That happens to be the year the Met last put on a Spanish-language opera, and there’s something amusing in the fact that next to nothing in “Florencia,” which premiered in Houston in 1996, would have surprised an audience back then.
You almost want to applaud the impressive, if perverse, achievement of a score that so thoroughly rejects all the galvanic musical developments since the early 1900s, when the opera is set.
The action — hardly complex, but crowded — takes place aboard a steamboat in the Amazon rainforest.
The passengers are on their way to hear the great diva Florencia Grimaldi sing at the Belle Époque opera house in Manaus, Brazil.
There’s a swooning pair of young lovers, and a bickering married couple; a would-be Grimaldi biographer and a mystical narrator; oh, and Florencia, too, somehow unrecognized by everyone else and returning to Manaus in search of her lover, a butterfly hunter she lost long ago.
Persons:
Catán, Giacomo Puccini, “ Florencia, Florencia Grimaldi, There’s, Grimaldi, Florencia, Marcela Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez
Organizations:
Met, Belle
Locations:
“, ”, Houston, Manaus, Brazil