Perhaps Rigola should have been more intentional in his handling of the text, as his libretto unfolds more like a selection of excerpts from the play than a standalone adaptation. Ibsen's five acts are compressed into two, totaling less than ninety minutes. As a result, the collapse of Stockman's campaign seems rushed, especially in the key town meeting scene in which his brother, the mayor, outmaneuvers him and his fellow citizens shout at him. We don't see Stockmann gradually losing his composure; instead, he almost immediately launches into a fiery speech denouncing the stupidity of the majority. The final scenes, in which Stockmann decides to re-educate the people on his own, unfold even more rapidly and fragmentarily.
However, Enemigo had a captivating evening, thanks in large part to Coll's superb score. The opera begins with a dynamic, frantic prelude in the form of a paso doble, a fast march often heard in bullfights. However, here the meter is basically a 7/8 curve and the harmony is a distorted G major. Such folkloric touches appear periodically throughout the work, signaling the popular energy that will consume Stockman. The doctor himself is distinguished by either wildly chatty lines or semi-Wagnerian pomposity; at the end his music becomes elegiac, implicitly undermining his dreams of starting over. Crowd scenes, even in shortened form, release explosive energy. Loud orchestral passages hint at the neutral fury of nature itself.
The opening night cast, while capable and engaged, struggled at times to be heard over Call's powerful orchestration. José Antonio López, as Stockmann, showed a beautiful, flexible baritone, but had difficulty breaking through the audio melee. American soprano Brenda Rae, as Stockmann's caring daughter Petra, held her own, combining brilliant high notes with an expressive chest voice. The composer conducted, and even if he overindulged his performers, he led with a clean, confident beat. Unsurprisingly, he received the loudest ovation of the night. This wasn't just a hometown crowd hugging their own son; it was a cosmopolitan audience that welcomed a significant new creative force in the operatic world.
In Madrid, the Teatro Real, Spain's flagship opera house since 1850, offered an evening of Bartók: the one-act ballet The Marvelous Mandarin and the one-act opera Bluebeard's Castle, with the first movement of Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta as a weighty intermezzo. Teatro Real has been an active supporter of contemporary opera in recent decades, with twenty world premieres taking place since 1997. (The company co-produced Coll's Enemy and will premiere it in February.) Since 2013, Teatro Real has been led by Catalan impresario Joan Matabos, who has a talent for balancing progressive ideas with conservative tastes while appeasing political observers.
Bartók's production was created by veteran German director Christoph Loy, who recently moved to Madrid and founded a company dedicated to reviving the zarzuela. Loy's production, first shown in Basel in 2022, has no hint of local flavor: Marton Ag's set resembles a nondescript urban wasteland with a shabby telephone booth on one side, a hulking warehouse building on the other, and scattered rubbish. This milieu fits seamlessly with The Tangerine, in which desperate men use a girl to ensnare bystanders until an indestructible protagonist complicates their scheme. It's more of a stretch for Bluebeard, in which Judith, the new bride of a sinister nobleman, learns the fate of her predecessors. However, Loy's stark minimalism, enlivened by dark Beckettian humor, provided compelling continuity for the evening.
Loy himself choreographed “Tangerine” in a loose, athletic style that often resembled a sexualized boxing match. Carla Perez Mora played the girl with restrained fury; Gorka Culebras made the mandarin a mentally suffering martyr. In Bluebeard, the dominant character was the always exciting German soprano Eveline Herlitzius, who sang Judith with sharp force and fleshed out her character with precise acting gestures. Not since Anya Seely have I seen a singer embody destiny by simply folding her hands humbly in her lap. Christophe Fischesser as Bluebeard could not match Herlitzius's intensity, but his polished, deep-set bass provided a strong musical underpinning. Gustavo Gimeno showed an instinctive command of Bartók's rhythms and colors in boxing. To the pioneering Florentines all this would have seemed incomprehensible, but it came close to realizing their theatrical ideal – a seamless fusion of text, music, image and feeling. ♦
