Alberto Ginastera's ‘Don Rodrigo’

Extract

In 1962 the Municipality of the City of Buenos Aires commissioned Alberto Ginastera to compose an opera for the Colon Theatre, to have its first performance during the season of 1964. For some time before that Ginastera had been discussing with the Spanish poet and playwright, Alejandro Casona (who at that time was living in Argentina) the idea of writing an opera whose central figure would be Don Rodrigo, the last Visigoth King of Spain. This very beautiful legend has been related in hundreds of sagas throughout the centuries (in English literature Scott, among others, recreated it in ‘The Vision of Don Roderick’), and it has also been used operatically before, in Handel's Rodrigo. Ginastera's Don Rodrigo, his first opera, calls for a monumental mise-en-scène. It has four main characters: a dramatic soprano (Florinda, daughter of Count Don Julián); a dramatic tenor, (Don Rodrigo, King of Spain); a baritone (Don Julián, the governor of Ceuta); and a bass (Teudiselo, Rodrigo's tutor).