Performing La Púrpura de la Rosa

Judith Malafronte is a singer, organist, music critic, and teacher based in Connecticut. She has sung on the MB1800 series several times, beginning in the 1980s.

In 1991 I recorded a CD of 17th century Spanish art songs with the Newberry Consort, and harpist Andrew Lawrence King was one of the extra instrumentalists. His superb musical, improvisatory, and linguistic skills in this repertoire added so much to the success of that recording, “Ay, Amor!” on harmonia mundi usa. I was delighted, then, when in 1997 he invited me for performances and a recording of “La Púrpura de la Rosa,” whose premiere in Lima in 1701 marked it as the first opera ever given in the Americas.

At that time there were no other recordings of Torrejón y Velasco’s setting of Calderón’s mythological Venus and Adonis libretto, although Gabriel Garrido’s Ensemble Elyma released a CD in 2000, the year after ours came out, following their performances at the Grand Théâtre de Genève. I had not done Spanish music for several years, and still had very few vocal models for confronting this repertoire, but I was game to try.

Without distinct arias and recitatives, or even a through-composed arioso flow to the musical writing, the style of “La Púrpura de la Rosa” was unfamiliar to me. Many scenes are organized around strophic repetitions of a chord scheme, and the text is dense, flowery, philosophical, and sophisticated. The score includes several large-scale repetitive units, strophic coplas and estribillo refrains, along with Pasacalle forms. Musicologist Louise K. Stein had made an excellent edition of the opera, and Andrew Lawrence King’s musical preparation was superb, but there were pages and pages where we had to fit large swaths of text to a repeating melody. As dutiful singers, attentive to text, we worked hard at making word accents, poetic units, and rhymes seem natural as well as theatrically appropriate.

There was a lot of emotion surrounding the recording project. My mother had just died and I went straight from her funeral to JFK, where I flew to Amsterdam. The very first person I met was Pat O’Brien. Pat later became a good friend and frequent colleague, but back then I knew him as a legend, an icon, an imposing figure in the land of lute. He was all that, and he had taught everybody, but he was also a warm, witty, quiet genius, lending me silent support throughout the project. The day of our second rehearsal, we all awoke to the news of Princess Diana’s fatal car accident in Paris. Suddenly everyone seemed to share my baffled and vulnerable state, so the tragedy of Venus and Adonis unfolded in counterpoint to the emotional aftermath of the loss of The People’s Princess, as well as my own personal grief.

Another amazing instrumentalist I met on this gig was Steve Player, who danced, played guitar, sang, and seemed to exist on a parallel plane in relationship to the piece. While the rest of us were working from heavily annotated scores, he seemed to be reliving a past life with an intuitive connection to the essence of the material. It is always wonderful to have at least one dancer on a gig, and Steve was infinitely inspiring to me and to the rest of the continuo team, which included such superstars as Lee Santana, Hille Perl, and Paul O’Dette.

Our “Púrpura” project is also where I met tenor Douglas Nasrawi. Seventeenth-century operas, like Shakespeare’s plays, combine seriousness with comic relief, and “Púrpura” has its share of levity. Doug was cast in the role of the peasant gardener Chato, who spends most of the opera arguing with his wife Celfa (sung by the lovely Nancy Mayer) about the boring aspects of marriage, scenes that contrast with the lofty and courtly language of the primary couple, Venus and Adonis. When I asked Doug about his memories of this gig, he answered: “I remember Andrew introducing the singers at the first rehearsal. He said, ‘and Nancy and Doug will be providing the comic relief.’” Doug insists that I responded, “I’ll be the judge of that.” Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t.

As I was singing Venus, my main musical partner was soprano Ellen Hargis, a longtime musical friend and frequent collaborator, as Adonis. We had fun switching genders, as the male role of Adonis lies higher than the part of Venus. She was used to presenting as a female soprano heroine, while I always enjoyed breeches and swords in mezzo-soprano trouser roles. As you can imagine, in an era when women were stuffed into tight tops and had to navigate mountainous skirts, men’s costumes were a lot more comfortable. Ellen and I have always enjoyed singing and clothes shopping together, so we took advantage of the concert version we were presenting to costume ourselves appropriately. I got to be the glamourous Venus in a golden gown, while she purchased a gorgeous velvet tunic patterned in green leaves, to suggest the forest where much of the opera’s action takes place.

For some reason, the proper pronunciation of the heroine’s name, BAY-noose, cracked everybody up, and we English speakers were corrected every time we strayed.

The soprano singing the role of Marte (Mars), was María del Mar Fernández Doval, and I envied her authentic, sharply detailed handling of the text, particularly the many quickly moving syllabic passages. Mars is the god of war, after all, and María brought a wonderful energy to the role. I was also in awe of Gloria Banditelli, the graceful and stylish Italian mezzo-soprano, in the role of the soldier Dragón.

Recently I asked Andrew Lawrence King to look back on our work. Having pursued countless Spanish musical projects in the meantime, he admits that “we were on the right track. We came at that first recording of ‘Ay, Amor’ with no clue. We didn’t know the performance practice conventions, so we relied on our knowledge of French and Italian repertoire, which wasn’t really applicable.” He credits his 1994 instrumental project with The Harp Consort, “Luz y Norte,” with helping him develop a sense of the different dance types, and how to make what he calls “the three chord trick” work for various rhythmic contours. On the page many Spanish and Latin American dances look similar, with the same three chords, but you need to figure out “the emotional groove” for each one. In developing a continuo band, he says “Pat O’Brien was key to this – he showed us that these big bands of guitars needed to be all different sizes, with more in the middle range. The mosquitos, the very small Spanish guitars, are strumming the fastest, giving real bite. The larger guitars give resonance and move more slowly.” Andrew realized that the musical genre of Pasacalles is not a French or Italian imitation, but a concept of “vamp till ready, of establishing the harmonies and feel of a piece. They can be introductions, interludes, or postludes. They can be used in between verses, or to make time for things happening on stage, and it puts the continuo player in charge of tying the show together.”

So what’s old and what’s new with “Púrpura”?  Current hot topics are whether or not Torrejón composed the entire opera (music by Juan Hidalgo is almost certainly included) and if the Jácaras in this score are actually Jácaras, spirited pieces for lowlife characters. Lawrence King now thinks they are not, because they lack the complex syncopations that even obscure the downbeat, but let’s leave this for another day. After all, our nearly 30-year-old recording is not too shabby!