The 2010-11 Los Angeles Opera season is officially underway. Most people think the opera season begins with the opening night of the first opera. Nope. True opera die hards know the season really begins the weekend before, when the Opera League of Los Angeles puts on their first seminar on the fifth (and top) floor of our fair sprawling city's opera house, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. As I've said in past posts, the volunteer-run Opera League of Los Angeles, which most people just call the League, is essentially the fan club for the LA Opera company.
This afternoon's seminar covered Il Postino (The Postman), the first opera of the season, opening this Saturday. If you're not big on opera, but the title still looks familiar, that's because it's the name of a popular Italian movie from the nineties. The plot's pretty simple. The main character is this young guy named Mario. When we first meet him, he's helping Dad with the fishing business, which you glean is a business that's been in the family for quite some time, partly because they don't live on the Italian mainland but on the island of Salina off the southern coast of Italy, just north of Sicily. Like most islands, fishing is one of Salina's dominant industries. The only problem is that Mario hates fishing. Desperate for a change of pace, he convinces the village's local postmaster to give him some work. The timing couldn't be better. The postmaster has a brand new route. The catch is, the route includes all of one person. Not just any person, but the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, who recently relocated to Salina because his homeland has declared him an outlaw for being a Communist. The film starts with a newsreel showing Pablo arriving at the island and getting mobbed by throngs of adoring fans.
Mario's innocent in every way. He doesn't really get what a big deal it is to chat with Pablo every day. He didn't go to school very long before Dad wanted him to help out with the fishing, hence Mario's not very well read. Not to worry. Pablo can help out with that, and he can help Mario land Beatrice, the waitress at the local cafe. Pablo takes Mario under his literary wing and teaches him about the magic of words, the magic of poetry and metaphors, all that stuff. As you no doubt can guess, Mario eventually gets over his shyness so he can use said magic to win Beatrice's heart. This being a European film and not an American Hollywood studio production, Il Postino ends on sort of a downer note. When Pablo comes back to Salina years later to say hey to his pal Mario, he finds only Beatrice and her son by Mario, whom they named Pablo in the poet's honor. Mario himself, however, is dead. He was killed by police at a Communist rally before Pablito was born. What makes Mario's passing all the more tragic is that he didn't even go to the rally to protest. He'd written a poem and just wanted to give a reading. Then the cops showed up, people panicked, the cops got violent, you know the rest. But wait, you want to hear something even sadder? The film's leading man, Massimo Troisi, who played Mario as well as co-wrote the screenplay, died of a heart attack right after the film wrapped. He had some heart condition and was due to have surgery. But Massimo wanted to finish principal photography first so the rest of the cast and crew wouldn't have to sit around and twiddle their thumbs while he convalesced. Horrible, huh?
The film's based on a 1983 novel called Ardiente Paciencia (Burning Patience) by a guy named Antonio Skármeta, who was born in Chile to Croatian immigrant parents. The huge difference between the novel and the film is the former stays in Chile and features Pablo much older, circa 1970, not long before his death. In adapting it for the screen, director Michael Radford and company moved it to Italy twenty years earlier, inspired by a real-life visit Pablo made to the island of Capri in the early fifties.
The two speakers today were Daniel Catán and Susana Hernández Araico. Daniel's the guy who composed Il Postino, which is awesome. Like most opera companies, most of the operas LA Opera stages are the classics by long-dead composers, so to put on an opera and have the composer show up to talk about it is a real treat. A little background on Daniel. Originally from Mexico, he has no Spanish accent at all, having left home to attend school in the UK and US. First he went to the University of Sussex to get a degree in philosophy before going to the University of Southampton. He went across the pond to my home state of New Jersey to get his PhD from Princeton. Only after all of that did he return to his homeland to take the job of music administrator at the Palace of Fine Arts. He wrote essays about music while falling in love with opera. He knew Il Postino would make a great opera the first time he saw the film, but the rights were impossible to obtain due to all the screenwriters who'd contributed. In hindsight, that turned out to be a good thing. Today he said that, at the time, he wasn't ready to write a character like Pablo Neruda. So Daniel's first full-length opera was La Hija de Rappacini (Rappaccini's Daughter), which came out in 1994 when he was forty-five. Then he went to Houston Grand Opera for 1996's Florencia en el Amazonas, for which he collaborated with none other than Gabriel García Márquez as well as Márquez’s protégée, Marcela Fuentes-Berain. The opera was based on Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera. It was the first ever Spanish opera commissioned by a major American opera company. LA Opera staged it in 1997. It had its European premier in Heidelberg in 2006. Florencia en el Amazonas was the beginning of a great relationship between Daniel and Houston Grand Opera. He stayed there and eventually produced a piece to coincide with their 50th anniversary season (2004-05), Salsipuedes: A Tale of Love, War, and Anchovies. It premiered there toward the start of the season in the fall of '04 and had its European premiere at Hagen, Germany in 2008. Like Mel Brooks' The Producers, it's a comedy about the Nazis. The title of the piece refers to the fictional Caribbean island where the story takes place in 1943. One opera critic called it a marriage of The Producers and Cosi Fan Tutte. Like the latter, it involves two sets of lovers who have trust issues. Meantime, you've got the island government's lone ship sent out to deal with Nazi submarines, and a corrupt island leader who's trying to make millions by striking a trade deal with the Nazis to sell them on the island's most precious export: anchovies. Houston Grand Opera had a lot of fun with the opera when it premiered. The ushers wore floral shirts and shorts and flip flops. The lobby bars served mojitos while images of palm trees were projected onto the walls. Il Postino is Daniel's first opera since Salsipuedes. Its world premiere will be here next week, and after this, it'll move on to Vienna and Paris. Daniel, meanwhile, will stay here. He's now settled in the Los Angeles area and teaches music at the College of the Canyons in Santa Clarita.
Susana Hernández Araico is a professor of Spanish and Latin American Literature in Cal Poly Pomona's department of English and Foreign Languages. This was super. The vast majority of the Opera League seminars feature the same rotating cast of academic characters, who are all wicked smart and excellent at speaking and presenting. Sometimes, though, it's nice to have variety, right? So props to the League for getting the composer as well as someone like Susana who has very specialized knowledge germane to the opera's backstory.
Before they spoke, Allan Edmiston came out and gave his usual welcome and thank-you spiel. If you've read even one of my League posts, you'll know that Allan is everyone's favorite heart surgeon and League seminar facilitator. His forte is Wagner. He is, or at least used to be, one of the top dawgs in the Wagner Society's LA branch. Today he gave a special shout-out to Ed and Alicia Clark. I'm not sure who they are, but going by what Allan said, Ed and Alicia's philanthropy is the only reason our production of Il Postino is possible. And of course Allan gave props to all us League members, especially the volunteers who keep the ship afloat.
Following Allan was League President Judy Lieb, a sprightly woman who possesses that special brand of contagious cheer. First, she plugged the upcoming Opera Volunteer Conference, an annual event put on by Opera Volunteers International, a group of people whose mandate is probably what you're thinking. Did you think opera could get this involved? That you'd have enough passionate opera goers to justify creating something like Opera Volunteers International? Go to just one opera and you won't be surprised anymore. After plugging the conference, Judy reminded us of what is probably the best and easiest way for folks to help out LA Opera: Do your grocery shopping at Ralphs. For you non-Angelinos, Ralphs is a local chain of grocery stores. I've got one about a block from me. They're everywhere in LA. In the past year or so, the League became part of the Ralphs Community Service program. If you have a Ralphs Club card, you can access your account on ralphs.com and designate LA Opera as the program you'd like to support. After that, whenever you buy stuff at Ralphs, making sure they scan your Club card of course, a portion of your tab goes to LA Opera. Judy also thanked Ed and Alicia Clark as well as the volunteers, including and especially Allan Edmiston and Anne Russell Sullivan. Anne serves as the social chair on the League’s executive committee. Judy extended her final thanks to the company that donated the piano used later in the seminar for some Il Postino excerpts.
And with that, the esteemed professor Susana Hernández Araico from Cal Poly Pomona and composer Daniel Catán came up to the stage and took their seats. Susana spoke first. You might think Ed and Alicia Clark had gotten enough gratitude already, but nope. Among the first words out of Susana’s mouth was another thanks to the Clarks, not only for Il Postino, but for Hispanics for LA Opera, a League offshoot specifically for LA's Hispanic opera fans. Check out hispanicsforlaopera.org when you get a chance.
Susana said she was thrilled to be here today because she loves to promote Hispanics in opera and literature. She's also fascinated with how stories evolve, and Il Postino has evolved quite a bit since that original novel was written. She said that almost everyone she meets only associates Il Postino with the mid nineties Italian film. They have no idea it comes from a Chilean novel written in the early eighties.
Susana pointed out that this seminar and the production of Il Postino are well timed with other anniversaries. Yesterday, September 11, besides the obvious anniversary you're thinking of, was also the anniversary of Chile's coup d'état. It was on September 11, 1973, that the socialist government of Salvador Allende was overthrown, with Salvador himself committing suicide. This was terrible news to Pablo Neruda. He'd already lived in exile once before, back in the forties and fifties because Salvador's predecessor didn't like him. When the socialists took over, they wanted Pablo to be president, but he deferred to Salvador. And then in the early seventies, Salvador literally came under fire from the military, precipitating a chain of events culminating with his death and Augusto Pinochet taking over with a military dictatorship. Things were supposed to improve under Pinochet, but of course they didn't. Pablo knew what was coming. Pinochet was a monster whose reign of terror lasted from 1973-90.
When I lived with my mom in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, we had a neighbor from Chile. He was a smart guy, intellectual type, exactly the kind of person evil dictators hate. I was in junior high at the time so of course I had no idea about Pinochet or international politics in general. My world was Nintendo and Keebler Elf cookies. What's interesting is that, while he was from Chile, his two kids, one of whom was close to my age, were from Brazil. What does that mean? I never did get the backstory, but we can put two and two together with help from hindsight. He probably didn't have the money to go straight from Chile to North Carolina, but he could get to Brazil. Not ideal, but at least he'd be out from under Pinochet's shadow. Is that where he met his wife? Or did they leave Chile together and then have Matthias and Diego in Brazil? Matthias was closer to my age, around ten or eleven or so. I was twelve.
Matthias and Diego. I'll never forget them. We had some awesome times playing basketball on that blacktop and playing all manner of games at the apartment complex swimming pool. I made them teach me some Portuguese, like how to count to ten, the stuff you usually want to know right away in a new language. To think of us kids in that place, a world away from Pinochet's Chile, makes me wonder what Matthias and Diego's Chilean father must've thought. I can just see him watching us playing while wondering what life would've been like had he stayed in his homeland.
Unfortunately the story has an ambiguous ending. When summer break arrived, I went up to Jersey to visit my father. When I came back in August, they'd gone back to Brazil. My mom and I ran into the father in the parking lot outside our building. He'd stayed behind to tie up loose ends and whatnot. I remember asking him if Matthias and Diego would ever come back, and he didn't say. Or maybe couldn't say, or perhaps didn't want to say. It was a very vague answer.
Susana pointed out another two anniversaries coming up. September 22 is the date in 1994 when Il Postino came out, and September 23 is the date in 1973, just twelve days after Chile's coup, when Pablo Neruda passed away at the age of sixty-nine. He died at a clinic in Santiago, back in the heart of his homeland. He'd been ailing with prostate cancer, but heart failure was listed as the official cause of death. In perhaps the first sign that things would be no better at all under the new regime, Pinochet forbade any large gatherings or processions in Pablo's honor. You think anyone listened? Hell no. Literally thousands of people crowded the streets to pay their respects to one of their country's greatest writers. Pablo's funeral, no doubt to Pinochet's disgust, was the big public event of the year.
Susana said she was at LA's central library downtown, just a few blocks from the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, when Antonio Skármeta was there and gave a talk about Ardiente Paciencia. In addition to writing the novel, he adapted it into a play as well as a film, all during the eighties. As for the 1994 film version we all know and love, that had a lot of people contributing to the screenplay, but Antonio wasn't one of them. Anyway, Susana said the film he wrote was filmed in Portugal, and the play was originally staged in Berlin.
She was quite right in assuming most of us in the audience knew very little about Antonio's original novel (or play or movie). So it was news to most of us that the novel's setting wasn't fifties Italy but late sixties and early seventies Chile. Pablo first fled Chile in the late forties when he was a senator in Chile's communist government and a very vocal critic of the opposition that soon took over and threatened to arrest him. He got the heck out of there and was removed from the senate in absentia. He traveled all over the place, to other parts of Chile, Argentina, Mexico and, yes, the Italian island of Capri. But then, as I mentioned above, more drama started happening in the early seventies. Susana told us the novel takes place mainly in 1969 with Pablo living in exile in the Chilean resort town of Isla Negra. In reality, he wasn't exiled at this time, but he did have a house in Isla Negra, which today is one of Chile's three Pablo Neruda museums. The novel mixes fact and fiction in other ways as well.
Susana said she really likes the island setting of Il Postino. She's the commodore of a sailing club, which is kind of amazing. I don't think I've ever met a commodore. At any rate, she said the point of this preface was to make us appreciate the creativity that's been applied to the personal events in the life of Pablo Neruda, and how that blend of fact and fiction helps us address grand themes while keeping the scale small and personal.
And with that, she dove into her lecture on Il Postino in the context of its geographical and cultural milieu. Ardiente Paciencia and Il Postino, Susana said, are "twin texts" that complement each other. First, you've got the novel. It's set in 1969 Chile. Susana said that people familiar with that time and place know right away about the upcoming presidential election. It was the election that could've made Pablo Neruda the president. People wanted him to run, enough people to suggest he had a real shot at winning, but instead he deferred to his pal Salvador Allende. So that's the novel's setup. With Il Postino, we're going back twenty years to the early fifties and an island off the coast of Italy. While Pablo did spend a year living in a friend's villa on Capri, off the west coast of Italy in the Tyrrhenian Sea, Il Postino is set on the island of Salina, one of the Aeolean Islands, still in the Tyrrhenian Sea but way down south by Sicily. Susana pointed out that the novel's characters are literate. Rosa, the mother of Mario's love interest Beatriz, reads Pablo's poems to her daughter, for example. In Il Postino, meanwhile, most folks in Mario's village can't read.
Susana said that some people have wondered about Pablo's politics, how he could remain a Communist after folks like Stalin and Mao came along. First, she pointed out that Pablo didn't even subscribe to Communism until the late forties, when he was in his mid forties or so. During the time between the film's early fifties and the novel's late sixties, Pablo rescinded support of Stalin and Mao. In 1956, three years after Stalin's death, his successor Nikita Khrushchev gave his so-called secret speeches, not because the speeches themselves were secret, but because the purpose of them was to spill the dirty, bloody secrets of Stalin's rule, how Papa Joe systematically and methodically starved, purged, and wiped out over thirty million of his own people. Mao racked up a similar death toll with his Cultural Revolution, but that didn't come until the seventies, after Pablo died. I suspect Pablo's disowning Mao came from the fact that Mao was pretty much installed as China's dictator by Stalin, so from Pablo's point of view, he was already guilty by association.
Susana also talked about how both the novel and the movie show the characters interacting with the arts, Pablo's poetry being the most obvious example. Another example would be the love of film. In the novel, Mario is a huge movie buff. His smile is described as a Burt Lancaster smile, which helps convince the postmaster to give him a job. We never actually see Mario go to the movies in the novel. It's only ever mentioned anecdotally. In the movie, Mario's love of film is, appropriately, established visually, and right away. The very first scene sees him at the village's local theater watching the newsreel. The theater's packed, and the audience talks at the screen like they do in Cinema Paradiso. We see the news footage of Pablo arriving at Salina and being greeted by the masses. As the camera follows him, someone in the audience spots their house in the background and yells it out to the rest of the theater. You can tell these people love being there and that they feed on the camaraderie and the feeling of community you get at the cinemas.
Susana delved a bit into art versus reality. She talked about "Naked," one of Pablo's more famous poems. In the movie, Mario uses it to woo Beatrice. He sends it to her in the mail, and she reads it aloud in the cafe with her mom standing nearby. I forget the exact words, but it's a sexy poem. Beatrice's mom takes the poem literally. Huge mistake with poems, especially poems by Pablo, a master at metaphor. Mom considers "Naked" porn and becomes horrified that Beatrice would have anything to do with that perv Mario. Susana said that Beatrice's mom's "naive identification of poetry" has to do with the film, and more importantly the film medium, being the reality half of the art versus reality equation, the art half of course being Pablo. A narrative feature film doesn't have much room for metaphors. What happens on screen is what you get. And that's the relationship of Beatrice's mom to the poem. What she hears her daughter read (she herself can't read, like most of the villagers) is, from her point of view, all she gets. So it's kind of a Russian doll type scenario. Our relationship to the narrative film medium is being reflected back at us by Beatrice's mom's relationship to the poem.
An elderly guy in the audience raised his hand and wanted to know what Daniel had to say about all this. Daniel got out of his chair to answer the question and said that, as a college professor, he felt like he had to be on his feet to talk or it just wouldn't feel right. First, he recapped a lot of what Susana said, about how different the novel is from the film and so on. He doesn't think it's a big deal that Il Postino took the story out of the novel's political context. You have to remember it's an Italian movie made first and foremost for Italian and in general European audiences. Why would audiences in nineties Europe care about Chile's politics from decades ago? You're supposed to make the audience relate to and sympathize with the characters, and forcing Chile's politics down their throats would've stymied that. Thus, the screenwriters made it a very personal story about a young Italian everyman with whom everyone in the audience could identify.
Now that he's writing an opera that will hopefully be consumed globally, Daniel's going to bet people might care a little about Pablo Neruda and his politics. In writing the libretto for Il Postino, he fleshed out the Pablo character in the context of his politics. And he did the same for Pablo's wife Matilde. He wanted to establish Pablo as a political exile as well as a mentor. It only amounted to one extra scene that wasn't in the movie, but Daniel said he'd felt very eager to write that scene for years before he finally did. It's a scene inspired by a scene in Verdi's Otello, when the title character tells the gods he can do whatever he wants, but not "this," whatever this is. I saw Otello at LA Opera but can't remember what that scene was about. When Daniel saw Otello as a youngster, none other than our very own Placido Domingo was playing Otello. Daniel's a good decade younger than Placido, but he says today he feels older, while the maestro still performs at opera houses all over the world with all that youthful energy. Daniel called this the "miracle of opera." So we'd know to look out for it, he said this new scene happens about halfway into act two. Pablo's hanging out at his villa with Matilde when Mario delivers a letter telling of massacres back in Chile. Pablo sings a song expressing his fear of dying in exile. Not dying violently, just dying at all. He's suddenly terrified he'll never see Chile again.
The exile theme hits home with Daniel. He's never actually been exiled, of course, but as you read above, he's traveled quite a bit, especially in the US and UK, so he at least can relate to that feeling of living far from home. He wanted us to be sure, however, that he felt at home living in Los Angeles. Apparently not all the singers in this opera feel that way. Daniel said some of them empathize with Pablo Neruda so acutely that they've broken down and cried during rehearsals. Cristina Gallardo-Domâs, the soprano who sings the part of Matilde, is from Chile. She was living there when Pinochet took over in '73. Ron Daniels, who directed this production, is from Brazil and, like Daniel, went to college in Britain. Apparently Ron and his college buddies got in a scrape with the law and burned their books and their apartment so they wouldn't go to jail. Even Daniel's twenty-two-year-old assistant wept from identifying so deeply with Pablo and his exile.
Daniel retained the film's setting to make the story universal for the audience, so that no matter who you are, you could identify with Pablo's situation. Jews would see Nazi Germany, Chileans would see Pinochet's Chile, you get the idea. One scene he did differently from the film was Mario's death at the end. I just saw the film recently on Netflix, and we don't really see Mario die. It jumps ahead a few years to when Pablo comes back to visit and meets little Pablito while Beatrice tells him about Mario dying at the protest while she was still pregnant. Daniel makes you see it full force.
He said the theme of the story is love and art, how love and art are two sides of the same coin. Mario finds love which, as it does for all of us, inspires him to improve himself. And what helps him improve? The poetry of Pablo. Like Mario, we all want to love and be loved, and art can get us there. Susana interjected to say Pablo Neruda would disagree, but Daniel insisted that Pablo wrote out of love and was a true humanitarian. Mario takes up poetry so he can land the love of his life, but he gets even more. He becomes a more rounded individual, more human. Using an operatic metaphor, Daniel said Mario starts out as a shallow Rossini comedy (e.g. The Barber of Seville) and becomes a deeper Mozart comedy (e.g. The Marriage of Figaro).
Susana said that in Ardiente Paciencia, Antonio Skármeta doesn't show Mario's death. Instead of getting killed at a riot, he's taken away by the secret police. And that's the last we see of him. Susan also said that Antonio uses humor and irony, and not just with Mario. Pablo especially comes across as having a robust sense of humor and cracks jokes all the time. Daniel said he met Antonio and told him to be proud of the novel. It's grown and evolved and now has a life of its own. Like a child, it grew up and moved out.
The last topic they covered before the break was the epilogue. Daniel pointed out that most operas that use an epilogue do so to let the audience know that everything's going to be okay, Don Giovanni being a prime example. Not so with Il Postino. Daniel uses an epilogue, alright, but for the opposite effect. Pablo comes back to find out Mario was killed. Daniel wants the audience to know that no, everything will not be okay. The world's tough, brutal, and capricious. He took it further by saying his epilogue is ultimately about us, the audience, since we're contending with the same world as Mario. This circles back to what he said about maintaining the film's fictional island setting so anyone in the audience can identify with the story and the characters. Susana mentioned the narrator in the novel, and how the narration provides what she called "enhanced reality," that sort of in-your-face life-can-really-suck-sometimes perspective Daniel aims for with his epilogue.
Susana asked him about his use of film in the opera, including during the epilogue. Daniel confirmed that he would be using a screen with projections for a few scenes. Not only that, but he's employing the same technology LA Opera used three years ago with Beethoven's Fidelio, which opened their 2007-08 season. I remember that quite vividly. I'm not sure what it's called, but it was a very clever and visually striking piece of wizardry they used to open the opera to lead us into the bowels of the prison where the story takes place. Daniel's using that same format, which didn't exist before Fidelio, for the epilogue when the police shoot and kill Mario. He also uses it to show the sea at one point as well as an interview with Pablo.
And that concludes the first half of the seminar. Pretty cool, huh? I had no idea Il Postino had all this background, context, and depth, but then again, that's why the Opera League puts on these things, to enrich our brains. At this point we had a good hour plus to enjoy our boxed lunches catered by the Patina Restaurant Group, which owns a bunch of restaurants in downtown LA. As I always do during the lunch breaks, I stuffed my notes into my backpack and took everything out to the Music Center plaza to get some sun and write in my journal while refueling.
When we reconvened upstairs at half past two, Daniel and Susana were sitting in the front row while on stage was a tenor named Diego, Placido's understudy for the role of Pablo. The accompanist was Jeremy Frank, assistant conductor who's starting his third season with LA Opera. Unfortunately Jeremy and Diego only had a half-hour to perform excerpts from Il Postino before Jeremy had to rush off to The Marriage of Figaro rehearsals at three. LA Opera typically produces two operas concurrently. Jeremy said thirty minutes was enough for three excerpts.
The first was a song halfway through the opera, the scene when Pablo gets the letter from home about all the people being killed. Matilde puts on a record to cheer him up, but Pablo can't help being scared he'll never see Chile again. That's the song Diego sung here. After Jeremy set up the context for us, Daniel chimed in to say that his students don't know what a record is. Vinyl makes him feel nostalgic for the fifties.
The second excerpt was from the first act, when Pablo starts teaching Mario about poetry and metaphors. Jeremy said it's the longest scene in the opera. Mario’s island home has always been beautiful, but Mario never appreciated it until now. Remember what I said above about Mario wanting to learn poetry to woo Beatrice but gaining so much more? Right away it starts to happen. Using the power of poetry and, I would say, language in general, Pablo gets Mario to stop taking his home for granted. The old master gets his new protege to use a metaphor by accident when he asks Mario how he feels, and Mario says he feels like he’s in a boat getting knocked around by Pablo’s poetry. And that’s when Pablo’s like, “Hey, you just created your very first metaphor. Congrats, kid!” In setting up the context for us, Jeremy said they’re using that same awesome screen technology I talked about above to show a hand writing with a pen in Pablo’s trademark green ink.
For the third and last excerpt, Diego sang the song where Pablo reads his poem "Desnuda" ("Nude") to Matilde. You'll recall it's the same poem Mario sends to Beatrice, which she reads aloud to her mom in the cafe. Diego may be an understudy, but he's pretty damned good. You have to figure someone who's qualified to understudy a living legend like Placido Domingo could land lead roles with smaller companies. This was a great piece to save for last because it was easily the best, the most "sublime" as opera connoisseurs like to say. Diego got a big ovation. And so did Jeremy for that matter. Give it up for the accompanist. After he ran off to Figaro rehearsals, Daniel came back up and talked briefly about songs versus arias. While arias of course have an end, they have to end in a forward direction so as not to compromise the opera's momentum. And it's for that reason, he posited, that songwriters, folks who write the modern stuff like rock and pop, have a tough time writing arias and operas in general.
Susana came back up to join Daniel for the last part of the seminar, a Q&A with the audience. The first question was for Daniel: Once he finished the libretto, how did he figure out the score? And did the movie's soundtrack influence him or otherwise factor in? Daniel said the soundtrack didn't get in the way at all. He said movie music is just texture, while opera music has to put you into the story and the character. He writes at least thirty percent of the score before he lets anyone know what he's working on. While he loves the story, the poetry, and the characters, the big challenge he knew he'd face from the beginning was Mario. In his opera, as in the movie, Mario starts out as inarticulate. Remember, he lives in a village where pretty much everyone is illiterate. But in opera the characters have to sing, which begs the question: How do you write an opera where one of the principal singers plays a character who can barely put two words together? That led Daniel to make Mario's condition an organic part of the singing. At the start of the opera, when Mario stutters, it's very rhythmic. And then by the end of the opera, of course, Mario's very literate and poetic, which is when the Mexican tenor playing him, Rolando Villazón, gets to let loose and "sing like a god," Daniel said.
The second question came from the same person: Did Daniel use motifs? He said no, he wanted something bigger than motifs because motifs can tie you down. When I think of motifs, I always think of Wagner, the man who practically invented them, or at least made them an art form. In fact, Daniel cited Wagner. He said Wagner's operas mandated motifs, but that doesn't mean every opera should have them. Mozart didn't need motifs or use them very much.
Third question (from a different person this time): Did Daniel write the libretto first? I'm no opera expert, but that's kind of an obvious question, isn't it? It's like asking a movie director if the script was written before the movie was shot. Daniel's a classy guy so he was very tactful with his answer. He also added that the libretto is a "lost art." As a librettist, you're like a TV or movie writer in that you're not married to the text like a novelist or playwright. When he writes libretti, he focuses on structure. Even in one-act operas, you have to keep structure in mind. An opera that's only one act would usually start the story in the middle of a three-act structure. He also said that he never writes a libretto chronologically. First, he gets the long scenes out of the way, the duets, the arias, etc., until the only scenes left are the easy peasy ones.
Fourth question: Since Dan mentioned that the rights to the film were initially impossible to get, how did he ultimately secure them? Daniel said he called up Antonio Skármeta and pitched it to him. At first, Antonio didn't think Daniel could do it, but he had seen Daniel's first full-length opera, Florencia en el Amazonas, and enjoyed it quite a bit. Antonio finally relented and let Daniel have the book rights. Once he had that, he didn’t necessarily need the movie rights, but he felt compelled to go after them anyway since his opera's story would resemble the movie's much more than the novel's. The reason it was so hard was because the rights were owned by so many people. The screenplay for Il Postino was written by five people, including the leading man who played Mario, Massimo Troisi. As I said above, he died less than a day after the filming ended, at which time his share of the rights was passed to his five kids. When another one of the screenwriters passed away, those rights went to his two kids. Daniel said that by the time he started pursuing the rights, they were spread across upwards of a dozen people. What's more, they all hated each other. And they really ran the gamut in terms of their social station. Some were wealthy, others not so. Some were "truck drivers," Daniel said. He and his wife flew to Italy to meet with all of them in person and eventually got letters of permission. When they were done, two of the rights owners went back to LA with Daniel and his wife, the screenwriter Anna Pavignano and her son. Anna's son was engaged to get married at the time, and the thought was to bring the fiancée to LA to get married here. But right after he got to LA, his wife called him and told him she was pregnant and to get his ass back there.
The next question was about the libretto: Would it be possible to read it before the opera? Daniel said it should be out any day now. Someone else asked if Daniel wrote the supertitles. He said yes, and it's been a ton of extra work. "No wonder composers end up blind," he said. What about singers, someone asked? Does Daniel like to use the same singers from opera to opera the way film directors sometimes use the same actors from movie to movie? Daniel said no, he likes to get the singers who are best for the part at that given time. He also said his wife is an accomplished singer. As for choruses, again it depends on the opera. For Il Postino, he didn't feel a chorus was necessary.
Next question: How did Daniel and Placido collaborate on the project? Daniel said that before the Chilean soprano Cristina Gallardo-Domâs was cast to play Pablo's wife Matilde, the Matilde role was a small one. Since Placido was playing Pablo and now had an awesome soprano to play his wife, he wanted Daniel to expand Matilde's role. Cristina was all for it. She arrived already having read the novel and showed it to Daniel. "See? She's a big character in the novel," she said to him. After attending a concert, the three of them had dinner on the fourth floor of the Dorothy Chandler (just below us). Placido took off his shoes, got comfy, and said he wanted Matilde to have a great aria that would ground Pablo. Cristina did so well and was so inspired by singing Matilde that she's releasing an album soon.
Last question: Is LA Opera making a DVD of this new production of Il Postino? Daniel's not sure, but he thinks so. Not only that, but it'll be the only DVD recording of this opera because Placido has already stated he doesn't want it to be recorded when it goes to Paris and Vienna next year.
And that's that, folks. By now it was half past three. Just as the accompanist Jeremy Frank had to bail a half-hour earlier for Figaro rehearsals, which we could hear from the fifth floor, Daniel had to get downstairs for Il Postino rehearsals. It should be a grand opera. I was already looking forward to it, but after today, I'm especially eager to see how it turned out. With a great story, great composer, singers like Placido and Cristina, and that awesome video technology, it should be a real treat.
This afternoon's seminar covered Il Postino (The Postman), the first opera of the season, opening this Saturday. If you're not big on opera, but the title still looks familiar, that's because it's the name of a popular Italian movie from the nineties. The plot's pretty simple. The main character is this young guy named Mario. When we first meet him, he's helping Dad with the fishing business, which you glean is a business that's been in the family for quite some time, partly because they don't live on the Italian mainland but on the island of Salina off the southern coast of Italy, just north of Sicily. Like most islands, fishing is one of Salina's dominant industries. The only problem is that Mario hates fishing. Desperate for a change of pace, he convinces the village's local postmaster to give him some work. The timing couldn't be better. The postmaster has a brand new route. The catch is, the route includes all of one person. Not just any person, but the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, who recently relocated to Salina because his homeland has declared him an outlaw for being a Communist. The film starts with a newsreel showing Pablo arriving at the island and getting mobbed by throngs of adoring fans.
Mario's innocent in every way. He doesn't really get what a big deal it is to chat with Pablo every day. He didn't go to school very long before Dad wanted him to help out with the fishing, hence Mario's not very well read. Not to worry. Pablo can help out with that, and he can help Mario land Beatrice, the waitress at the local cafe. Pablo takes Mario under his literary wing and teaches him about the magic of words, the magic of poetry and metaphors, all that stuff. As you no doubt can guess, Mario eventually gets over his shyness so he can use said magic to win Beatrice's heart. This being a European film and not an American Hollywood studio production, Il Postino ends on sort of a downer note. When Pablo comes back to Salina years later to say hey to his pal Mario, he finds only Beatrice and her son by Mario, whom they named Pablo in the poet's honor. Mario himself, however, is dead. He was killed by police at a Communist rally before Pablito was born. What makes Mario's passing all the more tragic is that he didn't even go to the rally to protest. He'd written a poem and just wanted to give a reading. Then the cops showed up, people panicked, the cops got violent, you know the rest. But wait, you want to hear something even sadder? The film's leading man, Massimo Troisi, who played Mario as well as co-wrote the screenplay, died of a heart attack right after the film wrapped. He had some heart condition and was due to have surgery. But Massimo wanted to finish principal photography first so the rest of the cast and crew wouldn't have to sit around and twiddle their thumbs while he convalesced. Horrible, huh?
The film's based on a 1983 novel called Ardiente Paciencia (Burning Patience) by a guy named Antonio Skármeta, who was born in Chile to Croatian immigrant parents. The huge difference between the novel and the film is the former stays in Chile and features Pablo much older, circa 1970, not long before his death. In adapting it for the screen, director Michael Radford and company moved it to Italy twenty years earlier, inspired by a real-life visit Pablo made to the island of Capri in the early fifties.
The two speakers today were Daniel Catán and Susana Hernández Araico. Daniel's the guy who composed Il Postino, which is awesome. Like most opera companies, most of the operas LA Opera stages are the classics by long-dead composers, so to put on an opera and have the composer show up to talk about it is a real treat. A little background on Daniel. Originally from Mexico, he has no Spanish accent at all, having left home to attend school in the UK and US. First he went to the University of Sussex to get a degree in philosophy before going to the University of Southampton. He went across the pond to my home state of New Jersey to get his PhD from Princeton. Only after all of that did he return to his homeland to take the job of music administrator at the Palace of Fine Arts. He wrote essays about music while falling in love with opera. He knew Il Postino would make a great opera the first time he saw the film, but the rights were impossible to obtain due to all the screenwriters who'd contributed. In hindsight, that turned out to be a good thing. Today he said that, at the time, he wasn't ready to write a character like Pablo Neruda. So Daniel's first full-length opera was La Hija de Rappacini (Rappaccini's Daughter), which came out in 1994 when he was forty-five. Then he went to Houston Grand Opera for 1996's Florencia en el Amazonas, for which he collaborated with none other than Gabriel García Márquez as well as Márquez’s protégée, Marcela Fuentes-Berain. The opera was based on Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera. It was the first ever Spanish opera commissioned by a major American opera company. LA Opera staged it in 1997. It had its European premier in Heidelberg in 2006. Florencia en el Amazonas was the beginning of a great relationship between Daniel and Houston Grand Opera. He stayed there and eventually produced a piece to coincide with their 50th anniversary season (2004-05), Salsipuedes: A Tale of Love, War, and Anchovies. It premiered there toward the start of the season in the fall of '04 and had its European premiere at Hagen, Germany in 2008. Like Mel Brooks' The Producers, it's a comedy about the Nazis. The title of the piece refers to the fictional Caribbean island where the story takes place in 1943. One opera critic called it a marriage of The Producers and Cosi Fan Tutte. Like the latter, it involves two sets of lovers who have trust issues. Meantime, you've got the island government's lone ship sent out to deal with Nazi submarines, and a corrupt island leader who's trying to make millions by striking a trade deal with the Nazis to sell them on the island's most precious export: anchovies. Houston Grand Opera had a lot of fun with the opera when it premiered. The ushers wore floral shirts and shorts and flip flops. The lobby bars served mojitos while images of palm trees were projected onto the walls. Il Postino is Daniel's first opera since Salsipuedes. Its world premiere will be here next week, and after this, it'll move on to Vienna and Paris. Daniel, meanwhile, will stay here. He's now settled in the Los Angeles area and teaches music at the College of the Canyons in Santa Clarita.
Susana Hernández Araico is a professor of Spanish and Latin American Literature in Cal Poly Pomona's department of English and Foreign Languages. This was super. The vast majority of the Opera League seminars feature the same rotating cast of academic characters, who are all wicked smart and excellent at speaking and presenting. Sometimes, though, it's nice to have variety, right? So props to the League for getting the composer as well as someone like Susana who has very specialized knowledge germane to the opera's backstory.
Before they spoke, Allan Edmiston came out and gave his usual welcome and thank-you spiel. If you've read even one of my League posts, you'll know that Allan is everyone's favorite heart surgeon and League seminar facilitator. His forte is Wagner. He is, or at least used to be, one of the top dawgs in the Wagner Society's LA branch. Today he gave a special shout-out to Ed and Alicia Clark. I'm not sure who they are, but going by what Allan said, Ed and Alicia's philanthropy is the only reason our production of Il Postino is possible. And of course Allan gave props to all us League members, especially the volunteers who keep the ship afloat.
Following Allan was League President Judy Lieb, a sprightly woman who possesses that special brand of contagious cheer. First, she plugged the upcoming Opera Volunteer Conference, an annual event put on by Opera Volunteers International, a group of people whose mandate is probably what you're thinking. Did you think opera could get this involved? That you'd have enough passionate opera goers to justify creating something like Opera Volunteers International? Go to just one opera and you won't be surprised anymore. After plugging the conference, Judy reminded us of what is probably the best and easiest way for folks to help out LA Opera: Do your grocery shopping at Ralphs. For you non-Angelinos, Ralphs is a local chain of grocery stores. I've got one about a block from me. They're everywhere in LA. In the past year or so, the League became part of the Ralphs Community Service program. If you have a Ralphs Club card, you can access your account on ralphs.com and designate LA Opera as the program you'd like to support. After that, whenever you buy stuff at Ralphs, making sure they scan your Club card of course, a portion of your tab goes to LA Opera. Judy also thanked Ed and Alicia Clark as well as the volunteers, including and especially Allan Edmiston and Anne Russell Sullivan. Anne serves as the social chair on the League’s executive committee. Judy extended her final thanks to the company that donated the piano used later in the seminar for some Il Postino excerpts.
And with that, the esteemed professor Susana Hernández Araico from Cal Poly Pomona and composer Daniel Catán came up to the stage and took their seats. Susana spoke first. You might think Ed and Alicia Clark had gotten enough gratitude already, but nope. Among the first words out of Susana’s mouth was another thanks to the Clarks, not only for Il Postino, but for Hispanics for LA Opera, a League offshoot specifically for LA's Hispanic opera fans. Check out hispanicsforlaopera.org when you get a chance.
Susana said she was thrilled to be here today because she loves to promote Hispanics in opera and literature. She's also fascinated with how stories evolve, and Il Postino has evolved quite a bit since that original novel was written. She said that almost everyone she meets only associates Il Postino with the mid nineties Italian film. They have no idea it comes from a Chilean novel written in the early eighties.
Susana pointed out that this seminar and the production of Il Postino are well timed with other anniversaries. Yesterday, September 11, besides the obvious anniversary you're thinking of, was also the anniversary of Chile's coup d'état. It was on September 11, 1973, that the socialist government of Salvador Allende was overthrown, with Salvador himself committing suicide. This was terrible news to Pablo Neruda. He'd already lived in exile once before, back in the forties and fifties because Salvador's predecessor didn't like him. When the socialists took over, they wanted Pablo to be president, but he deferred to Salvador. And then in the early seventies, Salvador literally came under fire from the military, precipitating a chain of events culminating with his death and Augusto Pinochet taking over with a military dictatorship. Things were supposed to improve under Pinochet, but of course they didn't. Pablo knew what was coming. Pinochet was a monster whose reign of terror lasted from 1973-90.
When I lived with my mom in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, we had a neighbor from Chile. He was a smart guy, intellectual type, exactly the kind of person evil dictators hate. I was in junior high at the time so of course I had no idea about Pinochet or international politics in general. My world was Nintendo and Keebler Elf cookies. What's interesting is that, while he was from Chile, his two kids, one of whom was close to my age, were from Brazil. What does that mean? I never did get the backstory, but we can put two and two together with help from hindsight. He probably didn't have the money to go straight from Chile to North Carolina, but he could get to Brazil. Not ideal, but at least he'd be out from under Pinochet's shadow. Is that where he met his wife? Or did they leave Chile together and then have Matthias and Diego in Brazil? Matthias was closer to my age, around ten or eleven or so. I was twelve.
Matthias and Diego. I'll never forget them. We had some awesome times playing basketball on that blacktop and playing all manner of games at the apartment complex swimming pool. I made them teach me some Portuguese, like how to count to ten, the stuff you usually want to know right away in a new language. To think of us kids in that place, a world away from Pinochet's Chile, makes me wonder what Matthias and Diego's Chilean father must've thought. I can just see him watching us playing while wondering what life would've been like had he stayed in his homeland.
Unfortunately the story has an ambiguous ending. When summer break arrived, I went up to Jersey to visit my father. When I came back in August, they'd gone back to Brazil. My mom and I ran into the father in the parking lot outside our building. He'd stayed behind to tie up loose ends and whatnot. I remember asking him if Matthias and Diego would ever come back, and he didn't say. Or maybe couldn't say, or perhaps didn't want to say. It was a very vague answer.
Susana pointed out another two anniversaries coming up. September 22 is the date in 1994 when Il Postino came out, and September 23 is the date in 1973, just twelve days after Chile's coup, when Pablo Neruda passed away at the age of sixty-nine. He died at a clinic in Santiago, back in the heart of his homeland. He'd been ailing with prostate cancer, but heart failure was listed as the official cause of death. In perhaps the first sign that things would be no better at all under the new regime, Pinochet forbade any large gatherings or processions in Pablo's honor. You think anyone listened? Hell no. Literally thousands of people crowded the streets to pay their respects to one of their country's greatest writers. Pablo's funeral, no doubt to Pinochet's disgust, was the big public event of the year.
Susana said she was at LA's central library downtown, just a few blocks from the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, when Antonio Skármeta was there and gave a talk about Ardiente Paciencia. In addition to writing the novel, he adapted it into a play as well as a film, all during the eighties. As for the 1994 film version we all know and love, that had a lot of people contributing to the screenplay, but Antonio wasn't one of them. Anyway, Susana said the film he wrote was filmed in Portugal, and the play was originally staged in Berlin.
She was quite right in assuming most of us in the audience knew very little about Antonio's original novel (or play or movie). So it was news to most of us that the novel's setting wasn't fifties Italy but late sixties and early seventies Chile. Pablo first fled Chile in the late forties when he was a senator in Chile's communist government and a very vocal critic of the opposition that soon took over and threatened to arrest him. He got the heck out of there and was removed from the senate in absentia. He traveled all over the place, to other parts of Chile, Argentina, Mexico and, yes, the Italian island of Capri. But then, as I mentioned above, more drama started happening in the early seventies. Susana told us the novel takes place mainly in 1969 with Pablo living in exile in the Chilean resort town of Isla Negra. In reality, he wasn't exiled at this time, but he did have a house in Isla Negra, which today is one of Chile's three Pablo Neruda museums. The novel mixes fact and fiction in other ways as well.
Susana said she really likes the island setting of Il Postino. She's the commodore of a sailing club, which is kind of amazing. I don't think I've ever met a commodore. At any rate, she said the point of this preface was to make us appreciate the creativity that's been applied to the personal events in the life of Pablo Neruda, and how that blend of fact and fiction helps us address grand themes while keeping the scale small and personal.
And with that, she dove into her lecture on Il Postino in the context of its geographical and cultural milieu. Ardiente Paciencia and Il Postino, Susana said, are "twin texts" that complement each other. First, you've got the novel. It's set in 1969 Chile. Susana said that people familiar with that time and place know right away about the upcoming presidential election. It was the election that could've made Pablo Neruda the president. People wanted him to run, enough people to suggest he had a real shot at winning, but instead he deferred to his pal Salvador Allende. So that's the novel's setup. With Il Postino, we're going back twenty years to the early fifties and an island off the coast of Italy. While Pablo did spend a year living in a friend's villa on Capri, off the west coast of Italy in the Tyrrhenian Sea, Il Postino is set on the island of Salina, one of the Aeolean Islands, still in the Tyrrhenian Sea but way down south by Sicily. Susana pointed out that the novel's characters are literate. Rosa, the mother of Mario's love interest Beatriz, reads Pablo's poems to her daughter, for example. In Il Postino, meanwhile, most folks in Mario's village can't read.
Susana said that some people have wondered about Pablo's politics, how he could remain a Communist after folks like Stalin and Mao came along. First, she pointed out that Pablo didn't even subscribe to Communism until the late forties, when he was in his mid forties or so. During the time between the film's early fifties and the novel's late sixties, Pablo rescinded support of Stalin and Mao. In 1956, three years after Stalin's death, his successor Nikita Khrushchev gave his so-called secret speeches, not because the speeches themselves were secret, but because the purpose of them was to spill the dirty, bloody secrets of Stalin's rule, how Papa Joe systematically and methodically starved, purged, and wiped out over thirty million of his own people. Mao racked up a similar death toll with his Cultural Revolution, but that didn't come until the seventies, after Pablo died. I suspect Pablo's disowning Mao came from the fact that Mao was pretty much installed as China's dictator by Stalin, so from Pablo's point of view, he was already guilty by association.
Susana also talked about how both the novel and the movie show the characters interacting with the arts, Pablo's poetry being the most obvious example. Another example would be the love of film. In the novel, Mario is a huge movie buff. His smile is described as a Burt Lancaster smile, which helps convince the postmaster to give him a job. We never actually see Mario go to the movies in the novel. It's only ever mentioned anecdotally. In the movie, Mario's love of film is, appropriately, established visually, and right away. The very first scene sees him at the village's local theater watching the newsreel. The theater's packed, and the audience talks at the screen like they do in Cinema Paradiso. We see the news footage of Pablo arriving at Salina and being greeted by the masses. As the camera follows him, someone in the audience spots their house in the background and yells it out to the rest of the theater. You can tell these people love being there and that they feed on the camaraderie and the feeling of community you get at the cinemas.
Susana delved a bit into art versus reality. She talked about "Naked," one of Pablo's more famous poems. In the movie, Mario uses it to woo Beatrice. He sends it to her in the mail, and she reads it aloud in the cafe with her mom standing nearby. I forget the exact words, but it's a sexy poem. Beatrice's mom takes the poem literally. Huge mistake with poems, especially poems by Pablo, a master at metaphor. Mom considers "Naked" porn and becomes horrified that Beatrice would have anything to do with that perv Mario. Susana said that Beatrice's mom's "naive identification of poetry" has to do with the film, and more importantly the film medium, being the reality half of the art versus reality equation, the art half of course being Pablo. A narrative feature film doesn't have much room for metaphors. What happens on screen is what you get. And that's the relationship of Beatrice's mom to the poem. What she hears her daughter read (she herself can't read, like most of the villagers) is, from her point of view, all she gets. So it's kind of a Russian doll type scenario. Our relationship to the narrative film medium is being reflected back at us by Beatrice's mom's relationship to the poem.
An elderly guy in the audience raised his hand and wanted to know what Daniel had to say about all this. Daniel got out of his chair to answer the question and said that, as a college professor, he felt like he had to be on his feet to talk or it just wouldn't feel right. First, he recapped a lot of what Susana said, about how different the novel is from the film and so on. He doesn't think it's a big deal that Il Postino took the story out of the novel's political context. You have to remember it's an Italian movie made first and foremost for Italian and in general European audiences. Why would audiences in nineties Europe care about Chile's politics from decades ago? You're supposed to make the audience relate to and sympathize with the characters, and forcing Chile's politics down their throats would've stymied that. Thus, the screenwriters made it a very personal story about a young Italian everyman with whom everyone in the audience could identify.
Now that he's writing an opera that will hopefully be consumed globally, Daniel's going to bet people might care a little about Pablo Neruda and his politics. In writing the libretto for Il Postino, he fleshed out the Pablo character in the context of his politics. And he did the same for Pablo's wife Matilde. He wanted to establish Pablo as a political exile as well as a mentor. It only amounted to one extra scene that wasn't in the movie, but Daniel said he'd felt very eager to write that scene for years before he finally did. It's a scene inspired by a scene in Verdi's Otello, when the title character tells the gods he can do whatever he wants, but not "this," whatever this is. I saw Otello at LA Opera but can't remember what that scene was about. When Daniel saw Otello as a youngster, none other than our very own Placido Domingo was playing Otello. Daniel's a good decade younger than Placido, but he says today he feels older, while the maestro still performs at opera houses all over the world with all that youthful energy. Daniel called this the "miracle of opera." So we'd know to look out for it, he said this new scene happens about halfway into act two. Pablo's hanging out at his villa with Matilde when Mario delivers a letter telling of massacres back in Chile. Pablo sings a song expressing his fear of dying in exile. Not dying violently, just dying at all. He's suddenly terrified he'll never see Chile again.
The exile theme hits home with Daniel. He's never actually been exiled, of course, but as you read above, he's traveled quite a bit, especially in the US and UK, so he at least can relate to that feeling of living far from home. He wanted us to be sure, however, that he felt at home living in Los Angeles. Apparently not all the singers in this opera feel that way. Daniel said some of them empathize with Pablo Neruda so acutely that they've broken down and cried during rehearsals. Cristina Gallardo-Domâs, the soprano who sings the part of Matilde, is from Chile. She was living there when Pinochet took over in '73. Ron Daniels, who directed this production, is from Brazil and, like Daniel, went to college in Britain. Apparently Ron and his college buddies got in a scrape with the law and burned their books and their apartment so they wouldn't go to jail. Even Daniel's twenty-two-year-old assistant wept from identifying so deeply with Pablo and his exile.
Daniel retained the film's setting to make the story universal for the audience, so that no matter who you are, you could identify with Pablo's situation. Jews would see Nazi Germany, Chileans would see Pinochet's Chile, you get the idea. One scene he did differently from the film was Mario's death at the end. I just saw the film recently on Netflix, and we don't really see Mario die. It jumps ahead a few years to when Pablo comes back to visit and meets little Pablito while Beatrice tells him about Mario dying at the protest while she was still pregnant. Daniel makes you see it full force.
He said the theme of the story is love and art, how love and art are two sides of the same coin. Mario finds love which, as it does for all of us, inspires him to improve himself. And what helps him improve? The poetry of Pablo. Like Mario, we all want to love and be loved, and art can get us there. Susana interjected to say Pablo Neruda would disagree, but Daniel insisted that Pablo wrote out of love and was a true humanitarian. Mario takes up poetry so he can land the love of his life, but he gets even more. He becomes a more rounded individual, more human. Using an operatic metaphor, Daniel said Mario starts out as a shallow Rossini comedy (e.g. The Barber of Seville) and becomes a deeper Mozart comedy (e.g. The Marriage of Figaro).
Susana said that in Ardiente Paciencia, Antonio Skármeta doesn't show Mario's death. Instead of getting killed at a riot, he's taken away by the secret police. And that's the last we see of him. Susan also said that Antonio uses humor and irony, and not just with Mario. Pablo especially comes across as having a robust sense of humor and cracks jokes all the time. Daniel said he met Antonio and told him to be proud of the novel. It's grown and evolved and now has a life of its own. Like a child, it grew up and moved out.
The last topic they covered before the break was the epilogue. Daniel pointed out that most operas that use an epilogue do so to let the audience know that everything's going to be okay, Don Giovanni being a prime example. Not so with Il Postino. Daniel uses an epilogue, alright, but for the opposite effect. Pablo comes back to find out Mario was killed. Daniel wants the audience to know that no, everything will not be okay. The world's tough, brutal, and capricious. He took it further by saying his epilogue is ultimately about us, the audience, since we're contending with the same world as Mario. This circles back to what he said about maintaining the film's fictional island setting so anyone in the audience can identify with the story and the characters. Susana mentioned the narrator in the novel, and how the narration provides what she called "enhanced reality," that sort of in-your-face life-can-really-suck-sometimes perspective Daniel aims for with his epilogue.
Susana asked him about his use of film in the opera, including during the epilogue. Daniel confirmed that he would be using a screen with projections for a few scenes. Not only that, but he's employing the same technology LA Opera used three years ago with Beethoven's Fidelio, which opened their 2007-08 season. I remember that quite vividly. I'm not sure what it's called, but it was a very clever and visually striking piece of wizardry they used to open the opera to lead us into the bowels of the prison where the story takes place. Daniel's using that same format, which didn't exist before Fidelio, for the epilogue when the police shoot and kill Mario. He also uses it to show the sea at one point as well as an interview with Pablo.
And that concludes the first half of the seminar. Pretty cool, huh? I had no idea Il Postino had all this background, context, and depth, but then again, that's why the Opera League puts on these things, to enrich our brains. At this point we had a good hour plus to enjoy our boxed lunches catered by the Patina Restaurant Group, which owns a bunch of restaurants in downtown LA. As I always do during the lunch breaks, I stuffed my notes into my backpack and took everything out to the Music Center plaza to get some sun and write in my journal while refueling.
When we reconvened upstairs at half past two, Daniel and Susana were sitting in the front row while on stage was a tenor named Diego, Placido's understudy for the role of Pablo. The accompanist was Jeremy Frank, assistant conductor who's starting his third season with LA Opera. Unfortunately Jeremy and Diego only had a half-hour to perform excerpts from Il Postino before Jeremy had to rush off to The Marriage of Figaro rehearsals at three. LA Opera typically produces two operas concurrently. Jeremy said thirty minutes was enough for three excerpts.
The first was a song halfway through the opera, the scene when Pablo gets the letter from home about all the people being killed. Matilde puts on a record to cheer him up, but Pablo can't help being scared he'll never see Chile again. That's the song Diego sung here. After Jeremy set up the context for us, Daniel chimed in to say that his students don't know what a record is. Vinyl makes him feel nostalgic for the fifties.
The second excerpt was from the first act, when Pablo starts teaching Mario about poetry and metaphors. Jeremy said it's the longest scene in the opera. Mario’s island home has always been beautiful, but Mario never appreciated it until now. Remember what I said above about Mario wanting to learn poetry to woo Beatrice but gaining so much more? Right away it starts to happen. Using the power of poetry and, I would say, language in general, Pablo gets Mario to stop taking his home for granted. The old master gets his new protege to use a metaphor by accident when he asks Mario how he feels, and Mario says he feels like he’s in a boat getting knocked around by Pablo’s poetry. And that’s when Pablo’s like, “Hey, you just created your very first metaphor. Congrats, kid!” In setting up the context for us, Jeremy said they’re using that same awesome screen technology I talked about above to show a hand writing with a pen in Pablo’s trademark green ink.
For the third and last excerpt, Diego sang the song where Pablo reads his poem "Desnuda" ("Nude") to Matilde. You'll recall it's the same poem Mario sends to Beatrice, which she reads aloud to her mom in the cafe. Diego may be an understudy, but he's pretty damned good. You have to figure someone who's qualified to understudy a living legend like Placido Domingo could land lead roles with smaller companies. This was a great piece to save for last because it was easily the best, the most "sublime" as opera connoisseurs like to say. Diego got a big ovation. And so did Jeremy for that matter. Give it up for the accompanist. After he ran off to Figaro rehearsals, Daniel came back up and talked briefly about songs versus arias. While arias of course have an end, they have to end in a forward direction so as not to compromise the opera's momentum. And it's for that reason, he posited, that songwriters, folks who write the modern stuff like rock and pop, have a tough time writing arias and operas in general.
Susana came back up to join Daniel for the last part of the seminar, a Q&A with the audience. The first question was for Daniel: Once he finished the libretto, how did he figure out the score? And did the movie's soundtrack influence him or otherwise factor in? Daniel said the soundtrack didn't get in the way at all. He said movie music is just texture, while opera music has to put you into the story and the character. He writes at least thirty percent of the score before he lets anyone know what he's working on. While he loves the story, the poetry, and the characters, the big challenge he knew he'd face from the beginning was Mario. In his opera, as in the movie, Mario starts out as inarticulate. Remember, he lives in a village where pretty much everyone is illiterate. But in opera the characters have to sing, which begs the question: How do you write an opera where one of the principal singers plays a character who can barely put two words together? That led Daniel to make Mario's condition an organic part of the singing. At the start of the opera, when Mario stutters, it's very rhythmic. And then by the end of the opera, of course, Mario's very literate and poetic, which is when the Mexican tenor playing him, Rolando Villazón, gets to let loose and "sing like a god," Daniel said.
The second question came from the same person: Did Daniel use motifs? He said no, he wanted something bigger than motifs because motifs can tie you down. When I think of motifs, I always think of Wagner, the man who practically invented them, or at least made them an art form. In fact, Daniel cited Wagner. He said Wagner's operas mandated motifs, but that doesn't mean every opera should have them. Mozart didn't need motifs or use them very much.
Third question (from a different person this time): Did Daniel write the libretto first? I'm no opera expert, but that's kind of an obvious question, isn't it? It's like asking a movie director if the script was written before the movie was shot. Daniel's a classy guy so he was very tactful with his answer. He also added that the libretto is a "lost art." As a librettist, you're like a TV or movie writer in that you're not married to the text like a novelist or playwright. When he writes libretti, he focuses on structure. Even in one-act operas, you have to keep structure in mind. An opera that's only one act would usually start the story in the middle of a three-act structure. He also said that he never writes a libretto chronologically. First, he gets the long scenes out of the way, the duets, the arias, etc., until the only scenes left are the easy peasy ones.
Fourth question: Since Dan mentioned that the rights to the film were initially impossible to get, how did he ultimately secure them? Daniel said he called up Antonio Skármeta and pitched it to him. At first, Antonio didn't think Daniel could do it, but he had seen Daniel's first full-length opera, Florencia en el Amazonas, and enjoyed it quite a bit. Antonio finally relented and let Daniel have the book rights. Once he had that, he didn’t necessarily need the movie rights, but he felt compelled to go after them anyway since his opera's story would resemble the movie's much more than the novel's. The reason it was so hard was because the rights were owned by so many people. The screenplay for Il Postino was written by five people, including the leading man who played Mario, Massimo Troisi. As I said above, he died less than a day after the filming ended, at which time his share of the rights was passed to his five kids. When another one of the screenwriters passed away, those rights went to his two kids. Daniel said that by the time he started pursuing the rights, they were spread across upwards of a dozen people. What's more, they all hated each other. And they really ran the gamut in terms of their social station. Some were wealthy, others not so. Some were "truck drivers," Daniel said. He and his wife flew to Italy to meet with all of them in person and eventually got letters of permission. When they were done, two of the rights owners went back to LA with Daniel and his wife, the screenwriter Anna Pavignano and her son. Anna's son was engaged to get married at the time, and the thought was to bring the fiancée to LA to get married here. But right after he got to LA, his wife called him and told him she was pregnant and to get his ass back there.
The next question was about the libretto: Would it be possible to read it before the opera? Daniel said it should be out any day now. Someone else asked if Daniel wrote the supertitles. He said yes, and it's been a ton of extra work. "No wonder composers end up blind," he said. What about singers, someone asked? Does Daniel like to use the same singers from opera to opera the way film directors sometimes use the same actors from movie to movie? Daniel said no, he likes to get the singers who are best for the part at that given time. He also said his wife is an accomplished singer. As for choruses, again it depends on the opera. For Il Postino, he didn't feel a chorus was necessary.
Next question: How did Daniel and Placido collaborate on the project? Daniel said that before the Chilean soprano Cristina Gallardo-Domâs was cast to play Pablo's wife Matilde, the Matilde role was a small one. Since Placido was playing Pablo and now had an awesome soprano to play his wife, he wanted Daniel to expand Matilde's role. Cristina was all for it. She arrived already having read the novel and showed it to Daniel. "See? She's a big character in the novel," she said to him. After attending a concert, the three of them had dinner on the fourth floor of the Dorothy Chandler (just below us). Placido took off his shoes, got comfy, and said he wanted Matilde to have a great aria that would ground Pablo. Cristina did so well and was so inspired by singing Matilde that she's releasing an album soon.
Last question: Is LA Opera making a DVD of this new production of Il Postino? Daniel's not sure, but he thinks so. Not only that, but it'll be the only DVD recording of this opera because Placido has already stated he doesn't want it to be recorded when it goes to Paris and Vienna next year.
And that's that, folks. By now it was half past three. Just as the accompanist Jeremy Frank had to bail a half-hour earlier for Figaro rehearsals, which we could hear from the fifth floor, Daniel had to get downstairs for Il Postino rehearsals. It should be a grand opera. I was already looking forward to it, but after today, I'm especially eager to see how it turned out. With a great story, great composer, singers like Placido and Cristina, and that awesome video technology, it should be a real treat.
