Word: goya
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...still cling to life on the edges of repertory. Although it has been years since Menotti has had a hit, his name still means opera to those for whom annual Christmas telecasts of the treacly Amahl and the Night Visitors were a cultural high point. Goya, however, is a new low: a brazen melange of elements from Traviata and Puccini's La Rondine, served up with music that is a degenerate descendant of the once proud lyric tradition. Sung in English, Goya may be the piece that writes fine to Italian opera...
Conceived, at his request, as a starring vehicle for Spanish-born Supertenor Placido Domingo, Goya was given a handsome $1.1 million production by the Washington Opera before an opening-night audience in the Kennedy Center that included Queen Sophia of Spain and glitterati from two continents. It is being broadcast nationally this week on PBS. So far, so laudable...
...what is one to make of an opera about the life and turbulent times of Francisco Goya (Domingo, in robust voice) that omits almost every significant incident in the painter's life? Of a work that concentrates on a historically disputed love affair with the Duchess of Alba (Mezzo-Soprano Victoria Vergara), concluding with a gratuitous mad scene, replete with writhing spirits and fun-house demons? Of a score whose one striking musical device, an insistent, high-pitched whine signifying Goya's deafness, is borrowed from Smetana's string quartet From My Life...
...composer who employs himself as a librettist has a fool for a collaborator. Goya's scan-deep profundity is revealed in such apercus as "I have to paint to live. But I only live to paint." Never once, though, does Goya show its hero in the throes of creation. There is little sense of the penetrating psychological insight of his official portraits, and important events like his rise to court painter are only alluded to, or take place offstage. The horrors of the Napoleonic invasion, reflected in Goya masterpieces like the stark, brutal The Third of May, 1808, are suggested...
Menotti's musical wares -- Puccini with a little water, Mussorgsky with the Mussorgsky removed -- may once have been serviceable. But in Goya, and in its equally forlorn predecessor La Loca, written in 1979 for Beverly Sills, the music no longer has any discernible creative impulse; instead it seems to have been composed by the yard, measured to fit and then snipped off with blunt pinking shears. Menotti has recently confessed that "I have my doubts about how important my music is." After Goya, he may be the only one who does...