By
A
performance of “Beatrix Cenci,” by Alberto Ginastera, at the Teatro Colón in
Buenos Aires in 2016. The centenary of the composer’s birth is being celebrated
with productions of his work around the world.Arnaldo
Colombaroli
BERLIN — The Argentinean composer Alberto Ginastera is
well established as a leading voice of Latin America. Much like Bela Bartok in
Hungary or Aaron Copland in the United States, his synthesis of native folk
elements into complex musical forms paved the way for the development of
concert music in his native country.
But Ginastera’s legacy transcends the borders of
Argentina. Not only did he resist and eventually flee his country’s
authoritarian regime, but his catalogue of over one hundred works — many of
which had their premiere on American soil — occupies a major place in
20th-century music history.
This season, to commemorate the centenary of
Ginastera’s birth, orchestras around the world are delving into not just
well-known compositions such as the Harp Concerto or “Estancia” Dances but his
entire opus. The Los Angeles Philharmonic, Berlin Philharmonic, Gothenburg
Symphony and Boston Symphony are some of the institutions to have included
prominent programs. There are also performances as far away as Taipei, Taiwan,
and Katowice, Poland.
Perhaps most significant, the Teatro Colón in Buenos
Aires is presenting a major survey of the composer’s work, from his last opera,
“Beatrix Cenci,” to the piano sonatas.
The Teatro Colón will host a major
survey of Ginastera’s work this year. “It is a moment to show off the best of
our culture,” the theater’s general director, Darío Lopérfido, said. CreditArnaldo
Colombaroli
For Darío Lopérfido, the Teatro Colón’s general
director, the program is a source of great pride given that two of Ginastera’s
three operas had their premiere not in Buenos Aires but in Washington. His
second opera, “Bomarzo,” was initially banned at home for “obsessive reference
to sex, violence and hallucination.” His “Beatrix Cenci” did not receive its
Argentine premiere until 1992, nine years after Ginastera’s death.
“Ginastera is our most international composer,” Mr.
Lopérfido said by phone from Buenos Aires. “Argentina is a country with a lot
of discussion and fights. But not in this case. It is a moment to show to the
world the best of our culture.”
Musical life across the country is indebted to
Ginastera, from the tango music of Astor Piazzolla, his first and most famous
student, to the Gilardo Gilardi Conservatory of Music in La Plata. The Centro
Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales, or CLAEM, which he founded to
expose Latin American composers to international trends in musical modernism,
bred influential figures such as the recently deceased Gerardo Gandini, who
also played piano in Piazzolla’s “Nuevo Tango” sextet.
But political conditions during Ginastera’s lifetime
forced him to turn abroad. In 1945, with the help of Copland, he won a
Guggenheim Fellowship to travel to the United States. It was around this time
that his music shifted from less explicitly nationalist material such as the
competitive dances of gauchos, or mestizo cowboys, to more abstract, spiritual
sources in a period which he himself called “subjective nationalism.”
Following Perón’s ouster in 1955, Ginastera flourished
as both a composer and educator, but just over a decade later came the rise of
the violent Onganía dictatorship. When the opera “Bomarzo” was censored, in
1967, Ginastera responded by imposing a ban of his music across Buenos Aires.
In 1971, the same year in which the CLAEM was forced to shut down, he left to
settle in Geneva.
Alberto Ginastera in 1977.CreditCourtesy
of Boosey & Hawkes
While the composer remained deeply connected to his
home country, he would start to embrace a broader sense of Spanish identity in
his music. And as early as the 1950s, parallel to his activities at the CLAEM,
he had started to integrate stylistic elements as disparate as twelve-tone
music and magical realism. Late-period works such as the Harp Concerto maintain
rhythmic vitality while creating eerie, modernist atmospheres.
The Spanish conductor Juanjo Mena, who conducts
several performances of Ginastera this season, said by phone from London that
the composer “translated what was around him,” absorbing influences from Ravel
and Stravinsky to Copland while communicating the rhythms of the Argentine
countryside in a clear fashion.
Ginastera’s instrumentation and rhythms in turn
impacted Copland. The musicologist and Ginastera scholar Deborah Schwartz-Kates
has documented a reciprocal influence between Copland’s ballet “Rodeo” and
“Estancia,” a ballet about the life of the gauchos.
“Both cultivate pastoral tropes of open landscapes,”
she said by phone from Miami, citing “lean, widely spaced harmonies which
represent ideas of openness, space and, metaphorically, the ideal of freedom
upon which their respective countries were based.”
The explicitly Argentinean themes in Ginastera’s music
may have typecast him as a certain type of composer, however, even in his later
period of aesthetic experimentation. “A piece of dodecaphonic music doesn’t
necessarily conform to certain stereotypes of what Latin-ness might mean,” said
Ms. Schwartz-Kates.
The American mezzo-soprano Joanna
Simon in “Bomarzo” in at the New York City Opera in 1967. The work, Ginastera’s
second opera, was initially banned in his home country of Argentina for
“obsessive reference to sex, violence and hallucination.”CreditNew York City
Opera
His Violin Concerto, which the New York Philharmonic
commissioned for its inaugural season at Lincoln Center in 1963, quotes
everyone from Paganini to Shostakovich within instrumental textures at once
distinctly Bartok-inspired and highly personal. “The states of mind are very
direct,” said the violinist Michael Barenboim, who performs the work with three
different orchestras this season. “When it wants to express anger, you can
tell. At the same time, everything is formally strict and structured.”
Politics have also played a role in the reception of
Ginastera’s music. After leaving for Switzerland, his network in the Americas
weakened. Although he lived to see “Bomarzo” performed in Buenos Aires in 1972,
the composer did not receive acclaim from his home government for the opera
that he considered his greatest work.
While Ginastera’s music never fell out of circulation,
the perception that he was more international than Argentine did not always
work in his favor. “He occupied a gray area where he was considered too famous
to be Argentine in Argentina but, in the rest of the world, too Argentine to be
famous,” Ms. Schwartz-Kates said.
Thanks to widening activities in scholarship over the
past decade, there is an opportunity to reassess the importance of his music.
For the centennial performances this year, Ginastera’s publisher, Boosey &
Hawkes, prepared new editions of several major works.
And as fate would have it, Argentina’s recently
elected President Mauricio Macri has set out to reverse decades of Perónist
politics. An inaugural concert for Mr. Macri at the Teatro Colón last December
included a performance of the “Estancia” suite.
“It’s a symbolic moment,” Mr. Lopérfido said.
“Citizens have the feeling that Argentina will be friends with the different
countries. It’s a moment of hope.”
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