FULL THE CONSUL (Menotti) Buenos Aires 2024 Sebastián Angulegui, Carla Filipcic-Holm, Adriana Mastrángelo, Virginia Correa Dupuy

Information on the Performance

• Work Title: The Consul  
• Composer: Menotti Gian Carlo  
• Libretto: Gian Carlo Menotti    Libretto Text, Libretto Index
• Venue & Opera Company: Teatro Colon, Buenos Aires, Argentina  
• Recorded: August 13, 2024
• Type: Staged Opera Live

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON THIS PERFORMANCE

20th-century opera had a conflictive relationship with one of its essential principles: the spectacle. It may be thought that Mauricio Kagel, Karlheinz Stockhausen or John Cage designed languages ​​that held the stage in high regard, but clearly it was a stage that was opposed to tradition. Shostakovich or Britten, on the other hand, played in favour of the contemporary use of consecrated conventions. One of those who best embodied this tendency is Gian Carlo Menotti. Born in Italy but settled in the United States, his operas function as an explanation of a very North American way of art: eclecticism, a dramatic sense à la Arthur Miller and the legitimacy of the dramatic effects. And if John Cage’s stage shows can be compared to the Village, Menotti’s correspond to Broadway. The Consul, which premiered in 1950 in Philadelphia and had a long second life, precisely, on Broadway, led to a Pulitzer Prize and the cover of Time magazine. The libretto, written by Menotti himself (as in all his works for the stage), refers directly to a theme that the Second World War and the Cold War brought to the fore. The wife of an opposition leader, pursued by the secret police of an unnamed country, tries to obtain a visa from a consulate to be able to travel abroad. The consul of the title never appears, but instead a secretary repeatedly asks for different papers, questionnaires and procedures from the unfortunate Magda Sorel and a sort of court of miracles that comes to the offices every day. With a language somewhere between Kafka, expressionism and a touch of surrealism, The Consul goes far beyond the reference to the regimes of the Soviet aegis in the 1950s and becomes a humanist reflection on all kinds of totalitarianism.

Quoted from Teatro Colon

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