Before Night Falls, the memoir by Reinaldo Arenas, gay Cuban novelist and poet, political dissident and prisoner, foe of Castro’s repressive regime, was published posthumously in 1993 to immediate acclaim. I remember the New York Times Book Review front page with a huge color photograph of the author’s handsome face and soulful eyes. Several of my gay friends were reading the book and enthusiastically recommended it to me. One of them finally put a copy in my hands and I read it; instantly drawn in, I too fell in love with Arenas and his story, so engagingly told, so full of adventure, vivid personalities, sex, escapes, suicides, betrayals. I was gushing about it to a friend who said, “Why don’t you turn it into an opera?” Reflexively, I said that was impossible: far too episodic, with way too many characters. How could Before Night Falls possibly be staged?
But I kept being drawn back by Reinaldo, a dream opera character, full of passionate intensity, sexy, doomed. He opens his mouth and song comes pouring out. In time, I came to think it could be done: I could see a narrative line spun out around the central character of Reinaldo, with scenes that compel confrontations, drama, music. I began to hear choruses and arias: Before Night Falls, the opera! This story was seething with potential music for the theatre. Among the numerous possible set pieces I envisioned were invocations of muses, erotic dances, hysterical aunts, a farewell duet, choruses for rebel soldiers, for prisoners, for a riot scene, and a phantasmagoric funeral procession, even a scene near Times Square on New Year’s Eve. I imagined arias interspersed throughout, in a continuous web of music, sweeping the story along in short scenes that segue seamlessly, building up to larger scenic units, all subtly creating the impression of time passing. Having decided to pursue Before Night Falls as an opera, I turned to the book’s copyright page and was initially daunted. Where to begin? It was pure serendipity to find the translator, Dolores M. Koch, in the Manhattan phone book: I called the number and there she was! Dolores and I hit it off from the start, and I was moved to hear her first-hand account of her friend Reinaldo’s life and death. She put me in touch with his two heirs, one in New York, the other in Paris. Eventually, I met them and discovered that they were enchanted by the idea of an opera; making a movie was obvious, but an opera? In 1995, I was granted the musical-dramatic rights—this was before the Estate had yet granted the film rights, which ultimately resulted in the 2000 movie by Julian Schnabel starring Javier Bardem in a stunning performance as Arenas, and Johnny Depp as both the cruel police detective and a drag queen in El Morro prison. After vain attempts to find a librettist, I decided to sketch a scenario myself and eventually enlisted Dolores Koch to help me write it. Much as a screenplay is to the director and the camera, a libretto is to the composer and the music. The libretto creates opportunities for the music to deliver the drama, including the characters, moods, situations, emotions, ideas—whatever the composer wishes to capture in the musical web. Dolores had no experience in writing librettos, but her intimate knowledge of Reinaldo, his work, and his milieu would be invaluable to me. Our collaboration, often touching when she would vividly recall Reinaldo, was both harmonious and productive. The opera as I conceived it is the story of one man’s life viewed as a series of escapes: the escape from his remote, claustrophobic village in the hills of Cuba, from repressive laws forbidding dissent, free expression, and homosexuality, and eventually from Cuba itself, through the Mariel exodus. Reinaldo Arenas was always his own man, an artist who fell afoul of the Castro regime, a writer who successfully smuggled manuscripts out of Cuba, gaining fame for his work despite the Cuban government’s attempts to suppress it, a gay man whose sexuality was used as an excuse to imprison him for being a dissident. But in exile, too, Arenas discovered other “prisons” to escape: leftists disliked his vehemently anti-Castro stance, and conservatives didn’t care for his open and proud homosexuality. Ultimately, too, Arenas found himself caught in the prison of AIDS: he contracted the disease in the 1980’s, when it was new, mysterious, and inescapably deadly. The great theme of the opera, as it was of Arenas’ life, is eternal: the struggle for freedom, for individual self-expression, artistic, sexual, and political, despite all the odds, despite the crushing weight of social and state repression. I had to make a crucial decision from the start: in what language to write the libretto? My instinct was to write it in English rather than Spanish and I determined to do so, but knew I’d have to justify that decision. Indeed, I’m often asked why I chose to write it in English. Opera is not exactly a literalist medium; after all, Le Nozze di Figaro is an opera in Italian based on a French play set in Spain and composed by an Austrian! I consider myself an American writing for an American and international audience. If, because the characters are Cuban, one were to set the opera in Spanish in order to be “authentic,” then the performers should also sing in Cuban Spanish, and it’s hard enough to find singers who sing Spanish well. Besides, that is not where authenticity lies: setting a story of a specific place and time in a language not that of the characters has the additional effect of universalizing the story, of lifting it above the local setting, and making it both stranger and more abstract. I was delighted to discover, after a public reading of scenes from the opera in New York, that several Cubans in the audience applauded my decision to set the work in English. I also did not know to what extent Cuban music would comprise some of the musical language of the opera. I decided to use just enough, and at dramatically appropriate moments, to lend color to my own musical language, which is tonal, concerned with lyricism, and utterly eclectic. Growing up, I listened to my parents’ Cuban music, my brothers’ Motown, Broadway, big band, and jazz, as well as my own beloved classical music. Tchaikovsky was indeed my first love. Like so many composers of my generation, in creating my own voice I availed myself of a wide and idiosyncratic palette of musical styles. In beginning to write the music, creating singing characters, an atmosphere, a sound-world, I came face-to-face with the feeling that, at bottom, I had to invent, as if from nothing, almost all of it. There were a few signposts provided by the memoir, but imagining the opera was for the most part a leap into the unknown. Since Reinaldo’s literary image-world was imbued with an element of magical fantasy, I took a cue from the end of the memoir, where he addresses the Moon. I gave our hero Rey two Muses: the Moon and the Sea, a soprano and a mezzo, two images of phasic nature central to his thinking. These interact with him throughout the narrative at strategic moments, as in a scene in which we see him being inspired by them at his typewriter, or when the Muses turn into the couple who smuggle his manuscripts out of Cuba. Also, to condense the many characters in the story and the themes of mentors, friends, betrayals, and suicide, I decided to create a fictional composite character who is Rey’s beloved older mentor, a man who’s ultimately broken by the Cuban secret police and confesses, naming names, thus betraying Rey, and who later commits suicide. There was no such individual, but all these separate events are taken from the memoir and given dramatic point by being embodied in a single character. But what to name him? I loved the real name of one of Reinaldo’s mentors, Virgilio, reminiscent of Classical antiquity and visits to the Underworld, but it would be too much a violation of the true historical personage, who never betrayed Arenas or committed suicide. Dolores came up with the evocative name Ovidio, suggesting the great story-teller of Metamorphoses and the Ars Amatoria. Ashutosh Khandekar, the editor of the Brit-ish journal Opera Now, writes in the issue of May-June 2006: [I]f operas written today are to be successful, they have to continue [the]tradition of helping to define the age in which they are created. [The 20th-century operas that] have been taken up into the mainstream repertoire … Lulu, Wozzeck, Peter Grimes, Billy Budd, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk [are]all anti-heroic pieces about dysfunctional human beings at odds with society, who are finally crushed by convention. This in itself says something rather profound about the human condition in the 20th century. … What great opera has always been able to do is to look beyond all … “isms” and bring into focus how we as people engage with the world around us. Clearly speaking to these grand themes, Before Night Falls addresses the abiding human pursuit of freedom. The character Rey, the Outsider, is my alter-ego, and potentially that of many people in the audience. Within the great operatic tradition, Before Night Falls offers new music, a new setting, and new characters in the ongoing artistic undertaking, in Khandekar’s formulation, to make us more conscious of “how we as people engage with the world around us.” Opera companies are for the most part conservative and risk-averse, given their precarious economies; and an opera with a gay hero set largely in Cuba, a perennial source of political controversy, may test many an opera company’s mettle. Even if I do not suffer under an oppressive regime, I can identify with Arenas’ struggle to get his work out there and heard. I share his fundamental optimism, knowing that Arenas’ story moves us because it evokes all the archetypal pull of the lonely hero’s journey toward enlightenment and liberation. Music enables us to feel directly what lies beyond words and actions: as all opera lovers know, the highest reward is to feel tears at a performance. Arenas’ pursuit of beauty, that ideal beyond the ability of any state to control it and thus potentially a subversive force, speaks in particular to our community. Indeed, the oft-noted link between gay people and a highly developed æsthetic sensibility may be an unconscious reason why gays are perceived to be dangerous, and why repeated attempts are made to make us less vocal if not less visible. I have tried to put into Before Night Falls, the opera, all of Reinaldo Arenas’ humanity, appetite for life, sensuality, love of beauty and brilliance. But it is audiences who will decide how those qualities move and inspire us. Jorge Martin’s other works, including his other operatic compositions, are enumerated at www.JorgeMartin.com.
