The composer's life: Fear, desire and "Ainadamar"

Osvaldo Golijov can truly be called a 21st-century composer. Though born in 1960 in La Plata, Argentina, he was virtually unknown until 2000, when his

La Pasión según San Marcos

, commissioned to celebrate the 250th anniversary of J.S. Bach's death, was premiered to astonished audiences and critics.

A genre that had been brought to an apex by Bach was transformed by Golijov, employing Latin American ethnic styles as well as Jewish texts from the Kaddish. Greater success was to come. Soprano Dawn Upshaw become his muse, and together they created the song cycle Ayre, which became a best-selling disc on the Deutsche Grammophon label. Many critics believe that Ainadamar, in its revised 2005 version, eclipsed everything he'd done before.

However, a key part of the composer's creative launch were his years in Philadelphia, where he studied at the University of Pennsylvania under George Crumb, among others, and had his work performed by Curtis Institute of Music students. There were several early premieres at the Painted Bride Arts Center under conductor Miguel Harth-Bendoya, then at Curtis Institute and still a close creative associate. Golijov also created a 19-piece chamber orchestra reduction of Verdi's Falstaff for Academy of Vocal Arts, though he now says, "It sounded more like Stravinsky's L'Histoire du Soldat."

Indeed, there are a number of skeletons in his Philadelphia closet, as he revealed during a winter-afternoon conversation in his Brookline, Mass., studio.

Question: What was your music like then? Did you initially take to modernism, which was still being taught?

Answer: I did experiment with it, and I found that fascinating, but only fascinating, not visceral . . . The composer who is so close to my heart, and so inside my heart, is Astor Piazzolla [the Argentinian tango-based composer]. His music is the true distillation of life. It springs from life. He said that new music is like one of those great promises for a scientific breakthrough that could save lives. It's almost there but never quite there. I want music to communicate straight to the heart. That's my primary concern.

Q: What can you tell me about those works that were premiered at the Painted Bride?

A: These were all student pieces and not a single one survives. Miguel is a good friend and would never tell which pieces they were. I have another friend, the violinist Scott St. John, who is now in the St. Lawrence Quartet. He played every single one of those pieces and could well blackmail me.

Q: Your opera Ainadamar deals with the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca. Did you feel a particular kinship with your teacher George Crumb, who used Lorca texts often in his music?

A: The thing with George is that he doesn't talk a lot. But there's an old Jewish saying that if a man is great, you can learn from the way he ties his shoes. He'd play through my pieces and stop at the voicings of the horns in the orchestra, and would teach me in one instant what other teachers would need three years. He's like a great Zen master. He's a true incredible being.

Q: It is often said that Ainadamar feels as much like a ritual as an opera. How do you feel about that?

A: I asked David [librettist David Henry Hwang] specifically for that. One problem I have with opera is recitative. Excepting Verdi or Mozart, it's boring with everybody else. I only want real-time dialogue, and any dialogue is from the dead to the living.

Q: I understand that you initially didn't want Lorca specifically portrayed in the opera, that he would be talked and sung about but never seen. Why did that change? And why did you cross genders by writing the role for a woman?

A: I was writing a different opera that I knew was coming to a dead end. We were stuck with a premiere date [at Tanglewood in 2003], had women cast in it but no opera. We decided to do an opera about Lorca. I didn't go to the Tanglewood office to look for Lorca. I was hoping one of the students would have a dark character to her voice, to have death as a character, as in [the Lorca play] Blood Wedding. And I looked at a picture of Kelley O'Connor and she looked so much like Lorca that my heart stopped. Her eyebrows. Her eyes. And I called David [Henry Hwang] and said I think we can have this girl who could be Lorca.

Later, Lorca's own niece came to see the opera; she looks exactly like Lorca. I mean, it was scary. And when she entered Kelley's dressing room before the show, they looked at each other and started to cry spontaneously. It was a goosebump moment.

Q: Do you think your opera could've been written 30 years ago, at the height of modernism? Even Leonard Bernstein was considered irrelevant in the 1960s.

A: I don't know. It's funny and sad: Regardless of the merits of each piece, Bernstein's Mass [in which he, like Golijov, juxtaposes high and low art] was received with scorn and rejection and viciousness, whereas my Pasión was received with enthusiasm. It shows that times change. Look, I don't know about the Mass but West Side Story stands as one of the great compositions of the past half-century. Bernstein was a great composer and the more I listen to his music the more I love it. It's music that springs unforced. So much of the other music written in the time sound contrived and didactic and medicinal.

Q: Can you tell me how you conceived the bullet fugue that characterizes Lorca's assassination?

A: This guy Ruiz Alonso, all of his life, bragged that he shot Lorca in the butt. I thought that kind of brutality has to be shown. But how do you show that? Can you do one gunshot with percussion? No, that's like a radioplay thing. But can you translate that into a flamenco fugue? That's what we did.

Q: But how?

A: We went to a Hollywood library of sounds. We looked for gunshots from the 1930s.

Q: The ejecting shells are also part of the music.

A: You can create music from the sound of shells falling.

Q: You've revised Ainadamar heartily and often, particularly between the 2003 version in Tanglewood and what came out in 2005 at Santa Fe. When do you know that a piece needs revising?

A: I think I spent more time revising [Ainadamar] than I did writing it. You have to trust your gut when a piece arrives. Some pieces are born right. The Pasión, I never touched it [after the premiere]. But Ainadamar . . . it's not perfect and that's not the point. A piece is like a person. Some have a mole or a limp or a heart condition. But that's what they are. And the piece is what it is. It's now what it's supposed to be . . . and it can take care of itself.

Q: You're now working on a piece for the Metropolitan Opera [to be premiered at the English National Opera before moving to New York in 2011]. In light of your Ainadamar success, do you have any follow-up anxiety?

A: Writing music is always the struggle in the beautiful tension between fear and desire. Sometimes it's beautiful to write without fear, but it can lead to self-indulgence. So fear is actually good. There's incredible fear, but also incredible desire.

Q: Is that an easy way to live?

A: It's not easy. But I don't regret it. This is what I want. This is a good time in my life. I'm healthy. I'm relatively young. There's a lot of pressure and so forth. I don't want to retire but do want to write more intimately, string quartets for example. But when an opportunity like this [the Metropolitan Opera] comes along, you have to try your hand at it. It's part of being alive, right?