LORCA’S GHOST IN FRACTURED LIGHT
“Verde que te quiero verde…” The first time I heard Lorca’s Romance Sonámbulo, its incantatory line “Green, how I want you green” slipped under my skin. The poem’s haunted beauty and dreamlike dread were something to feel rather than simply understand. That sensation returned at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, where LA Opera unveiled Osvaldo Golijov‘s Ainadamar.
Daniela Mack as Federico García Lorca
This opera does not aim for a clear portrait of Federico García Lorca. Instead, it explodes his story into fragments. At just over eighty minutes, it unfolds less as a biography and more as an invocation. What appears is not Lorca whole, but a broken, flickering presence. The experience is disorienting, jagged, and when it connects, it feels like possession.
A scene from Ainadamar 
Set on the night of actress Margarita Xirgu’s final performance in Uruguay, the opera plunges into her memories, evoking Lorca’s murder by Franco’s regime, their deep artistic bond, and the turmoil of 1930s Spain. Xirgu was not only Lorca’s collaborator but his artistic twin, bringing life to his most daring works when others hesitated. After his execution, she carried his legacy through exile, staging his plays across Latin America, banned as they were in Spain. Ana María Martínez, as Margarita, moves through this surreal landscape with strength and sorrow. Director Deborah Colker leans fully into the hallucinatory, crafting the piece not as historical drama but as fever dream. Disjointed visuals and surreal transitions reflect Margarita’s fragmented recollections.
Ana María Martínez as Margarita Xirgu
The opera’s emotional pull lies in its embrace of brokenness, a quality that resonates with an audience craving stories that resist easy closure. Golijov shapes this in a score that rejects clean lines. Lorca’s poetry, politics, and identity emerge as intertwined losses. Audiences respond to this ambiguity. In a culture drained by over-explanation, Ainadamar speaks through music, emotion, and spirit.
Solo dancer Isaac Tovar
Lorca becomes dangerous in this work not only for his politics but for how inseparable his art was from his identity. As Spain’s preeminent poet and playwright, he bridged tradition with the avant-garde. His execution in 1936, weeks into the Spanish Civil War, made him an early victim of Franco’s revolt against the Republic. Spain was a nation divided, with fascist movements gaining ground. Lorca’s support for leftist ideals, his embrace of Romani culture, and his homosexuality marked him as a target. Shot and buried in an unmarked grave, his death became a symbol of silenced creativity. Franco’s dictatorship lasted nearly forty years, stifling countless voices like Lorca’s.
Vanessa Becerra (center) as Nuria, with chorus and dancers
While history anchors Ainadamar, it is Golijov’s daring music that animates this weight, turning it into something alive and charged. He does not merely reference flamenco or cante jondo (Andalusian sad folk songs). These forms are reshaped and made volatile. The music is less a narrative and more a landscape of tectonic tension, forever shifting. Flamenco is not an ornament but a core element. Cante jondo, with its sorrowful depth, mirrors Lorca’s obsession with duende, that dark force of creation rooted in anguish. Golijov does not quote it, he transforms it, unsettling the listener at every turn.
Alfredo Tejada as Ramón Ruiz Alonso
Caribbean rhythms enter and disrupt, not as exotic color but as essential currents that push against flamenco’s gravity. This interplay brings movement and life, connecting Lorca’s imagined afterlife with places he never reached, like Cuba, where his spirit lingers in longing. Golijov also touches on late Romanticism, weaving in fleeting Straussian textures that shimmer briefly before vanishing. These moments give weight, but only for an instant, hinting at classical roots discarded in the face of political and personal collapse.
Solo dancer Laura Peralta
What makes the score truly alive is its refusal to resolve contradictions. It does not flow; it crashes. Hypnotic harp figures are shattered by flamenco claps, brass outbursts cut through silence. The music’s violence is deliberate, mirroring Lorca’s own fragmented life and work. Alfredo Tejada’s flamenco vocals as the fascist Ruiz Alonso are not just ominous, they are ceremonial, almost exorcistic. The audience is jolted, not guided.
Ana María Martínez as Margarita Xirgu
Even silence becomes a voice. In “Desde mi ventana,” Daniela Mack’s singing, fragile over sparse harp and strings, allows absence to speak. It is a rare moment of delicate beauty, soon torn by the return of violence. The music is unstable, often threatening collapse, and in this instability lies its brilliance. It mirrors Lorca’s refusal to be contained or explained. Golijov scores not a life but a haunting. Lorca remains, burning.
Vanessa Becerra as Nuria and Ana María Martínez as Margarita Xirgu
As vivid as the score is, the opera’s libretto, by David Henry Hwang and translated into Spanish by Golijov, often fails to meet the poetic bar set by Lorca himself. Where Romance Sonámbulo conjures visceral imagery through repetition and rhythm, the libretto’s language veers toward the flat or prosaic. Take Lorca’s line “La muerte me está mirando desde las torres de Córdoba” (“Death is watching me from the towers of Córdoba”). It gestures at Lorca’s metaphysical register without quite arriving there. Margarita’s “Te recuerdo bajo la lluvia” (“I remember you beneath the rain”) line tries for lyrical recursion but lands just shy of haunting. When Nuria, a (fictional) student of Margarita’s, speaks of fountains (“fuentes”) and blood (“sangre”), the words lack the dreamlike compression that made Lorca’s original verse feel simultaneously ancient and avant-garde. There is something mildly dissonant in watching a celebration of linguistic genius delivered through borrowed, often blunt text.
Ana María Martínez as Margarita Xirgu
Still, the fragmented structure of the opera mirrors Lorca’s own experiments with time and memory. Margarita’s memories spiral and loop, invoking Lorca across eras. While individual lines may lack power, the architecture of the libretto allows the spirit of his work to flicker through.
Vanessa Becerra as Nuria
Visually, Colker surrounds the performers with shifting projections—tears, slogans, dreams (Video Designer Tal Rosner). These enhance the emotional range but can overwhelm. When Margarita’s face is projected, mouthing lyrics alongside the live performance, the effect turns strange, disrupting the connection between singer and audience. In contrast, moments of visual restraint, like a single shaft of light during Lorca’s final hours, achieve a haunted emptiness that more elaborate scenes miss (Paul Keogan, lights).
Daniela Mack (white suit) and Ana María Martínez (flowered dress)
Choreography by Antonio Najarro emerges as the most powerful visual language. Dancers embody political trauma, turning bodies into symbols of repression and longing. In a striking sequence, Margarita invites Lorca to Cuba. They dance in joy, which dissolves into dread as dancers encircle him, foretelling doom. The execution scenes avoid literalism. Instead, dancers form arches like prison cells, limbs becoming instruments of torture. The violence is abstract but deeply felt. This blending of flamenco and modernist movement creates a visual poetry that honors Lorca’s spirit.
Daniela Mack as Federico García Lorca and Ana María Martínez as Margarita Xirgu
The vocal performances root the opera’s spectral ambition. Mack’s mezzo brings both gravity and lyrical beauty to Lorca, though the ethereal voice of a counter-tenor would have better captured his liminality. Martínez, as Margarita, commands the stage, especially in quiet moments where her voice thins yet stays precise. She shifts with time, embodying the young actress, the exiled artist, and the haunted soul with vocal finesse. Becerra’s Nuria grows into her role, her voice carrying Lorca’s words into the future.
Resident Conductor Lina González-Granados
The LA Opera Orchestra, led by Lina González-Granados, delivered flashes of brilliance. Some passages faltered with uncertain transitions. Yet in key moments, particularly during Lorca’s execution, the orchestra found a searing unity that left a lasting impression.
Vanessa Becerra as Nuria and Ana María Martínez as Margarita Xirgu
Ainadamar does not resolve, nor does it try to. It vibrates with the restless energy of memory, resisting the comfort of a finished portrait. Lorca does not emerge fully formed but flickers at the edge, elusive and urgent. The opera’s ambitions stretch at times, but its intensity never falters. For those willing to sit inside its fractures, it offers something rare—art that does not explain but haunts.
Ana María Martínez (center) as Margarita Xirgu
In this insistence on incompleteness lies its power. In a world wrestling with erasure and control, Golijov and Colker refuse the illusion of wholeness. Ainadamar speaks to the stories that remain jagged, the voices that echo precisely because they were never meant to be silenced. Lorca’s ghost is not pacified but summoned, his presence burning through the gaps we cannot close. This is not remembrance. It is invocation.
photos by Cory Weaver
Ainadamar
LA Opera
co-production of the Metropolitan Opera, Opera Ventures,
Scottish Opera, Detroit Opera, and Welsh National Opera
Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 North Grand Ave.
1 hour and 20 minutes without intermission
in Spanish with English and Spanish subtitles
ends on May 18, 2025
for tickets, call 213. 972.8001 or visit LA Opera
for more shows, visit Theatre in LA
