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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 February 2010
The Spanish Conquest of Mexico provides stirring drama for an epic opera on an American subject It has been set by some 30 composers; the earliest is Graun's Montezuma (1755), and the best-known Spontini's Fernand Cortez, ou la Conquête de Mexique (1809). Antonio Borgese, a Sicilian who ‘fell in love with the English language’, retold the epic story to music by Roger Sessions.
How did such an unlikely alliance—a Sicilian poet, an American composer, and Mexican history—come about? Sessions first met Antonio Borgese in 1934 in his home town of Hadley, Massachusetts, when Borgese was teaching at Smith College. In 1935 Borgese made a trip to Mexico, where he was overwhelmed by the early history of that country; on his return, he proposed collaborating on an opera on the subject, although he had never written a libretto. Sessions knew nothing of Mexico's history, but did possess a first edition of Prescott's Conquest of Mexico given to his grandfather, possibly by Prescott himself. Sessions read the Prescott and Bernal Diaz's account, and he too became enthralled. Borgese wisely advised against Sessions's proposed title, Tenochtitlan, arguing, ‘The opera is written for titans; we don't need a title for titans, too’. Instead, he suggested the title Montezuma.
1. The only available printed libretto is from the American première of Montezuma by the Opera Company of Boston.
2. The marriage took place in Sessions's Princeton home on Thanksgiving Day, Sessions's own wedding anniversary. Sessions was best man and Hermann Broch the ‘bridesmaid’.
3. Kunitz, Stanley J., ed, Twentieth-Century Authors, First Supplement (New York: H. W. Wilson Co., 1955)Google Scholar. Entry by Elizabeth Mann.
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5. Taped interview 16 October 1979.
6. Taped interview 14 April 1976.
7. Taped interview 9 October 1979.
8. Taped interview 21 February 1979.
9. Taped interview 16 October 1979.
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