In a Gloomy Garden

A seminude courtesan tries to seduce a hunchback as his image mocks him from three mirrors. Fashionable men and women strip to nearly topless leotards and pantomime a sordid orgy. A bearded astrologer chants about immortality while peacocks scream. In a gloomy garden, a man embraces a sculptured minotaur, seeing in it the face of his brother. Statues spring to life in an eerie dance.

This is such stuff as bad dreams are made on; and in Argentine Composer Alberto Ginastera's new opera Bomarzo, it is appropriately woven into the gripping nightmare of a tortured spirit. Commissioned by the Washington Opera Society and given its world premiere last week at Washington's Lisner Auditorium, Bomarzo is based on a prizewinning novel by Buenos Aires Art Critic Manuel Mujica Lainez, who also wrote the libretto. In 15 taut, hallucinatory scenes that take place mostly in the mind of Pierfrancesco Orsini, Renaissance Duke of Bomarzo, it flashes back over the events of the Duke's "secret life, which like the hump on my back, encumbered my soul."

Sighs & Moans. Bomarzo is taunted by his brothers and father; he is sexually ambivalent and frustrated, ghost-ridden and obsessed with death. Suspecting that his wife has been unfaithful with his brother, he orders the brother killed. Then, having built a garden of grotesque stone sculptures symbolizing his inner traumas, he unwittingly drinks poison and dies in the gaping mouth of one of his statues; his only benediction is a kiss from an innocent shepherd boy who skips by.

Musically, this lugubrious narrative is etched in a jaggedly dissonant score that takes Composer Ginastera even farther out than the twelve-tone serialism of his 1964 opera Don Rodrigo. Ginastera stacks up thick instrumental clusters, punctuates them with short, stabbing chords, sometimes uses what he calls "clouds," in which orchestra and singers improvise rhythmically suspended, ever-shifting textures. At various points in the piece, the string players clatter their bows on their instruments, the brassmen blow air tonelessly through their mouthpieces, the woodwinds bend notes into piercing quartertones. A 24-voice chorus in the pit sometimes comments on the action or makes weird noises underlining a dramatic moment; during the orgy scene, it sighs, moans, and murmurs the word love in several languages simultaneously.

Metaphysical Anxiety. Under the firm baton of New York City Opera Director Julius Rudel, the singers projected their parts with clarity and polish while threading their way through Ming Cho Lee's surrealistic settings. Mexican Tenor Salvador Novoa eloquently voiced the pain and weakness of the Duke, and statuesque Joanna Simon, as the courtesan, sang her seduction aria in a lustrous mezzo-soprano.

Ginastera sees Bomarzo as "a man of our time," because he "struggles with sex, submits to violence, and is tormented by the metaphysical anxiety of death." The thesis might be more persuasive if Bomarzo were a less odd and cringing figure, and if the unremitting bleakness of his psychological life were set off against a more robust outward existence. But there can be no doubt that Ginastera has powerfully achieved his effects, combining orchestral wizardry and forceful vocal writing to carve out the contours of jarringly dramatic emotion. As Washington Opera Society President Hobart Spalding says, "The fellow is made to write operas."

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