A Little Puccini and Water

By Michael Walsh

Amid the shambles of Gian Carlo Menotti's opera Goya, which got its world premiere in Washington this month, there was one bright spot: at least the sets are reusable. One of them could double as Lillas Pastia's tavern in Carmen; another might suit Violetta's death in La Traviata. But as for Menotti's already recycled libretto and music, there can be no future at all.

The Italian-born composer, 75, has long purveyed a brand of derivative, pseudoromantic opera, such as The Consul and The Saint of Bleecker Street, which both somehow won Pulitzer Prizes in the '50s and still cling to life on the edges of repertory. Although it has been years since Menotti has had a hit, his name still means opera to those for whom annual Christmas telecasts of the treacly Amahl and the Night Visitors were a cultural high point. Goya, however, is a new low: a brazen melange of elements from Traviata and Puccini's La Rondine, served up with music that is a degenerate descendant of the once proud lyric tradition. Sung in English, Goya may be the piece that writes fine to Italian opera.

Conceived, at his request, as a starring vehicle for Spanish-born Supertenor Placido Domingo, Goya was given a handsome $1.1 million production by the Washington Opera before an opening-night audience in the Kennedy Center that included Queen Sophia of Spain and glitterati from two continents. It is being broadcast nationally this week on PBS. So far, so laudable.

Yet what is one to make of an opera about the life and turbulent times of Francisco Goya (Domingo, in robust voice) that omits almost every significant incident in the painter's life? Of a work that concentrates on a historically disputed love affair with the Duchess of Alba (Mezzo-Soprano Victoria Vergara), concluding with a gratuitous mad scene, replete with writhing spirits and fun-house demons? Of a score whose one striking musical device, an insistent, high-pitched whine signifying Goya's deafness, is borrowed from Smetana's string quartet From My Life?

The composer who employs himself as a librettist has a fool for a collaborator. Goya's scan-deep profundity is revealed in such apercus as "I have to paint to live. But I only live to paint." Never once, though, does Goya show its hero in the throes of creation. There is little sense of the penetrating psychological insight of his official portraits, and important events like his rise to court painter are only alluded to, or take place offstage. The horrors of the Napoleonic invasion, reflected in Goya masterpieces like the stark, brutal The Third of May, 1808, are suggested only in hallucination. Nobody claims that art must imitate life. But the real Goya, a man of passion and power, is nowhere in evidence here.

Menotti's musical wares -- Puccini with a little water, Mussorgsky with the Mussorgsky removed -- may once have been serviceable. But in Goya, and in its equally forlorn predecessor La Loca, written in 1979 for Beverly Sills, the music no longer has any discernible creative impulse; instead it seems to have been composed by the yard, measured to fit and then snipped off with blunt pinking shears. Menotti has recently confessed that "I have my doubts about how important my music is." After Goya, he may be the only one who does.