Edinburgh International Festival: The fall of Montezuma and the rise of modern Mexico is described in a rarely performed German opera

Published on Friday 26 March 2010 18:23

THE unequal clash of civilisations that marked the birth of modern Mexico sets the scene for Montezuma. The mostly Mexican production of an 18th-century German opera about the fall of the Aztec emperor is a natural fit with Festival director Jonathan Mills's declared aim of bringing the voices of the new world back to the old, mixing them in the process.

The Mexican stage director Claudio Valds Kuri found his way to Montezuma on the heels of the world-wide success of his Teatro de Ciertos Habitantes company's experimental show, Monsters and Prodigies: A History of the Castrati.

With a bizarre cast of characters, that play explored the history of castration, early opera and the phenomenon of surgically altered boy sopranos. So it is perhaps not surprising that for Montezuma, the little known 1755 work by Carl Heinrich Graun, he sought out three sopranist singers – male falsettos, better known as countertenors – for his cast. The piece was written for six soprano voices and one tenor, and the only existing recording uses women singers.

Montezuma is a German-Mexican-Spanish-British co-production which gets its very first outing at the Theater der Welt in Germany before heading to Edinburgh in August. But Mills took the initiative on the work, approaching Valds Kuri with a quest for European works that had a connection with Mexico.

Montezuma is described as a "rarely performed operatic gem", something Edinburgh audiences will have to decide. But its interest also lies in the fact that Frederick II of Prussia – Frederick the Great, to whom Graun was kapellmeister – personally penned the libretto, before it was translated into Italian.

"It is quite interesting to find a text by one emperor, using another emperor to talk about himself," says Valds Kuri. This year also marks the bicentenary of independence from colonial Spain, being celebrated in Mexico, Chile, Argentina and several other Latin American countries. "It is a good year for reflection," he says.

Montezuma reduces the main events of Mexico's traumatic conquest to a single day. It begins with Fernando Corts's arrival on the coast of Veracruz in 1519, covers his progress through conquests and alliances, and his arrival at Tenochtitln. He was welcomed to the island capital in the lake that would become Mexico City, initially as the Emperor Montezuma's guest. With the treachery of the Spaniards, and the imprisonment of Montezuma in his own palace, rebellion, revolt, destruction and death take their course.

Montezuma lived from 1466 to 1520; the opera came to these events 200 years later, and this production opens another two centuries after. Valds Kuri plans to use it as an exploration of how a culture views "the other", how the "civilised" European explorers approached the Aztecs they viewed as "barbarians", and vice versa.

To this day, the heart of the story lies in the enigmatic figure of Montezuma – traitor or dupe, coward or even hero? Tragically deluded into thinking Cortes was the incarnation of an Aztec prophecy, or perhaps deciding that his own sacrifice would avoid more useless slaughter?

With famed Argentinian conductor Gabriel Garrido as music director, the stage will represent Montezuma's island city, but Valds Kuri is clear that the "real investment is in the artists". His cast is international – though three of seven soloists hail from Mexico – and will come together in three months of rehearsals.

A former actor and film director, Valds Kuri was also co-founder and bass voice of the early music ensemble Ars Nova. Graun's music borders both Baroque and Classical styles and instruments including the lute and the viola da gamba. While the music is firmly European, it will have a Latin American interpretation.

After initial rehearsals in Hamburg and Geneva, where Garrido's orchestra is based, the seven soloists converged earlier this month on Mexico, to work with the eight-strong Mexican choir and visit the ruins of the Templo Mayor, or Great Pyramid, in Mexico City. "It is not common where the singers, the actors can go to the places where the history happened," Valds Kuri says, adding that the production will be performed at the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City later in its international tour.

The historical events of the conquest of Mexico are still the source of "great resentment", which the opera hopes to address, he says. "In Mexico it is a daily item because most of the population is mestizos (an old term for mixed race)."

There is no sense, he says, in thinking this way about the past, though for centuries power has been divided along ethnic fault lines. "We are still thinking that we lose something, but now we don't lose anything because we are both things, half indigenous, half Spaniards."

&#149 Montezuma is at the King's Theatre, Saturday 14 August, Sunday 15 August and Tuesday 17 August.

&#149 Supported by Embassy of Mexico, United Kingdom, CONACULTA and Secretara de Relaciones Exteriores, Estados Unidos Mexicanos.