IBSEN ON THE BEACH

In Spain, Francisco Coll turns "An Enemy of the People" into an opera.

- BY ALEX ROSS

Opera landed in Spain in 1627, less than three decades after the art first arose, in Florence. That year, Italian expatriates in Madrid presented “La Selva sin Amor” (“The Forest Without Love”), with a libretto by the towering Spanish playwright Félix Lope de Vega and music by Filippo Piccinini and Bernardo Monanni. No one took much notice. At a time when Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca, and Cervantes were weaving verbal spells upon the stage, music must have seemed a superfluous addition—just as, in England, the mighty lines of Marlowe and Shakespeare hardly cried out for melodic elaboration. A few decades later, the first zarzuela operas launched a homegrown music-theatre tradition, although their mixture of song and spoken text proved difficult to export. In the centuries that followed, Spanish opera found little international resonance. To date, the Met has staged only two works from Spain: Enrique Granados’s “Goyescas,” in 1916, and Manuel de Falla’s “La Vida Breve,” in 1926.

To see Spanish opera, then, you have to go to the source. Last month, in Valencia, I attended the world première of Francisco Coll’s “Enemigo del Pueblo,” an adaptation of Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People.” The setting was the Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía, Santiago Calatrava’s futuristic beached whale of an opera house, which opened in 2005. Despite endless controversy over the design—the building cost hundreds of millions of dollars and required extensive modifications to remain functional—the resident company has found a prominent place on the European scene. Its glory is its youthful orchestra, the Orquestra de la Comunitat Valenciana, which plays with greater fire and focus than many more venerable ensembles.