Staying Fit
When an English professor suggested to Jorge Martín that the highly acclaimed memoir Before Night Falls be made into an opera, the composer balked.
The 1993 autobiography of the late Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas contained a vast cast of characters. Numerous vignettes. Multiple layers of deep, complex issues. Censorship. Political persecution. Homosexuality. Life in exile. The wracking, debilitating pain of AIDS.
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"I said, 'You’re crazy,'"recalls Martín. "I thought, 'You can’t put that on stage.' It was an epic, it was a whole life story."
But the idea of rendering Before Night Falls for the operatic stage took hold and, more than a decade later, promises to be the Cuban American composer’s breakthrough work: Martín’s first full-scale opera will debut next year at the 2010 Fort Worth Opera Festival.
At two and a half hours, the opera—performed in English with Spanish supertitles—is the most ambitious and longest single work that Martín, 50, has undertaken. "I'm excited," says Martín, whose oeuvre includes several one-act operas, chamber music, and other orchestral and choral works. "It's very rare that new operas get produced."
For Darren K. Woods, general director of the Fort Worth Opera and a fan of both the book and the 2000 film version of Before Night Falls, staging the work became imperative following a workshop presentation last summer at the Seagle Music Colony in upstate New York.
"We performed the piece with young artists and piano. The audience was rapt throughout the entire performance and at the end erupted into an ovation the likes of which we rarely see," says Woods. "The opera transcends the book and the movie. This is literally a story that had to be sung to reach its fullest potential."
Read about Martín's creative processin composing Before Night Falls.