Llorca: Artist-Opera, Composer-Politics and the Internets

W e now need to look beyond restrictive theories; beyond galleries with their exclusive, radical agendas; beyond, even, artists themselves—and focus all our attention, and every critical fibre we can muster, on the works that are being produced today, wherever they come from and whoever makes them.”
  —  Julian Spalding, ‘The Eclipse of Art’, 2003

DSM: The performance by Agrupación Coral Benidorm (Benidorm Choral Ensemble) and members of the Julius-Stern-Institut für musikalische Nachwuchsförderung of the Universität der Künste Berlin last night was novel and exciting.

• Director: Matias de Oliviera Pinto
  
• Piano: Anastassiya Dranchuk
  
• Soprano: Laila Salome Fischer
  
• Speaker: Anna Thalbach

CMT: ‘Las Horas Vacías’, Ricardo Llorca’s chamber opera for soprano, chorus, piano and a chamber orchestra, premiered at the Sacred Music Festival of Benidorm, is a work about a woman, isolated in her executive role, trying to find meaningful interaction with other people—a lover?—via the internet.

DSM: More broadly, ‘The Empty Hours’ proposes to be a psycho-opera. It’s an extended meditation on the loneliness and feelings of ennui and meaninglessness that are prevalent in Western societies. It’s not a scholastic piece, it’s not an Adorno-style ‘negative dialectical’ set-piece—it’s accessible and and the music is moving. I would say, though, that it looks like Llorca’s very much in the tradition of Spanish tragedians like Cervantes.


CMT: Llorca indulges in extended passages with bitonal harmony—purposefully—not with a superficial aim to unsettle the listener, but to advance the plot.

DSM: The score is organic, approachable. The timbral qualities of the soprano’s voice are extensively explored, in ways that are complemented by the orchestration. The writing for each instrument is lyrical—the only part of the score that’s self-conscious is the extensive bitonality—two keys simultaneously, clashing.

CMT: As new music goes, ‘The Empty Hours’ is something of a hybrid, both traditional and contemporary. It establishes its narrative with a harmonic and melodic foundation that’s not tonal but not atonal either—it might accurately be called non-atonal.

DSM: Llorca says that, due to the absence of a single unifying tendency or a specific defining style in new music today, he and other composers of new music are forced to choose between continuing along the path of experimentation or returning to a classical framework. The opera, to him, represents a middle ground—an escape from this dichotomy.


CMT: Llorca is 45—he was born in 1962 in Alicante on the southeastern coast of Spain, and he studied in Madrid at the Royal Conservatory under Román Alis, Luigi Nono, Carmelo Bernaola, and Luis de Pablo. For the past 20 years Llorca has lived in New York. He completed his studies at Juilliard, where he worked with composers David Diamond and John Corigliano, and then joined the Juilliard faculty. In 2001, he received the John Simon Guggenheim Award for his composing.

DSM: Llorca has had a number of important commissions, including the Virginia Luque Debut Recital at Carnegie Hall; the Julliard Performing Arts Program for Schools; the Composers and Choreographers Series at Lincoln Center; the Queen Sofía Spanish Institute; Sensedance; the Centro para la Difusión de la Musica Contemporanea; the Festival Internacional Andrés Segovia; the Junta de Castilla-La Mancha; the Grupo de Musica Barroca ‘La Folia’; the Festival de Musica Colombo-Catalana; the Setmana de Musica Sacra; and the French Institute-Alliance Française.


CMT: Llorca’s compositions currently include:

• Tres piezas para piano y orquesta: ‘El tiempo malherido,’ ‘El fin de la inocencia,’ ‘La avalancha’;
  
• Concierto Italiano para flauta de pico, guitarra, clave continuo y orquesta de cuerdas;
  
• Tres piezas academicas para piano: ‘Sarao,’ ‘Coral,’ ‘Fuga’;
  
• The Dark Side (monodrama for mezzosoprano and piano);
  
• El Ángel Caído (The Fallen Angel);
  
• The Swimming Pool; and
  
• The Empty Hours (Las Horas Vacías, monodrama).

DSM: ‘The Empty Hours’ combines traditional compositional techniques with modern and post-modern musical elements. 17th Century recitatives are amended with contemporary motives and polyrhythms. The role of Llorca’s recitatives is not one of evoking nostalgia, though, or merely providing a foil for the contrasting aggressive passages. The recitatives have the effect of revealing the ‘disconnects’ in personhood, the multiple ‘selves’ that we are comprised of. Not just the multiplicity of the selves that we outwardly present to others, but the multiplicity of selves that we are inside. In other words, the combination of compositional techniques does shed light on Llorca’s politics—on the political arguments of his operatic essay.

CMT: Through the opera, the protagonist Frau experiences a series of self-doubts and reflections. She is totally absorbed by her job, a series of negotiations with investors and presentations to business clients. By the conclusion I had expected that she would reach a kind of meta-stable stance, a non-resolution to the human predicament but one that achieves a degree of dignity and meaning. That’s what I’d been led to anticipate from the pre-performance press...

W  hen actions are merely diagnostic of outcomes rather than causal, the analysis of [personal autonomy and] choice becomes problematic... The cognitive dissonance can be reduced by re-evaluating the state of affairs. But cognitive dissonance theory does not claim that people must engage in actions that are ‘diagnostic’ of an inference in order to accept the inference. And dissonance theory is not inconsistent with the notion that people may choose actions that enable them to make favourable inferences.”
  —  George Quattrone and Amos Tversky, 'Self-Deception', in Jon Elster, ‘The Multiple Self’, 1987

DSM: The performance by Julius-Stern-Institute of Berlin was admirable—earnest and beautiful. At the Institut about 70 gifted students between 9 and 19 years receive a comprehensive musical education alongside a general curriculum. The Julius-Stern-Institut chamber orchestra was established in late 1999.

CMT: Matias de Oliveira Pinto’s conducting was passionate and sensitive to the requirements of the composition. The ensemble is comprised of young players—for whom bitonal writing could be confusing. Hell, dissonances so extensive as these can be confusing to players of any age, of any level of experience. But de Oliveira Pinto provides ample cues and support. With such a ‘safety net’ the performers can devote themselves to their parts, can invest themselves emotionally in their parts.


DSM: Anastassiya Dranchuk’s piano was suitably ‘metronomic’, in keeping with the score.

CMT: Bell-like, clock-like eighth notes—especially in the reverberous Berliner Dom. Yes, Dranchuk was relentless and precise in her performance. The piano and orchestra are, essentially, the ‘other’ subject in the opera—the antagonist to the ‘Frau’ protagonist. They represent the world, the relentless passage of time—the context within which human beings either find and create meaning or fail to do so.

DSM: Dranchuk’s piano is the core of Llorca’s ‘minimalism’ in this opera—the glue that holds the texture of the opera together.

CMT: As well as the harbinger introducing new motifs or announcing the reprise of previous ones.

DSM: The 29-voice Benidorm choir was a bit muddy. But that’s not their fault—Llorca has too many passages where there is a Tower of Babel of competing voices. Maybe in a studio or a smaller hall with more congenial acoustics this writing would be okay. But, really, I think the compositional techniques in the rest of the score have already ample abstractions symbolizing the fragmentation of society, the isolation, the loss of identity that accompanies technology, the dark side of technology that enables radical autonomy (or technology that inadvertently prevents people who need competent professional help from seeking and getting such help).

CMT: The string players’ performance was admirable. Llorca’s score allocates interesting passages to each of the parts, and the Julius-Stern-Institut members rose to the occasion.

DSM: Laila Salome Fischer’s singing was capable. Her part has a number of technically difficult staccato passages, for instance. Her intonation was spot-on, and she nicely accommodated her diction to the cavernous Dom sanctuary. Well done!

CMT: Anna Thalbach’s oration was too self-absorbed. She emitted giggles several times that sounded very much the way a teen-age girl sounds when she is on the phone with friends. If the score calls for those, then perhaps Thalbach’s effect is the one that Llorca did intend. But it seemed inconsistent with any plausible introspection regarding ‘emptiness’ of our post-modern hours. If this Geschäftsführerin’s hours are truly ‘empty’, then the existential weight of them should be felt by the character. I was expecting and hoping for this existential weight, but I never got it. Thalbach never experienced it, never delivered it; and Llorca never wrote it.

H ello? Hello?
I think you’re connected ’cause I see your name on the screen.
Yes? ...Hello? Hello? Are you there?
Hello?
Ah!... Shall I tell you?
Wednesday was a nightmare with the new employees;
Who did everything wrong:
Photocopies, bills of sale, contracts sent off with no signature.
So I had to fix up everything, staying late to correct their mistakes
And getting home with my eyes exhausted,
And too late for dinner.
And then I only got a few hours sleep
Since I had to be at a meeting on Thursday morning
Again !!! with the new investors,
Who never missed a chance to criticize,
To inspect, oversee, and appraise,
Coming and going as they saw fit,
Correcting, controlling,
And meddling in things they can’t understand,
And no concept of the work involved...”
  — Frau, The Empty Hours libretto

DSM: I think the Berliner Dom’s crackly, distorted PA system is partly to blame for that.

CMT: Hmmm. Well, to the contrary, I in fact liked the creaky PA system through which Thalbach’s voice was amplified. I thought that its antique-ey, distorted sound lent a certain remoteness, a telephone-ey distance to the text. The physical or social isolation of Thalbach’s character was convincing because of the telephonic timbre that the PA system imparted. It was consistent with some of Llorca’s tendencies to use ‘found’ sounds and electro-acoustic effects in other of his compositions.


DSM: It might be interesting for a woman of 40 years or older—40 or 50 or 60, say—to perform the speaker role in The Empty Hours, don’t you think?

CMT: For a more world-weary, world-savvy, business-savvy demeanor you mean? For a perspective more realistic in portraying a female Managing Director? Yes, I think that would be more in keeping with the thematic aspirations of Llorca’s opera. Obviously, that’s not possible if the ensemble who’s performing is the young Julius-Stern-Institut group. But, yes, in other productions of this opera I think a speaker of a certain age would be a good idea. It’s hard to carry off the part of a business woman, a Managing Director no less, if you’re only 18 years old.

More than this, though, I think Llorca is way ‘over the top’ with the text of the libretto—the Geschäftsführerin’s ‘It’s all about me’ attitude. It’s hard to conceive of anyone so self-absorbed as this Frau; hard to conceive of any partner, online or otherwise, who would put up with such a person’s egotism and narcissism—conveyed by the words that the libretto puts in the Frau’s mouth/keyboard.

More than that, though, my impression from the libretto is that Llorca’s conception of online social networking and text-messaging—among business people—is flawed. The exchanges (for example, the excerpt above) are so implausible that it makes me wonder whether Llorca has ever used any Web 2.0 apps; makes me wonder whether he himself is online much at all, or whether he instead chose this online-culture conceit only for its topicality-cachet. The Internets! Okay—this opera proposes to be about online culture. But it clumsily depicts online culture—not even close to reality. The libretto could be convincing if the Frau’s lines weren’t so histrionic and confessional. If the text resembled actual online dialogues of real business people it would be effective and believable. No business woman in a position of any responsibility ever utters sentences like this ditzy, histrionic Frau’s. ‘I think you’re connected because I see your name on the screen.’ Please. If a thought or gesture like this actually arose in the course of online chat or solicitation of chat, what do you imagine would be the reaction? Loser! Flee at great speed!

What I mean is, I don’t think Llorca’s intent was to create an opera that takes a cynical, disparaging view of business women—but that’s in fact what he’s inadvertently done. A cynical, disparaging critique of hyper-capitalism, yes—that may be part of Llorca’s politics and part of what he intends. But I don’t believe he means to evoke this disparaging view of business women as self-absorbed, needy, hysterical Web 2.0 incompetents, unfulfilled and estranged from family and community. We can’t identify with this character if the portrayal is false or unrealistic. And we can’t identify with the character if the qualities she possesses are so off-putting and unlikable. Parasitic. Hours can have emptiness in contemporary social contexts even for full, whole every-woman/every-man characters; Llorca didn’t need to give us this empty, damaged woman character to enable the exploration of emptiness and social impoverishment.

I mean, I wouldn’t want to meet a business woman like this one in real life. And I have never met such a one in real life, in my own more than 30 years in business in the U.S. We wouldn’t tolerate such a portrayal of women today in theatre, television, film, literature. (Well, maybe we would if the woman character were a psychotic killer in a ‘B’ horror movie or a ‘so-bad-it’s-good’ cheesy TV soap-opera.) So I can’t accept that such a characterization of us should here be thought ‘artistic’ or have critical punches pulled merely because it is in this medium. It should not get a free pass just because it is opera—wrapping it up as opera with a chamber ensemble and chamber choir can’t immunize the work from criticism that it deserves. The music is fine if you ‘go’ for minimalist abstraction, but the libretto seriously needs a re-do.

DSM: Wow. Because I don’t speak German, I didn’t grasp the feminist aspects you’re upset by. Even without understanding the words, however, I do recognize your point about the young speaker, Anna Thalbach. If the lines were delivered with a coolness and detachment calibrated by more decades of living, it might’ve mitigated some of the problems inherent in the text itself. And I do acknowledge your point about hyper-capitalism—or more specifically your implication that Llorca has no realistic notion of business at all. Consider his ignorance of the rights and duties that investment bankers and venture capitalists have in the operations of the companies they invest in, for example. That ignorance yields a libretto that makes the Frau say stupid, unrealistic things. Evidently Juilliard is very far away from Wall Street. In all, though, you’ll agree that this performance was an outstanding element of Musikfestival Berlin.

CMT: Yes—all opportunities to hear new music are welcome. Push our envelope anytime! But sometimes we may push back.

O nly by considering the views of Spaniards themselves can we test the validity of our own perceptions and perhaps rethink how we arrived at them in the first place. ‘Giving to art objects a cultural significance,’ as Clifford Geertz says, becomes then a matter for both insiders and outsiders.”
  —  Carol Hess, ‘Manuel de Falla and Modernism in Spain’, 2002, p. 2.

• Ricardo Llorca website
  
• Matias de Oliveira Pinto website
  
• Musik Festival Berlin website
  
• Julius-Stern-Institut website
  
• Llorca R. El Tiempo Malerido. (RTVE, 2005.)
  
• Llorca R. Concerto Italiano / The Dark Side / Tres Piezas. (Columna Musica, 2006.)
  
• Llorca R. Concerto Italiano. (Columna Musica, 2004.)
  
• Adorno T. Philosophy of New Music. Univ Minnesota, 2006.
  
• Antokoletz E, Antokoletz J. Musical Symbolism in the Operas of Debussy and Bartok: Trauma, Gender, and the Unfolding of the Unconscious. Oxford Univ, 2004.
  
• Calinescu M. Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism. Duke Univ, 1987.
  
• de Falla M. On Music and Musicians. Boyar, 1981.
  
• de Unamuno M, Kerrigan A, Nozick M, eds. The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations. Princeton Univ, 1978.
  
• Elster J, ed. The Multiple Self. Cambridge Univ, 1987.
  
• Geist A. Modernism and Its Margins: Reinscribing Cultural Modernity from Spain and Latin America. Routledge, 1999.
  
• Spalding J. The Eclipse of Art. Prestel, 2003.
  
• Taylor-Jay C. The Artist-Operas of Pfitzner, Krenek, and Hindemith: Politics and the Ideology of the Artist. Ashgate, 2004.