Tropical Treat: LA Opera’s “Florencia en el Amazonas”

Magic Realism, as a somewhat loose literary classification, emerged from Latin America during the 1960s and ‘70s with astonishing works by Julio Cortázar, José Donoso, Mario Vargas Llosa, and of course Gabriel García Márquez. Less well known internationally, of course, are the painters and the composers who were influenced by that wonderful outpouring of fresh, inventive writing.

“Florencia en el Amazonas,” by the late Mexican composer Daniel Catán, with a libretto by Marcela Fuentes-Berain (a former friend and student of García Márquez), belongs in any consideration of the Magic Realism genre, although I’m not so sure I was convinced of that when LA Opera first presented Catán’s opera 17 years ago.

“Florencia en el Amazonas” is clearly an homage to García Márquez, and specifically his novel “Love in the Time of Cholera.” It is also heavily influenced by the fictional adventures and misadventures of Maqroll the Gaviero (the Lookout), told in a series of seven novellas by Álvaro Mutis, and presumably to some extent by Werner Herzog’s film “Fitzcarraldo.”

Operas set entirely aboard boats or ships usually have unhappy endings (Britten’s “Billy Budd;” Adams’s “The Death of Klinghoffer”), but in its final moments “Florencia” is a transcendent opera that embraces life rather than throws it away.

The story is set in the Amazon jungle (Colombia to Brazil) during the early 1900s when Manaus was a prosperous rivertown because of the rubber boom. During these few prosperous years Manaus built an opera house and for a while things were good, life was grand, until Henry Wickham was able to sneak a packet of seeds through security, so to speak, and then rubber tree plantations took root elsewhere. And so Manaus prosperity went down the tubes.

That sense of decline, of an era passing or past, suffuses “Florencia.” The eponymous character, Florencia Grimaldi (soprano Verónica Villarroel), is an aging diva who 20 years earlier had journeyed on the same river, the Amazon, with her true love Cristóbal Ribeiro da Silva. However, she chased a career as an operatic singer and became a sort of Sarah Bernhardt while Cristóbal went off into the jungle to find butterflies, specifically an elusive one called the Emerald Muse.

In a way, then, this is a kind of homecoming for Florencia. Early on she sings, “You said you’d wait forever.” Halfway through the opera she adds its corollary: “As long as I live I will search for you.” And at the end? “I know that you hear me in life or death. If you were not listening my song would cease.”

On the riverboat is the Captain (bass-baritone David Pittsinger), his restless nephew Arcadio (tenor Arturo Chacón-Cruz), a young writer, Rosalba (soprano Lisette Oropesa), a bickering middle-aged married couple, Paula (mezzo-soprano Nancy Fabiola Herrera) and Álvaro (baritone Gordon Hawkins), and a buff river spirit, Ríolobo, though he seems more like a crew member (baritone José Carbó).

The riverboat, which is not lifesize although it does take up much of the stage, pivots on a large turntable, this being efficient for scene changes as well as to move the story forward.

Leaving aside the Captain and Ríolobo, this is a romantic opera about love – both yearning and wistful. The musical palette, brought to shimmering life under the baton of Grant Gershon, seems to have been influenced in part by Debussy, Ravel, and Puccini, and so in that sense it’s neither rambunctious nor avant-garde. It does, however, swell and surge with some 13 percussive instruments enfolded into the score. Daniel Catán’s music for “Il Postino,” his last completed opera, also was quite palatable and, to use an appropriate metaphor, refrained from rocking the boat.

The singing? Truly commendable all the way around, although Carbó and Oropesa impressed me slightly more than the others – the former for his gravity, the latter for her buoyancy. As for the chorus, it’s a small group comprised of vendors and river folk who appear briefly quayside at the beginning of the opera when the passengers are boarding, the riverboat still docked but set to disembark. After this scene the chorus is through for the evening, home before 9 p.m., although the production also includes a handful of dark and slippery water sprites, modern dancers who display their youth and flexibility but are a bit of a distraction as well.

Director Francesca Zambello has revisited her earlier creation and somehow brings out more of the essence of the story. One of the things she’s done to pull in her audience is to make the set more visually alluring – and to that end we have S. Katy Tucker’s projection design, which generates the impression that the boat is actually moving, and Mark McCullough’s lighting design, which imparts a sense of sunlight reflected from the surface of the water onto the sides of the boat. The scenery designer is Robert Israel.

There are several rich, painterly moments, as when the lowered scrim at the beginning of Act II gives the appearance that the boat is mired in dense fog, and it evokes the feeling of a living, breathing canvas. In the scene just described, Florencia delivers one of her fetching arias and so it’s a sumptuous treat for both eyes and ears. In other words, “Florencia” is a somewhat spare opera with a riverboat its sole prop, and yet an opera that’s rich in cool, tropical color.

As mentioned, this is a romantic opera about love, but as the name of the boat indicates – it’s called “El Dorado” – what our starry-eyed passengers seek has been there with them all along: Arcadio and Rosalba are smitten by one another, while Paula and Álvaro realize how much they mean to each other even though they’ve been bickering constantly. The opera gets a little sappy when Álvaro, who tumbles into the river and presumably drowns, is brought back to life and to Paula. Too Disneyesque. It’s one of the few places when we may roll our eyes.

In all, though, it’s two hours well spent, and while I admit to having had reservations about the merits of this work the first time around, I now find it far more engaging today. I won’t go so far as to say it’s a great opera, but it’s a beautiful work and it places composer Daniel Cátan in the exquisite company of other Latin American masters, and not just of Magic Realism.

Florencia en el Amazonas is onstage at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown Los Angeles in the Music Center. Performances, Sunday, Nov. 30, at 2 p.m.; Wednesday, Dec. 10, at 7:30 p.m.; Sunday, Dec. 14, at 2 p.m.; Thursday, Dec. 18, at 7:30 p.m., and Saturday, Dec. 20, at 7:30 p.m. Tickets from $18. Call (213) 972-8001 or go to LAOpera.org.