CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Orchestra Of St. Luke's

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Sunday, December 7th, 2008 at 2:00 PM

Orchestra of St. Luke's
Robert Spano, Conductor
Dawn Upshaw, Soprano (Margarita Xirgu)
Kelley O'Connor, Mezzo-Soprano (Federico García Lorca)
Emily Albrink, Soprano (Nuria)
Jesus Montoya, Tenor (Ruiz Alonzo, the Arresting Officer)
Kyle Ferrill, Baritone (José Tripaldi, a guard)
Wade Thomas, Baritone (Maestro, a teacher)
Alex Richardson, Tenor (Torero, a bullfighter)
Adam del Monte, Flamenco Guitar
Scott Kuney, Classical Guitar
Gonzalo Grau, Percussion
Jeremy Flower, Sampler
The Women of the New York Virtuoso Singers
Harold Rosenbaum, Director

Music by Osvaldo Golijov
Libretto by David Henry Hwang
Spanish translation by Osvaldo Golijov

Program Notes:

OSVALDO GOLIJOV (b. 1960)
Ainadamar (Fountain of Tears), Opera in Three Images

Completed in 2003 and revised in 2005, Ainadamar received its world premiere on August 10, 2003, at the Tanglewood Music Center in Lenox, Massachusetts, with Dawn Upshaw, Jessica Rivera, Kelley O’Connor, vocal fellows of Tanglewood, and members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Robert Spano. This afternoon’s performance marks the work’s Carnegie Hall premiere.


As our world continues to grow smaller and more interconnected, classical music is increasingly enhanced by traditions outside its European origins. The music of Osvaldo Golijov represents that enriching mixture of cultures in miniature. Subject to a variety of musical influences during his formative years, the composer grew up in an Eastern European Jewish household in La Plata, Argentina. His mother was a piano teacher and his father a physician, and he heard classical chamber music, Jewish liturgical music, klezmer, and the tango innovations of Astor Piazzolla. He studied piano and composition in Argentina and then went to Israel and studied with Mark Kopytman at the Rubin Academy in Jerusalem, where he was again immersed in an eclectic mix of musical traditions. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied with George Crumb, and he has made his career primarily in the US ever since.

Golijov’s compositions resound with the raw “street voices” of South American popular music, mixing with echoes of klezmer, African chant, and Latin percussion. As he told an interviewer, “Let’s say a tune is pentatonic, or in some [unusual] kind of scale. It’s not about that, it’s about how the voice utters that tune—I mean, what happens to the throat when singing that tune. That’s more important than the note, than the pitches.”

The music of Golijov first came to wide popularity with the phenomenal success of his Pasión según San Marcos, its text treated similarly to those of the Bach passions but using Brazilian and African musical idioms and vocalists. Robert Spano conducted its American premiere at Tanglewood, where he and Golijov met, and in 2003 he conducted the world premiere of the composer’s first opera, Ainadamar.

The opera takes its title from a public water course in the Spanish city of Granada. The name Ainadamar derives from the original Arabic for “Fountain of Tears,” referring to the canal’s sad history as a backdrop for executions as far back as the Inquisition. A young woman named Mariana Pineda was garroted there in 1831 for her connections to those opposing the country’s repressive king, Fernando VII. Before long, she had become a folk hero, and eventually the city erected a statue of her in a public square.

The Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca (1898–1936) knew her story well. As a boy in Granada, he had but to look out his bedroom window to see the statue of this martyr. His verse-play Mariana Pineda had its first production in 1927, with sets and costumes by Salvador Dalí and starring the charismatic actress Margarita Xirgu as Pineda. Both the Barcelona premiere and a subsequent production in Madrid were acclaimed successes, and Lorca became identified with the “Generation of ‘27,” a blanket term for the young artists who flourished during the brief Spanish democracy that collapsed in the Civil War of 1936.

Francisco Franco’s right-wing forces, known as Fascists or Falangists, captured Madrid in July 1936, and Lorca fled to his hometown, but a month later the Fascists also took over Granada. The 38-year-old Lorca was captured and, along with a teacher and two bullfighters, taken to Ainadamar and shot.

With a libretto by the American dramatist David Henry Hwang (perhaps best known for his play M. Butterfly), the opera Ainadamar entwines the stories of García Lorca’s tragic death, Pineda’s cruel execution in the same spot a century earlier, and the aging Xirgu’s association throughout her career with the role of Pineda in Lorca’s play. Although often described as being about Lorca, the opera is primarily concerned with the Xirgu, whom we see at the end of her life in 1969, preparing for what will become her last performance as Mariana Pineda. Her memories of her friend the playwright and of her earlier performances in this role are dramatized as she reviews her life’s passionate commitment to freedom and truth. As Osvaldo Golijov views Ainadamar:

I see its action as a process, the peeling off of layers of Margarita’s spiritual makeup. At the beginning she might resemble Celia Cruz [the Afro-Cuban “Queen of Salsa”], buried under three inches of mascara and a flamboyant wig. Margarita is like that, but through the course of the opera, as she approaches her own death, she cleans off all those layers to approach, and even achieve, the purity of Lorca. So in the beginning we hear the extroverted sounds and music from the world of her youth – horses galloping, the balada, the rumba, very rhythmic stuff – but gradually she moves to a more interior world.

People do this when they face death. As they approach their final hour, they peel away the artifice and they finish with a sort of serenity. This is a rather anti-conventional opera in that way, since usually operas build in momentum. In this case, the first part of the opera is realistic; the second, the remembrance of Lorca’s assassination, is a nightmare; and in the third all traces of reality vanish and we enter an interior world, with Margarita’s graceful acceptance and understanding of what her life has been all about. The last 25 minutes of the opera have a different time conception from what came before.

—Nick Jones

Nick Jones is the former program annotator of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.

© 2008 Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Reprinted by permission.