Femme Fatale at CCM

Wesley Lawrence as Giovanni and Paola Gonzalez as Beatriz in Daniel Catan's "Rappaccini's Daughter" at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music

Although he is very much alive, composer Daniel Catan enjoys playing the role of “dead composer," he said.

   Mexican born Catan, whose “Rappaccini’s Daughter” will receive its Cincinnati premiere May 30-June 1 at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, rehearsed the cast for the opera on a visit to CCM earlier this year.

   “Last time I came I heard the students who would sing and they did a beautiful job.  It is time for me to come and watch."

   The opera, premiered in 1991 in Mexico City, will be performed at 8 p.m. May 30 and 31 and 2:30 p.m. Sunday in Cohen Family Studio Theater in CCM’s Mary Emery Hall.  Admission is free.

   Catan is also the composer of "Florencia en el Amazonas," to be performed by Cincinnati Opera July 10 and 12 at Music Hall in its regional premiere.

   Set in Renaissance Italy, "Rappaccini's Daughter" is the final production of CCM’s 2007-08 Studio Series and the first under the aegis of the new Corbett Foundation Opera Fusion Program.

   Announced last fall, the program is a three-year joint venture by CCM and Cincinnati Opera including collaborative academic programming, enhanced young artist and internship opportunities for CCM students during Cincinnati Opera’s summer festival and an annual opera production at CCM.

   Based on a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne adapted by Nobel Prize-winning Mexican author Octavio Paz, "Rappaccini's Daughter" is about the ultimate femme fatale. 

   A lovely young girl, Beatriz, is poison -- literally.  It's not her fault, having been raised in her father Dr. Rappaccini’s garden.  Rappaccini is a physician/scientist who seeks to cure illness with poisonous plants.

Foxglove (digitalis) might have been found in Rappaccini's garden.

A young student, Giovanni, has a room above the garden, where he becomes besotted with Beatriz, though he does notice that she is a bit strange.  A rose he tosses her wilts at her touch and she calls one of the trees in the garden her “brother.”

   Though warned by a friend about Rappaccini --  "for him, patients are merely material for experimentation" -- Giovanni persists in visiting Beatriz, who falls for him and thinks he might be able to rescue her from her prison.  Rappaccini is all for it, since he believes that uniting Beatriz (death) with Giovanni (life) will produce immortality.   Fearing for Giovanni, Baglioni gives him an antidote that he says will cure Beatriz.  After berating her for not being what he thought, Giovanni gives Beatriz the antidote.  Saddened by his rebuke, she drinks it and promptly dies.

   To be performed with piano accompaniment, the opera will be fully staged, with costumes, sets and lighting.  It will be sung in Spanish with English supertitles.  Karl Shymanovitz will conduct the all-student cast.  Stage director is Karen Moe Miller.

   "Rappaccini's Daughter" is Catan's second opera, but "publicly speaking,” his first, he said.  "With my first one, I learned what not to do.  The thing that I learned the most was how important the libretto is.  It sounds silly, but most composers -- and I used to be one -- felt that most opera libretti are dumb.  I thought it really doesn't matter what they're singing if the music is good -- and I was very wrong.  Even though they seem dumb sometimes, they're not if they provide the right framework for the drama.

   "It's like scaffolding.  It has to be just right for the music to be in.  The scaffolding then has to be withdrawn and the music delivered."

   Hawthorne and Paz were a perfect combination, said Catan.  "The strength of the Paz play is the poetry, the beauty of the lines, especially the love part of it.  It's very sensual.  Hawthorne does not have that.  It has the dramatic structure, the thriller structure, that Paz does not."

   What makes a good dramatist is not what makes a good poet, said Catan, who now lives in Los Angeles.  "A good poet stops time and looks at the moment and the moment is enlarged.  A dramatist has the thing that is unraveling.  Paz is a wonderful poet, but the drama is not there.  It stays still like a poem.  Hawthorne has the drama, but not the poetry inside it.  When I combine the two, I have a very workable libretto."

   It’s the same with musicals, he said.  "Somebody writes the book and somebody else writes the lyrics or songs.  The guy who writes the songs is the poet.  That's when time stops. The other has the machinery that keeps the play moving."

   Catan, 59, started as a pianist, he said.  "I was lined up to go to a conservatory and become a pianist.  At a certain point, I kind of rebelled and said no, I don't want to be a musician.  I don't want to be a pianist.  Then I went and studied philosophy, which is perhaps even more useless.  My parents thought they had saved me from a fate worse than death and then when I announced philosophy, they nearly collapsed."

   It was while he was studying philosophy at the University of Sussex in England that he fell in love with music all over again.  "I re-discovered that music is much bigger than just the piano and I became obsessed with wanting to be a composer."  Sussex was also very close to the Glynbourne Festival Opera house.  "I spent all my time during my philosophy years working in that house as an usher, carpenter, you name it.  Anything that would take me to performances and see how the theater worked inside."

   Catan moved from Sussex to Southampton University, where he studied composition.  It just happened that the director of the music division at Southampton, Peter Evans, was a biographer of Benjamin Britten, one of the masters of 20th-century opera and a great influence on Catan.  From there, Catan went to Princeton University where he studied with Milton Babbitt, a modernist with no interest in opera.  "He used to say, 'Why are you writing opera?  I mean, aren't there enough?'  But he was a wonderful man and a wonderful teacher.”  

   Somewhat like Britten, who revived English opera after a period of dormancy from the age of Purcell and Handel, Catan is bringing opera in Spanish to the world stage.  Given its American premiere in 1994 by San Diego Opera, "Rappaccini's Daughter" was the first opera by a Mexican composer to be produced in the U.S.  "Florencia," co-commissioned by Houston Grand Opera, Los Angeles Opera and Seattle Opera, "Florencia en el Amazonas" was the first Spanish language opera to be commissioned by a U.S. opera company.

   Of opera in Spanish, "there's a total lack," said Catan.  "When the Spanish Empire started collapsing, they became disconnected from the rest of Europe to such an extent that Spain really never had a romantic movement.  It didn't have an enlightenment and only now they are beginning to reconnect."

   Spain has a popular, indigenous music theater called zarzuela, "but it attracted only very minor composers.  It is not a tradition that is very close to me or even very powerful in Latin America."

   Interestingly, Catan has yet to have an opera produced in Spain, but he is working on it.  "I have an invitation to participate in a seminar in the Canary Island about opera in Spanish.  I want to bring it to the table.  I think the whole Spanish speaking world needs to inaugurate this."

   Catan's next opera, to be premiered by Los Angeles Opera under music director James Conlon in September, 2009, is "Il Postino," based on the popular Italian film.  It will star tenors Placido Domingo and Rolando Villazon as Chilean poet Pablo Neruda and Mario the postman, respectively.  "Imagine my writing for those two.  I absolutely had a wonderful time inventing duets for them." 

   Though there is no cost of admission to “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” reservations are required.  To reserve a seat, call (513) 556-4183.  For information, visit www.ccm.uc.edu.