FROM AROUND THE WORLD: MADRID.(Review)

Madrid's Teatro Real has unveiled a Baroque miracle that time forgot: Celos Aun del Aire Matan (Jealousy, even from the breeze, is deadly). Written in 1660 by Spain's greatest dramatist, Pedro Calderon de la Barca, and composer Juan Hidalgo, Celos is considered by scholars to be the first Spanish opera; no earlier opera score has survived intact in this country, and indeed the music to Celos remained lost for centuries. The first act resurfaced in 1933, the full opera in 1942, albeit in a skeletal score for voice and unfigured bass. The opera received its first modern reading in Cologne in 1981 (in concert form) and arrived the following year at the Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires. Those performances led to an exhaustive critical edition of the manuscripts and a new orchestration inspired by mid-seventeenth-century Spanish theater music, deeply influenced by folk motifs and dances.

For this production, dramaturg Jose Guillermo Valdecasas and musicologist Francesco Bonastre incorporated popular melodies of the period, as well as additional music by Hidalgo and others. Localisms aside, this opera's obvious musical references are to Monteverdi and Cavalli. Unlike those Italian masters, Hidalgo usually avoided arias and recitatives in favor of simple, often-repeated phrases and melodies so natural-sounding that Calderons cultured verses seem like folk poetry. One can only wonder what Spanish opera could have been if Celos had not disappeared and composers could have followed its example.

Calderon's beautiful libretto may be the best ever written in Spanish. Author of classics such as La Vida Es Sueno (Life Is a Dream), Calderon was an artist of the stature of Dante, Shakespeare or Cervantes. Goethe and Wagner revered him, but no really great composer ever dared to set his plays to music. His verses sound like music already.

Unlike many Baroque operas, Celos refers to mythology only to ...