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Composer Daniel Catan has been quoted as saying that he needed ” to write music that was seductive, glittering, and mesmerizing.”

His opera Florencia en el Amazonas ia a welcome and enchanting addition to the world’s operatic contemporary repertoire, which has been dominated by nihilistic interpretations of classic operas. The libretto is by Marcela Fuentes-Berain, a student of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whose style of “magical realism” informs the plot. She defines “Magical or Mythical realism” as dramatic incidents which “are not completely logical but come from passion.”

Florencia was inspired by Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ novel Love in the Time of Cholera. Literary scholars have described “magical realism” as a style or genre that combines naturalistic details and narrative with surreal or dreamlike elements. In magical realism  “magical” elements are a natural part in an otherwise mundane, realistic environment.

This view of reality actually predates Marquez. It is what Christians, like C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R.Tolkein, have called Enchantment. Christians know that the real world is actually an enchanted place. In “Lewis, Chesterton and the Use of Enchantment”, Dermot Quinn explains:

    “Enchantment has to do with the apprehension of the reality of things—the way the world really is. Not its appearance, mind you, but its very being. The world is charged with spiritual life, not as a mythic super-imposition on its earthy materiality, a kind of romance to help us through the valley of tears, but as the deepest truth and meaning of that materiality. ‘God loves matter. He invented it’. All of creation is a kind of sacrament.”[i][ii]

The plot premise is simple and classic. A small group of people steam through the Amazon River in the early 1900s to hear legendary opera singer Florencia Grimaldi (who has not been in her native South America for 20 years) at the reopening of the opera house in Manaus. Unbeknownst to most onboard, Florencia (Ailyn Perez) is one of the passengers, disguised, seeking to rediscover both her true self and her long-lost lover, Cristobal, a butterfly hunter who disappeared into the jungle. Cristobal is a derivative of Christopher, meaning “bearing Christ”. This allows the plot to operate on at least two levels – the naturalistic as one lover searches for another and on the spiritual level as a woman searches for God.

Catán stated that Florencia “is the story of the return journey that we all undertake at a certain point in our lives: the moment when we look back at what we once dreamed of becoming, and then confront what we have now become.” Director Mary Zimmerman sees in Florencia a dramaturgical connection to, of all things, Chekhov. “There are these three sets of couples on the boat, and each is at a different stage of life, of love. And one of the couples is incomplete—that’s Florencia, longing for her past lover,” the director explains. “She’s on a journey into her past and into her imagined future, what she’s dreaming could be, as she searches for Cristóbal. It’s an examination that you have as you get older, where you look back over your life and you see the patterns, and you have your regrets. So even though the story is expressed in this large landscape with crazy animals and flowers and so forth, it’s really about the internal life and the imagination.”

Other passengers include a writer named Rosalba (Gabriella Reyes), who is working on a biography of Florencia. She flirts with Arcadio (Mario Chang), the son of the ship’s Captain (Greer Grimsley). Paula (Nancy Fabiola Herrera) and Alvaro (Michael Chioldi) are a middle-aged couple who have lost interest in one another; they hope that hearing Florencia will rekindle their romance. And then there is Riolobo (Mattia Olivieri), a mystical character, cut from the dame cloth as Shakespeare’s Puck or Ariel, who seems very much in touch with nature.

On the trip the passengers, like those in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, they encounter a storm. When they arrive at Manaus shipwrecked, they discover a cholera epidemic and are not permitted to disembark.

The possibility of death has entered the journey. Florencia considers that Cristobal may be dead, “on the other shore” as she puts it. The Amazon becomes a metaphor for that which connects the living (one shore) with the dead (the other shore), the here and now with the hereafter.

Florencia begins Act Two with an aria which is  akin to the kyrie eleison, as she asks God and Cristobal to have mercy on her for her life’s errors. Meanwhile Rosalba and Arcadio have fallen for one another, and Paula and Alvaro are reconciled.

In the opera’s finale, Florencia transcends her corporeal self to reveal her enchanted self as the Butterfly that Cristobal has sought his whole life. He has  answered her prayers: he is now with her and she is with him,

In an essay, “On How I Found Florencia and Got to the Amazon,” Catán wrote, “As Florencia sings her final aria, her voice, her song, and she herself, become intertwined with the image of a butterfly. She breaks through her cocoon and enters her finest moment; her voice soars, her song acquires transparent wings. Love and beauty metamorphose into one another and become indistinguishable from each other.”

Chicago director Mary Zimmerman and her band of merry puppeteers (Chris Ignacio, Leah Ogawa, and Tom Lee) have outdone themselves  in creating  an enchanted rain forest environment, vibrating in Frida Kahlo – like colors, through which the ship travels. Along the way they encounter enchanted dancing creatures like the Hummingbird (Dandara Veiga), and the Heron (Griffin Massey).

Conductor Yannick Nezet-Sequin’s natural sense of whimsey keeps the brilliant musical proceedings alive and in balance, as Catan’s lush sounds reconcile all worlds through beauty and imagination.

Ailyn Perez is the undoubted center and star of the event. Playing a character very different from her Adina of Chicago’s Elixir of Love, she nevertheless exudes a transcendent love through her magnificent singing and acting which inspires the transformations of her fellow passengers. Greer Grimsley’s strong acting and take charge voice suit the Captain as they did his wonderful rendering of Wotan in Wagner’s Ring at the Met. Gabriella Reyes first impressed the world as the haunting off stage voice in Anna Netrebko’s final production of Aidaat the Met. Now we can fully appreciate that voice and the dynamic actress in whom it lives. Michael Chioldi has only grown (and he was fabulous then) as a singer and actor since we saw him as The High Priest of Dagon in the Virginia Opera’s Samson and Delilah. We look forward to seeing the other performers parlay their outstanding Florencia work into other engagements.

Without a political or social ax to grind, Florencia en el Amazonas does what art does best – reveal to the human heart the knowledge of itself. It was a glorious night at the opera, and we left hoping for more of a similar nature.