AMERICA’S EARLY ARIAS: JOHN MIDDLETON LECTURE
Historians believe that the first opera was Jacopo Peri’s
Dafne, composed in 1597 for a circle of humanists in Florence, Italy. Peri followed this early effort with
Euridice (1600), which is the earliest work with a surviving score. Opera buffs may know Monteverdi’s
Orfeo (1607), the only work among the earliest three that is still regularly staged. But what about opera on this side of the Atlantic? At 2 p.m. on Saturday, Aug. 8, scholar and former producer and director of Baroque-period operas, James Middleton, will speak about the beginnings of opera in the New World, at the New Mexico History Museum (113 Lincoln Ave., 505-476-5200). The first opera written and performed in the Americas was La Púrpura de la Rosa (The Blood of the Rose), which premiered in Lima, Peru, in 1701. It was composed by Tomás de Torrejón y Velasco, after a text by the Golden Age Spanish writer Pedro Calderón de la Barca, and tells the story of Venus and Adonis, from Greek mythology. A decade later, in 1711, New Spain’s capital, Mexico City, saw its first opera, Manuel de Zumaya’s La Parténope. The opera’s story, involving Partenope, the Queen of Naples, was topical in Mexico in the early 1700s because the Kingdom of Naples was contested in the War of the Spanish Succession (17011714), when Spain’s royal family changed from the Habsburgs to the Bourbons, who still rule in Madrid. There is no charge for the lecture, which is entitled “Never Before Seen Here: Baroque Stagecraft in the Spanish New World.” — Khristaan D. Villela