But the real mission of Florencia, who is traveling incognito, is to find Cristobal, the butterfly hunter who was the great love of her life - the man with whom she had a passionate relationship decades earlier and was the great inspiration for all her singing, but who she left behind in order to pursue her career. It is there that the internationally renowned diva, Florencia Grimaldi (played here by the formidable soprano Ana Maria Martinez, who deftly captures her character’s sense of yearning and regret), is to appear after an absence from any South American stage for 20 years. The opera follows the journey of a group of passengers on the El Dorado, a steamship that heads out along the Amazon River from a city in Colombia, South America, and is en route to the Brazilian city of Manaus, where a long-shuttered opera house is about to reopen. The Lyric production itself is a beauty on every count, but more about that after a brief synopsis of the story it spins. Gabriella Reyes performs in “Florencia en el Amazonas.” (Photo by Cory Weaver) In addition, with an uncanny bit of timeliness, it evokes both the destructive and redemptive power of nature, the terror that comes with an epidemic (in this case cholera), and the fear of death, both real and spiritual. And despite the work’s highly economical running time (just over two hours including an intermission) it manages to be a probing anatomy of obsessive love, a meditation on the complex nature of marriage, a fierce study of the dual faces of fame, and a haunted and haunting meditation on the power of memory and how an enduring passion can be a great source of artistic inspiration.
The opera’s ravishing, quasi-cinematic score by Daniel Catan (the Mexican composer of Sephardic Jewish heritage who died in 2011, and whose earlier opera, “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” received a stunning virtual production last spring by Chicago Opera Theater), is matched by its beautiful libretto by Marcela Fuentes-Berain who openly acknowledges that she was inspired by Garcia Marquez’s writings.
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