“La Ciudad Ausente”, Gerardo Gandini’s opera with libretto by Ricardo Piglia arrives at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires (Argentina) on December 5 and 7, 2023.
This remarkable lyrical piece in two acts marked a milestone in the history of Argentine opera at its world premiere at the Colón in 1995, and is based on Piglia’s novel of the same name, which takes the poet Macedonio Fernández and the illness of his wife Elena de Obieta as the starting point for a Faustian pact with an inventor who promises her the construction of a machine where she can perpetuate herself.
The themes of Ricardo Piglia’s novel “The Absent City” are the great obsessions of Argentine literature: paranoia, history and, of course, Argentine literature itself. There we find, as in Domingo Faustino Sarmiento or Rodolfo Walsh, research and document; there we find, as in Roberto Arlt, the figure of the inventor on the verge of delirium. And, also, as in Argentine history, conversations in low voices, conspiracies, fear.
Discover the Beauty of 'The Absent City' with the outstanding Performance of Maria Castillo de Lima
The opera composed by Gerardo Gandini from that novel, with Piglia himself as librettist, adds yet another level to the same game: it speaks of opera.
The Absent City: Scene VII – Micro-opera III: LUCIA JOYCE by Gerardo Gandini
Scenic conception by Valentina Carrasco.
Lucia Joyce is a former opera singer, daughter of the famous Irish writer James Joyce.
The action takes place during the year 1934 in the Burgholzli Psychiatric Clinic in Zurich, where she has been hospitalized for many years. There she is subjected to various and extreme treatments in search of a cure for her ailments, among them “electroshock, the ingestion of various experimental drugs and thermal shocks of ice and water in the bathtub”.
In spite of all this suffering, she did not forget the great singer she was, her stormy love affair eclipsed by the image of her father.
The famous Dr. Carl Jung, together with his team formed by a sadistic head nurse, a young and inexperienced assistant and a group of sordid nurses, attend to the patient with special zeal, since they consider her the star of the hospice.
This particular medical group, after torturing Lucia, is tempted to consume some of the drugs in her treatment.
The asylum then becomes an orgiastic aqcelarre. Lucia, perceiving the disorder of the clinic and that she is free from her bonds, in full musical hallucinations, where she sings a strange mixture of passages from the opera La Traviata by Giuseppe Verdi, with poems by her father as Finnegan’s Wake, decides to escape into that dreamlike and absent world. Seeking freedom in the eternity of the machine that keeps alive the wife of the writer Macedonio Fernández, the dying Doña Elena de Obieta.
Relive this contemporary classic with a stellar cast, under the musical direction of Christian Baldini and stage direction by OValentina Carrasco, accompanied by the Orquesta Estable del Teatro Colón. Let yourself be carried away by the unique voice of “María Castillo de Lima” and immerse yourself in the fascinating story of “The Absent City”!