NEW YORK -- Osvaldo Golijov was running out of time.The Argentine-born composer had been commissioned by the Tanglewood Music Center for a chamber opera to be performed in the summer of 2003.And with the deadline just months away, his original idea wasn’t panning out.“It didn’t go anywhere.
I had nothing,” he recalled in an interview.Happily, a friend introduced him to playwright David Henry Hwang, and they agreed to collaborate on a piece about a historical figure they both admired: Federico Garcia Lorca, the leftist Spanish dramatist and poet who was killed by fascist forces at the start of the Spanish Civil War.Of necessity, the collaboration proceeded fast and furiously.“I was so pressed for time that he started faxing me pages, one by one,” Golijov said.
“I didn’t even know how the thing was going to end or anything.” Hwang wrote the libretto in English and Golijov translated it into Spanish.Somehow the result, “Ainadamar,” premiered on schedule.It was restaged in revised form two years later at the Santa Fe Opera, and is now coming to the Metropolitan Opera in a production by Brazilian director and choreographer Deborah Colker that runs for nine performances beginning Oct.
15.The title is an Arabic word that translates as “fountain of tears” and refers to a spring in the hills above the city of Granada — the site where Lorca was assassinated in 1936.Hwang said he and Golijov were “moved by the fact that Lorca had to some extent predicted his own murder through his work.” His early play, “Mariana Pineda” tells of a Spanish heroine of the 19th century liberal movement who was executed for refusing to betray her comrades.Margarita Xirgu, who starred in that play, became Lorca’s muse, and when she fled to Cuba she tried unsuccessfully to persuade him to join her.Early on, Hwang decided to have Xirgu, rather than Lorca, be the main character in the opera.“I liked the idea of creating Lorca through the memories of Margarita...