The passengers aboard this ship of fools for love are inspired by the late Colombian literary lion, and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Gabriel García Márquez, although this work is not an operatic adaptation of any of his novels per se. However, Amazonas thematically departs from Conrad’s meditation on imperialism and reversion to savagery: This 1997 work, with a libretto by Marcela Fuentes-Berain, is about that elusive quest not for ivory but for “a crazy little thing called love,” as Freddie Mercury so eloquently put it. Regarding plot, it is more like Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella Heart of Darkness, with its tale of ivory traders embarking on an odyssey into the jungle.īut instead of floating down the Congo River on a steamboat into “deepest, darkest” Central Africa, the opera’s El Dorado (as the paddle wheeler is symbolically named) traverses the Amazon River, from Leticia (Colombia) to Manaus, Brazil, the Amazon’s largest city and a major port for ocean vessels, although it’s about 1000 miles from the Atlantic. In terms of stagecraft and theatrical special effects, composer Daniel Catán’s Amazonas is superb, even exceeding the Broadway production of Phantom (which is, of course, set largely in an opera house) in onstage visual wizardry. LOS ANGELES – Who says the operatic art form is dead? Simply put, Florencia en el Amazonas is among the finest operas this reviewer has ever seen.
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