up with composer Osvaldo Golijov. The first thing he says on a transatlantic Zoom call is how excited he is to come to Scotland this autumn. It's a mutual excitement: staging the Scottish premiere of Osvaldo's 2003 opera Ainadamar, about Federico Garcia Lorca as told by his friend Margartita Xirgu, is a thrilling project for the Company.
Ainadamar might seem different to the older operas in Scottish Opera’s 2022/23 season, but Osvaldo thinks its heart is the same. ‘I wanted people to walk out whistling a tune or two from the opera. I really wanted to create memorable arias.’ That said, there will be some unusual sound effects alongside the orchestra. ‘I use a horse gallop on cobblestone, the bullet, water, and cante jondo – what people call flamenco but it’s actually deep song from Andalusia sung by the Roma people. It’s completely not operatic but very operatic.’ Some of these sounds start as literal representations before morphing into a more abstract, expressive vein. ‘The gunshot becomes a dance, almost like a flamenco dance,’ Osvaldo says. With internationally renowned choreographer and director Deborah Colker at the helm of this production, Scottish Opera audiences can expect striking movement to accompany the music. Lastly, Osvaldo says, water had to be used – the Fuente Grande, known also Aynadamar or The Fountain of Tears (pictured on the opposite page), is central to this history. ‘In the middle ages, the Arab poets of Andalusia used to write poems to this fountain,’ he explains. ‘It was a place of love, and then eight centuries later the greatest poet Spain ever created was killed there. Lorca was one of the first victims in the Spanish Civil War.’
Osvaldo’s affinity for Lorca goes to childhood. ‘When I was growing up in Argentina everyone knew some Lorca poems by heart. He’s so alive. He doesn’t get old, he doesn’t age. There is something that transcends his time – not only in his art but in his persona. Everything he did was from love and with absolute freedom.’ Is there a responsibility when portraying historical figures? Not a strict one, Osvaldo says. ‘It’s a responsibility of being open and being true. I try to never lose sight of [Lorca and Xirgu’s] humanity and not make them symbols. It’s a problem when things become symbols.’ Lorca himself addresses this in his play Mariana Pineda, about a 19th century woman who was executed after refusing to betray her revolutionary lover. Her statue stands in Granada, and Xirgu’s performance of Lorca’s play forms the opera’s framing story. ‘Lorca’s aim when he wrote Mariana Pineda was to make her a person in love, not a statue. So what I did with Lorca is what he did with Mariana Pineda. I think Che Guevara wanted to be a statue, and unfortunately he ended up on t-shirts! But this opera and Lorca’s play go back to that person who was heroic from love, not from carrying a flag.’
Photo Credit Yoni Golijov
Interpretation opens new possibilities; in Ainadamar, Lorca is sung by a woman. Osvaldo was initially not going to include Lorca as a character, but mezzo-soprano Kelly O’Connor changed his mind before the premiere. ‘She had this extraordinarily dusky androgynous voice, and then I looked at her picture and she has the same eyebrows as Lorca’ says Osvaldo, ‘I didn’t do it with an ideological purpose.’ Now, Samantha Hankey plays Lorca for Scottish Opera. Despite the happily accidental nature of this choice, cross-gender casting allows its own freedoms. ‘In [Lorca’s] aria to the statue of Mariana Pineda, I wanted the singer to start super low, and then she starts going higher and higher. It questions what is male, what is female.’
Ainadamar has been compared to a passion play, but Osvaldo sees a distinctly Spanish twist. ‘I think Lorca is like a tree that comes from the soil of Spain, and that same soil eventually swallows it. Spain has such a dichotomy – they have this revolutionary spirit of freedom, of Lorca, Dali, Buñuel and the cante jondo. At the same time Spain has this repression that is still in place today up to a point. Something brilliant can emerge from that conflict, but can also be killed.’
Death is a constant in Lorca’s work, but the juxtaposition with an active, extraordinarily sensitive choice to live life fully is where his legacy will always resonate. ‘Lorca is a call to be alive, even if death is around the corner. He is all life with extraordinary sensitivity, always wide awake,’ Osvaldo says. ‘And cante jondo is mostly about the presence of death. Lorca said “a dead man in Spain is more alive than a dead man anywhere else in the world” – it’s not like in other cultures where the worlds of the living and of the dead are separate.’ These themes are baked into the opera. ‘Margarita is about to die – the opera happens in just one minute but she relives everything. Lorca is more alive than anybody actually alive around her. When I was a child my great grandmother was very old. She had lost three children. At some point in our conversations, I realised that those children of whom she was talking were more alive than I was.’
In opera terms, Ainadamar is young. Is there a temptation to keep shaping it? ‘I think that the key for any creator is forget,’ Osvaldo counters. ‘Remember things you have not put into music before but forget what you already did, and I’m pretty good at that,’ he adds with a laugh. ‘Ainadamar is almost 20 years old. It’s almost like somebody who was very close to me wrote it. There is a time just after you write when you want to make improvements. But at some point the piece becomes itself. That doesn’t mean it is perfect. Some pieces will limp, or have some other oddity, but they are themselves. I say “I love you how you are, good luck to you, I hope you have a long life, and bye!”’
Tickets for Ainadamar are on sale now here!