Opera lost since 1899 is to be staged
mainThe search for Enrique Granados’s lost opera, Maria del Carmen, has been a career-long obsession for US scholar, Walter Clark. Written when the Spanish composer was in his early thirties, it got lost as his fame took off.
Granados was killed when a German torpedo stuck his ship in 1916. The score was sold by his sons to a New York collector during the Spanish civil war. Later, it was reported to have perished in a warehouse fire. The diligent Clark kept looking.
He now has a full score and Spanish opera houses are eager to put the work on stage. More here.
I like your historical posts most of all.
How interesting. There has to be some good music in that score…
Hmm. . . A bit of a discrepancy here with the Wikipedia entry on this opera, which says it’s been staged a number of times using a score which is not the one discovered by Mr. Clarke. It would be great to have someone clarify this, please. Thank you!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mar%C3%ADa_del_Carmen_(opera)
This opera has been performed and recorded already. I think maybe Dr. Grant isn’t aware of this. I suspect his score was hijacked before he could publish
The review of Liceo’s 2006 production of “Maria del Carmen” appears on p. 16 of this edition of Scherzo.
http://www.scherzo.es/hemeroteca/2006-03-206.pdf
Here’s a Youtube clip from Liceu’s production of the opera http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Belx7cJdhqI
with Josep Caballe-Domenech conducting in 2006
And other performance with a smaller Spanish orch. (Cordoba?) with Max Bragado Darman conducting.
Here’s the Bragado Darman clip of “Maria del Carmen”.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSeD30a8jkE
Something is really fishy about the discovery of this “undiscovered” score. I suspect that Bragado Darman accessed the University of Riverside Library copy (he lives in Monterey, CA) and prepared an edition which he used to perform and record the work without Mr. Grant’s knowledge.
The only news here seems to be that we now know where to find the original manuscript of the work. As far as the rest goes, either Mr. Clark is a very bad musicologist (for not knowing that the work has been recently performed and recorded), or then he is just “forgetting” some facts to get better publicity for the upcoming new edition.
What’s strange is that Aaron Clark’s name is mentioned in the SF Classical Voice review of the 2006 production of “Maria del Carmen” in Ireland. Sounds like he wrote the program notes. https://www.sfcv.org/arts_revs/music_news_10_28_03.php
So apparently he did know about these previous performances. Why on earth would he make a big declaration about the “discovery” of this opera when he knew perfectly well that it was already “discovered”?
Someone should contact him to clarify all of this.
Here’s a link to the review of the Naxos recording of the opera: http://www.zarzuela.net/cd/cdmag/cdmag061.htm
Just received a reply from University of Riverside’s Senior Information consultant who wrote the original article about the score discovery. She explained that the score that Professor Clark discovered is the original unrevised edition. Versions performed previously are not the original. This wasn’t too clear in the article.
If it is of interest to anyone, I have the manuscript full score of the first 91 pages written out by Eduardo Granados and dated 2 December, 1916. It has my father’s markings and was presumably conducted at least in part by him when he was with the LA Phil. The note by Granados on the front page states that this is a revision and reorchestration of the work.
wow!