CORPUS EVITA

 

The Genesis of Corpus Evita

In 1997, in the process of looking for a rehearsal space for the Camerata, I connected with Larry Russo. Marta Johansen had participated in one of Kent Nagano's famous summer readings of unusual operas at Larry's Leather Factory space on Folsom Street in San Francisco, and she thought the place might be suitable. It proved ideal. The rehearsals culminated in a concert in May of that year, and included most of the pieces that would eventually appear in our first commercial recording, with the Klavier label. Among those pieces was Carlos Franzetti's Concierto del Plata, which we performed with another friend, guitarist Sergio Puccini, from Rosario, Argentina. That piece was my first collaboration with Carlos.

When I called Larry about the space he spoke to me about his tango project, and asked whether I would be interested in collaborating as a composer. I declined, but put him in touch with Carlos. A few months later, while Larry and Carlos were busily working on their first joint project, Tango Fatal, Larry approached me to discuss a new idea: an opera around the topic of Eva Perón. Larry had been reading up about the Peróns and their times, and he thought there was enough there to write a powerful story. He was initially intrigued by the concept of a tango opera, perhaps in the style of the Maria de Buenos Aires by Astor Piazzolla and Horacio Ferrer, but the thinking quickly evolved in other directions.

Over the next couple of months Larry and I met many times to discuss the concept as it evolved, I would say inexorably, into the annotated outline for Corpus Evita. I produced the first scene in the first month, and Carlos read it, liked it and went right to work. Soon I received the first installments of the score. I had heard and performed other pieces of his, but this, his first opera, seemed entirely unique in style and scope. The material energized me to continue writing. It soon became clear to both of us that the collaboration was having a cathartic effect on both of us. We both found ourselves dealing with the topic the way people deal with unresolved personal issues in therapy. We felt as though the topic was floating in the air, waiting to be written about, and the right time had finally come. We later realized that we weren't the only ones feeling that cosmic pull. I traveled to Argentina in 1998, and arrived in Rosario just in time to attend a chat by Dalmiro Saenz, who was introducing his book Isabel: La Razón de Su Vida, a fascinating exploration of Isabel and her period. Tomás Eloy Martínez's Santa Evita was also making the rounds. The time had definitely come to tell this story.

Over the course of the next year, we worked intensively to complete the libretto and the score, entertaining a various points the thought of making Corpus Evita into a full length opera, including scenes specific to the dirty war. I wrote sketches for several scenes for that purpose, and Carlos sketched music for them. In the end, depicting the dirty war proved simply too painful. We scuttled those scenes and Carlos came up with the perfect solution: he wrote a fantastic orchestral interlude that conveys the brutality and darkness of the period masterfully, without words.

Both Carlos and I were born and raised in Argentina. We both lived in Isabel's Argentina. In many ways, we are a product of those times. Naturally, we felt that this was our story to tell; and we both brought into it the mixed blessings of our emotions and biases, like children trying to write about their parents. In the end, however, it was Larry who contributed some of the most important insights. He came up with the name Corpus Evita, which conjures up lots more than just images of the return of Eva's embalmed body to Argentina. Larry's relentless questioning enabled us to surface the concept of Evita's myth. True to the true Latin American tradition, Argentina created its own saint, selfless, heroic, exempt from all faults, and ready to be adopted by successive generations of Argentines looking for answers to questions that, as Perón puts it in scene six, simply "have no answers." Evita's myth, like peronism, has been a constant in Argentina's history of the last half century precisely because, while it is forever changing and adapting to the times, it still engenders the same heated passions. So, its manifestations are as frustratingly hard to conceptualize and justify as they are easy to recognize.

There were some truly magical moments during this period. Carlos wrote the first scene starting with Evita's speech, but he struggled to find the appropriate instrumental introduction to the piece. When the inspiration finally hit, it produced a powerfully haunting melody with a cutting edge, carried by the woodwinds, which sounded to me like the sound of memory itself. Several months later, after I produced the text for the seventh scene, he found that this melody was the perfect fit, syllable for syllable, for the opening chorus, where the souls of the disappeared sing about Argentina's grief and society's need to confront the past. We are convinced it was no coincidence. Musically, Corpus Evita had come full circle. It was our own very personal and revelatory encounter with the myth.

Corpus Evita: A Context

In 1973, the year when Perón returned from exile to become president again, I was 13 and in my second year of high school in Buenos Aires. I attended the Otto Krause Technical High School, which was only three blocks from the Casa Rosada , the presidential palace. There was a lot of political awareness and activism among high school students, particularly since most of us could only vaguely remember the last democratically elected president, Dr. Arturo Illia, who was ousted in a coup in 1966, and we yearned for an end to the military dictatorship. It was a period of great turmoil, and we were all caught up in it. Then, in 1976, came the military coup and the proceso, the euphemistic way in which Argentines refer to the dirty war of repression that left 30,000 people dead. It's very hard to forget this period, despite the passage of time. In fact, it seems to take on a sharper focus with time. So, when I started telling Larry the story as I knew it, I surprised myself with the details that I was able to recall.

The history of 20th century Argentina is so entangled with Perón and Eva that it is almost impossible to take them apart without damaging something important. So we will not attempt that in the brief space of a CD's liner notes. A few things are certain, though. Perón's timing was impeccable. He appeared on the scene right after WWII and capitalized on the support of the migrant farm workers turned industrial underclass by the mechanization of Argentine agriculture. Over the next decade, Perón and Eva would usher in social reforms and worker protections unfathomable in the country before the war, and the unions would gain enormous influence. Perón and Eva embarked on a shopping spree to nationalize private industries and large, money-losing enterprises like the railroads and ports, which became a major source of patronage jobs for party loyalists and a major drain on the economy. To finance these changes, they hit the country's plump gold reserves. But the Central Bank was not the only casualty. Argentina's rather fragile democracy took a beating during those years, as well. The increasingly compliant Congress, thoroughly dominated by Perón, eventually amended the Constitution to allow him to run for a second 6-year term (consecutive terms were not allowed up to then), and the Supreme Court was eventually brought in line too. Perón's party was more a movement than a party. Some go so far as to say it was only a personality cult.

When Perón returned from exile in 1973, he found a changed country. The next generation was resonating with the left-leaning ideologies that spread like wildfire throughout Latin America in the 60's and 70's. College students that had grown up in peronist households were now trying their own version of liberation from the oppression of the industrialized world, and young priests were preaching liberation theology. Multinational company executives, particularly those running US companies in Argentina, were being kidnapped for ransom. Even an ex-president, one of the generals that ousted Perón in the coup of 1955, was kidnapped and executed by the guerrillas.

Perón's return triggered a fierce fight within the party, between the right and the left. Both wings had united to engineer his return and ensure his election as president, but unity was short lived. Perón packed his cabinet with old time right-wing loyalists, and when he came in for criticism, he unceremoniously expelled the young leftists from his party at a rally at the Plaza de Mayo. Upon his death of heart failure, a year later, the leftist guerrillas became a tremendous problem for his third wife, Isabel, whom he had picked as vice-president. Unprepared for the role, she relied for strategic advice on José López Rega, the man who had been Perón's personal secretary during the Spanish exile. A former policy corporal and a man of little education, López Rega became her minister of social welfare, and quickly became a kind of Rasputin to the inexperienced new president. He also was associated with the creation and rise of the much feared and reviled AAA, the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance, which was responsible for many kidnappings and violent incidents which preceded the military coup of March 1976. There are enough clues that López Rega was probably a santería follower. In a number of pictures from that time, he appears dressed entirely in white, as novices are required to wear during the year preceding their initiation. Rumors spread quickly that he performed black magic séances at the government palace, with the president in attendance. He was nicknamed el brujo, the warlock, and the name stuck. One might conclude that in Corpus Evita fiction is reality tamed a bit, to make it more believable.

When the coup came in March of 1976, most of the Argentine middle class was relieved, after enduring many months of unrest, hyperinflation and empty supermarket shelves. Many people saw the military as the one force that could bring back stability and safety, amidst the spiraling violence between right and left-wing paramilitary squadrons. It was the simple-minded perception of a complex reality. Most of the country had to wait a whole decade to find out the true scope of the horrors that took place during the years of the military dictatorship. Some of us got an early preview, though. In January of 1976 my family and I moved back to Rosario, our hometown, where I was attending the last year of high school. Early one morning, shortly after the coup, my best friend got picked up by the military in front of our school, for carrying a can of red spray paint. He told them it was for me, so I could paint my bike. A while later they all showed up at our door, machine guns and all, and nearly gave my grandmother a heart attack. They proceeded to meticulously inspect the house for subversive literature, which of course they did not find, and then left. I will never forget my friend's eyes, staring at me from the back of the patrol car. He did four years for that, in a terrible prison in the north. He was only released when his family managed to bribe a high ranking military officer after selling everything they owned, and only on condition that the whole family move to Israel. Government-sponsored anti-Semitism too, was a facet of life in Argentina at the time.

Corpus Evita stretches into the 1990's, well after the return of democracy to Argentina. Carlos and I agonized over how to represent the dark period of the dirty war. In the end, he provided by far the best treatment possible: a musical interlude that masterfully depicts the brutality and darkness of the period, without words.

Very few Argentines visit Eva's tomb at the Recoleta cemetery in Buenos Aires these days, though the site is a required stop for many foreign tourists. But peronism is alive and well, transfigured several times over, now right-of-center, now neo-liberal, now left-of-center, depending on the moment in history and the party leader du jour. Argentines cannot agree on the meaning of "peronism" any more than Americans can find a common definition for the expression "the American dream;" yet, or precisely because of that, the myth lives on. That is what Corpus Evita is about.