In the original review, however, the DW editors had curiously substituted “Vietnamese” for “Viennese,” which would have been curious indeed!)Īs unique and important as Sor Juana was, and remains still, as a forward-looking thinker and activist in colonial Mexico, it’s also important to remember that she was not entirely alone.
I remarked of Menotti’s gloomy score that “Curiously, the orchestra occasionally drifts into noticeable strains of Viennese operetta…,” which was the correction published two days later. I reviewed this work 40 years ago for the Daily World (predecessor of People’s World) on September 25, 1979, which became the source of one of my all-time favorite stories about journalistic gaffes. It was one of Beverly Sills’s last roles at the New York City Opera. She was kept locked up in Tordesillas for the last almost five decades of her life. (And plumbing the depths of the truly obscure, there was also Gian Carlo Menotti’s opera La Loca-The Madwoman-about Juana (1479-1555), the mentally unstable Queen of Castile, a highly educated daughter of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, married to Philip the Handsome, Archduke of the House of Habsburg in 1496, and mother of Charles V. Fruitful comparisons could also be made to operas about the other “Juana”-that is, Jeanne, or Joan of Arc, of which there are several, notably by Verdi and Tchaikovsky-an equally feisty young woman (and also possibly a lesbian) who took on the male establishment and soared to historical prominence. Nor indeed the first opera about Juana: The Fort Worth Opera, five years ago, presented With Blood, With Ink, by Daniel Crozier. Juana is not the first opera to take place in a convent: Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites comes to mind and, of course, Giacomo Puccini’s one-act Suor Angelica. We see her later on participating in an ambitious course of letter writing, making poetry, arguing theology, and deftly wending her way through the thickets of male superiors who are demonstrably her intellectual inferiors. In fact, we meet her at the beginning of the opera as she is designing, on commission from the Church, a ceremonial arch to be erected in the city to welcome the new viceroy and vicereine, known as La Condesa. In any case, cloistered from the world, Juana could be free, privileged by the court to some extent because of her renown, to pursue her literary studies and other projects. The safety of the convent protected her from the inevitable fate of a suffocating marriage, and perhaps exposed her to the charms of her company of nuns (certainly one reason why so many gay men became priests). Sor Juana entered the convent in Mexico City at age 19. The opera comprises two substantial acts with numerous scenes in each, for a total of three hours with one intermission. Almost the entire production team were women. The conductor was Mary Chun, and the director Sara E. 22), presented by the combined forces of Opera UCLA, the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music, and the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television. Juana arrived at UCLA’s Freud Playhouse stage for two performances on Nov. Gaspar de Alba and the composer Carla Lucero co-wrote the libretto in Spanish. Earlier, in 1999, she had written a novel, Sor Juana’s Second Dream, upon which the opera is based. Her most recent academic book, (Un)Framing the ‘Bad Woman’: Sor Juana, Malinche, Coyolxauhqui and Other Rebels with a Cause, was published in 2014. Sor Juana’s portrait appears on Mexico’s 200-peso banknote.Īlicia Gaspar de Alba is a professor and founding faculty member of the UCLA César Chávez Department of Chicana/o Studies and former chair of the LGBTQ Studies Program. Though highly distinguished, Sor (Sister) Juana was actually not all that well known to the general public until Mexican author and 1990 Nobel Prize winner for Literature Octavio Paz (1914-98) published his massive biography, Sor Juana: Or, the Traps of Faith. (I am not including Evita Perón as a woman of culture although one of the most popular musicals of the 20th century bears her name, nor am I including the Virgen de Guadalupe, whose visage is ubiquitous throughout Mexican communities at home and abroad.) LOS ANGELES-Until artist Frida Kahlo joined the choir of feminist saints, the most famous woman of culture from Latin America was the 17th-century nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648-95). From left, Natalie Leonard as Concepción and Meagan Martin as Sor Juana / Taso Papadakis