La Púrpura de la Rosa (review)

The fabled love story of the mortal Adonis and the goddess Venus received a youthful and energetic staging when the University of Michigan School of Music Opera Workshop put on its production of the rarely performed La púrpura de la rosa, an opera orchestrated by the Lima composer Tomás de Torrejón y Velasco and based on an earlier libretto by the renowned Spanish dramaturge Pedro Calderón de la Barca. The three performances of La púrpura in March 2006 were planned to coincide with an international conference entitled "Opera in the Americas—American Opera," coorganized by Louise K. Stein and Daniel Herwitz of the University of Michigan, to which a forthcoming special edition of Opera Quarterly will be devoted. Professor Stein introduced the program with a pre-performance lecture that helped the audience to appreciate the historical and musicological roots of this early modern musical spectacle, transported from the Old World to the New at the beginning of the eighteenth century.

La púrpura was first performed in Spain on January 17, 1660, in honor of the wedding that would take place some six months later between Louis XIV and the Infanta Maria Theresa, daughter of King Philip IV of Spain (r. 1621–65). Following a Franco-Spanish armistice in 1659 (also known as the Treaty of the Pyrenees) that put an end to the two countries' hostilities after the Thirty Years' War (1618–48), both sides planned significant musical events to commemorate this historic treaty and the nuptial pageantry that would follow in its wake. This led to the decision to create an opera that would catapult Spain to previously unacknowledged musical heights among its European rivals—La púrpura was the result. Twenty years later, in 1679, the opera was performed yet again, this time to honor the marriage between Charles II and Marie-Louise d'Orléans on the birthday of the Hapsburg Archduchess Maria Antonia. As is widely known, Charles II's impotence and the consequent lack of an heir at the time of his death in 1700 created a dynastic crisis at the turn of the century that would only be resolved thirteen years later, following costly wars in Europe and across the Atlantic as well.

The historical events in the early eighteenth century that contributed to La púrpura being the first opera to be performed in the Americas thus related directly to Franco-Spanish familial ties. Its first presentation overseas, in Lima, was made to honor the arrival of a Bourbon monarch—Philip V—on the Spanish throne. Some scholars have speculated that Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz's "Loa for the Viceroy's Birthday" may also have been meant as a textual prologue for the musical performance of Calderón's libretto in New Spain twenty years earlier, and that it might have been set to music by any one of several talented composers then present in the Mexican capital. Unfortunately, no hard evidence corroborates the hypothesis that the opera was performed in Mexico prior its Lima premiere. But it is certain that the viceroy of Peru, Don Melchor Portocarrero Lasso de la Vega, Count of Monclova, commissioned a production of this opera in 1701 and that this date marks the first documented performance of an opera in the Americas. While the War of Spanish Succession would go on for more than a decade, Monclova was responsible for proclaiming the ascension of Philip V to the Spanish throne shortly after his acclamation in Madrid in November of 1700. He chose as his musical accomplice the composer Tomás de Torrejón y Velasco, a well-known Spanish composer who may have been present at the first performance of La púrpura in Madrid and who, in any case, brilliantly adapted the musical styles of Spain and Spanish America to a classic tale of amorous passions, infusing Calderón...