‘Enemy of the people’, by Francisco Coll, admirable music but with little drama | Culture

After the successful premiere of the short opera in English Kafka Coffeecomposed by Francisco Coll (Valencia, 40 years old), written for five singers and ten instrumentalists, at the Linbury Studio Theater in Covent Garden in London in March 2014, the British press immediately showed interest in one of his large-format works.

“What’s the next step, Mr. Coll?” – asked Eduardo Benarroch Auditorium magazine; Mark Berry praised her “great talent”. Bouleziano; Michael Church even bet on it The Independent that this short, 45-minute dramatic, funny and surreal piece “could become a classic”; and Helen Wallace proposed BBC music magazine the big question: “Could Coll be the composer Spain has been waiting for for so long?”

The answer to all this expectation came true last Wednesday, November 5th in Valencia enemy of the people. This is the first opera premiere at the Palau de les Arts, where he also presented Coll Kafka Coffee in 2016, in a co-production with Teatro Real, which will arrive in Madrid in February. It should be noted that the Valencian composer has just received the National Music Award in the Composition category.

Coll had already received a proposal from the Royal Opera House in London in 2014 and had even started a project in English with Meredith Oakes, librettist of his short opera, based on A ridiculous man’s dreamby Dostoevsky. “Since then, and more than ten years have passed, I have thought about several possible themes for my next opera: Lope de Vega, Lorca, Borges, Beckett, among many others. Some of them penetrated me so deeply that, once discarded as ideas for the opera, I felt that I had to do something with them”, acknowledges the composer in the program of hands.

The idea of ​​an opera based on the famous play An enemy of the peopleby Henrik Ibsen—in which a doctor is disowned for reporting the pollution of his prosperous local spa—emerged during the pandemic. There were no known operatic precedents, although there were many stage and film adaptations, and it was even a source of inspiration Sharkthe novel by Peter Benchley from which Steven Spielberg made a film.

Les Arts and the Teatro Real put Coll in touch with Àlex Rigola to write the libretto. The Catalan playwright had directed a very free adaptation of this drama in 2018 at the Pavón Kamikaze in Madrid, with great audience participation. However, his version for Coll’s opera, written in Spanish, is much closer to the original 1882 text.

The action focuses on five characters, without a precise spatial and temporal location, to which are added a sixth silent character and the city, represented by the choir. The plot is compressed into eight scenes distributed in two acts, instead of the original five. Everything revolves around the two antagonistic brothers, the Doctor and the Mayor, while the female figure of Petra, the Doctor’s daughter, whose wife died two years ago, is strengthened. The figure of the newspaper director – here called Mario – is maintained and a new one is introduced: Marta, who represents an entrepreneur. Finally, the silent character, Morten, the Doctor’s father-in-law, retains his original name.

Although the composer recognizes in the manual program Rigola’s desire to adapt his libretto to the needs of the music, there does not seem to have been a particular bond between the two. This aspect contrasts with a constant of contemporary work, exemplified by the famous collaboration between George Benjamin and Martin Crimp. The plot fails to unfold any real dramatic flight during its 80 uninterrupted minutes, and the direction, again by Rigola, suffers from limited acting leadership. Patricia Albizu’s monotonous scenography and simple costumes don’t help either, confined to a paradisiacal beach, supported by Álvaro Luna’s video, which becomes grey, reddish and dark as the action progresses, in combination with Carlos Marquerie’s lighting.

Best of all is Coll’s extraordinary music, admirably conducted by the composer himself at the head of the always outstanding Orquestra de la Comunitat Valenciana. The work begins with a bullfighting pasodoble in 7/8 time, as boring as it is gaudy and grotesque, a fun nod to the The wild catby his compatriot Manuel Penella, also premiered in Valencia just over a century ago. That pasodoble becomes a leitmotif which portrays the moral and political corruption of the mayor. However, the work is shot through from start to finish with exquisite orchestral interludes, full of explosive gestures and syncopated melodies, beautifully orchestrated and fully representative of Coll’s style.

The vocal writing abounds in recited recitative and chatter of a somewhat mechanical nature, although Coll introduces variety through leaps on the high notes and specific lyrical veins where time seems to stop. In the first of them, for example, the prosperous spas are evoked. The accompaniment is well balanced with the voices, and there is no shortage of melancholy or sarcastic winks, like those glissandi of trombone to which they refer the noseby Shostakovich. In any case, the influences are now perfectly diluted in Coll’s personal voice, unlike Ligeti’s evident prominence in Kafka Coffee.

In the first act, scene 2 – where the confrontation between the two brothers takes place, between the uncomfortable truth that the Doctor denounces and the social and political conformism that the Mayor embodies – was not able to fully prevail. Musically, the following scene stands out, in which Petra discovers Mario’s betrayal towards her father, to whom she perhaps feels attracted. The young woman sings the melancholic arioso Love is life, pleasure and painone of the most beautiful moments of the entire work. In the fourth scene the chorus representing the crowd appears, but the musical intensity of the fifth – where the Doctor experiences his loneliness – does not translate into an equivalent dramatic impact.

In the second act everything flows more naturally. It begins with a funny scene in which the massive meeting called by the Doctor in his study is represented, preceded by a Sevillian parody of the Rocío performed by the Mayor and Marta, and in which a multifaceted chorus declares the Doctor the enemy of the people. The second scene contrasts the doctor’s pain, the brother’s farewell and the incomprehensible attitude of the father-in-law, who has invested his niece’s inheritance in spa shares that will be worth nothing. For the final scene, Coll reserves a melancholic duet between the Doctor and Petra, another of the opera’s most beautiful moments, which includes a tribute to Robert Schumann by unraveling the harmony of the first movement of his Sonata for violin and piano in A minor op. 105written when the composer began to experience the first symptoms of his madness.

The voice cast as a whole wasn’t particularly appealing, despite the unquestionable dedication of its members. The American soprano Brenda Rae stood out above all, showing powerful coloraturas in the role of Petra and elevating her arioso with exquisite mastery of dynamics. The Murcian baritone José Antonio López was a solvent Doctor, if excessively tense and vibrant in the upper register. The same can be said of Granada tenor Moisés Marín, who bravely faced the extreme demands of his character’s range. Corretto is the Aragonese baritone Isaac Galán in the role of Mario, together with Marta of the British mezzo-soprano Marta Fontanals-Simmons. Less dramatically integrated into the cast was actor Juan Goberna in the role of Morten. The Cor de la Generalitat Valenciana deserves a separate mention, as it masterfully resolved the complex steps in the division written by Coll.