Word: franco
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...work is the fruit of a genuine romance between the opera's composer, longtime Costello keyboardist Steve Nieve, and the writer and psychoanalyst Muriel Teodori, who wrote the Franco-English libretto. First released as a Deutsche Grammophon recording in 2007, the opera recounts the story of Greek immigrant steelworker Dionysos (played by a bearded Sting), who falls in love with an opera diva, much to the consternation of his blue-collar buddies. His stalker-like obsession nearly gets him incarcerated by the police commissioner (a hulking, black-robed Costello), but with a little supernatural intervention by the ghosts of operas...
...Along the way, he tells the tale of Galicia, a cold, rainy, and stubbornly independent piece of Spain on the Atlantic Ocean. It is "a patchwork of small, low-intensity farms...real working countryside" and home to Don Quixote's Miguel de Cervantes, longtime Spanish dictator General Francisco Franco, and the Castro family (of the Havana Castros). Barlow's gastronomic travelogue manages to make the place sound utterly depressing and enchanting at the same time...
...years, Spain's Socialist government has made some efforts to redress the complaints of victims of the regime and their family members. The Law of Historical Memory, passed in 2007, provides pensions for soldiers who fought in the Republican army and includes a provision that denies the legitimacy of Franco's political trials. But for someone like Silva, whose own grandfather, an activist with a progressive party called Republican Left, was assassinated by pro-Franco Falangists in 1936, that law doesn't go far enough. "The political branch of the government is still refusing to publicly recognize the victims...
...Julián Casanova, a historian at the University of Zaragoza, sees Garzón ruling as a historic turning point. "It's true that recently we've seen a move toward retributive justice [for Franco's victims]," he says. "But this opens the way for the punitive justice that I've long thought we needed...
...country where some members of Franco's regime continued to hold office long after the dictatorship ended, not everyone supports the decision - including the court's lead prosecutor, who is appealing the ruling. Senator Agustín Conde, spokesperson on judicial affairs for the opposition Popular Party, lamented that Garzón was "reopening wounds that were happily healed," and an editorial in the center-right paper El Mundo warned that "the politics of memory are nasty" and constitute a "bloodless form of vengeance...