In February 2009, in the lobby of Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, three friends gathered at the bar to celebrate a successful performance of “La Hija de Rappaccini” (“Rappaccini’s Daughter”) – Daniel Catán, the composer of the opera; Eduardo Diazmuñoz, the artistic director of the UI School of Music Opera Program; and Thomas H. Schleis, the general manager of the program and principal coach.
Over drinks, Diazmuñoz announced that he had decided to produce all of Catán’s operas, in chronological order (“La Hija de Rappaccini” was the first). His second, “Florencia en el Amazonas” (“Florencia in the Amazon”) opens Nov. 8 and runs through Nov. 11 at Krannert Center.
But for Diazmuñoz, these performances will be bittersweet. In the three years since their toast in the lobby bar, Catán and Schleis died – suddenly and unexpectedly, both at age 62. Diazmuñoz, who was so close to both men that he called Catán his “godfather” and Schleis his “right-hand man,” organized a series of memorial concerts first for Catán, who died in Texas in 2011, and more recently for Schleis, who died in Champaign in July.
Diazmuñoz is dedicating this production to the memory of Catán, and the Opera Program’s 2012-13 season to Schleis. (It would have been Schleis’ 25th season.)
With firsthand knowledge of the rich background leading up to the production of “Florencia,” Schleis would have undoubtedly crafted the kind of informative pre-concert lecture for which he was well-known. In one of the memorials he wrote for Schleis, Diazmuñoz listed some of the qualities that made his lectures so popular – his “quick wit, shrewd intellect, flawless memory and sharp sense of humor.”
“I think that Tom was just about the kindest person I ever met,” Diazmuñoz said. “He was a terrific historian and a great coach. He touched the lives of countless students.”
Diazmuñoz’s friendship with Catán stretched back even further, to their first meeting more than 30 years ago at the National Conservatory of Music in Mexico City, where Catán taught a course called composition and research, and Diazmuñoz was his student. Upon graduation, Diazmuñoz was hired as associate conductor of the Mexico City Philharmonic and soon programmed one of Catán’s symphonic works. Upon hearing it, Catán told Diazmuñoz that it was the best interpretation he had heard of his composition.
The admiration was mutual. “I have always loved his music,” Diazmuñoz said. “He had so much to say – even in just two chords.”
Their friendship developed when Diazmuñoz returned to Mexico after a few years of working and studying in Paris. Catán confided that he was working on an opera; Diazmuñoz initially tried to dissuade him.
“That was partly because I considered opera to be boring,” Diazmuñoz said. “In this age and time, who is going to hear opera?”
Catán, though, saw opera as the only means of marrying text and music into a form powerful enough to convey the emotions “boiling inside him,” Diazmuñoz said.
Writing in Spanish, Catán was disappointed in his first efforts: He allowed “Encuentro en el Ocaso” (“Meeting at Sunset”) to be produced once, then hid the score. (Diazmuñoz is still trying to get it.) He wrote “La Hija de Rappaccini” then burned the score. Over the next six years, he rewrote the opera, and in 1991, presented Diazmuñoz with a bound score and a request to conduct the world premiere, at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico.
Their recording of that opera, made within weeks of the initial performance, became a calling card that helped both men advance their careers, and in 1994, Diazmuñoz conducted the U.S. premier of “Rappaccini” for the San Diego Opera. Catán soon received a joint commission from the Houston Grand Opera, the Seattle Opera and the Los Angeles Opera for “Florencia,” which premiered in Houston in 1996.
Inspired by the writing of Gabriel García Márquez (best known for his novel “Love in the Time of Cholera”), the opera follows a singer named Florencia as she travels down the Amazon River aboard a steamboat full of interesting characters, in search of her long-lost love. (A Denver Post review of a recent Opera Colorado production described the story as “a piece that manages to be touching, amusing and highly manipulative within a tight two hours.”)
More commissions followed: “Salsipuedes,” a darkly comic opera that critiques Latin American politics, for the Houston Grand Opera, premiered in 2004. “Il Postino” (“The Postman”), inspired by Michael Radford’s 1994 film and by the Antonio Skarmeta novel “Ardiente Paciencia,” was commissioned by the Los Angeles Opera, with artistic director Placido Domingo starring in the 2010 premiere.
At the time of his death, Catán was working on “Meet John Doe,” an opera based on the 1941 Frank Capra movie of the same name, commissioned by the Butler School of Music at the University of Texas at Austin. He had finished the libretto, and it was to be his first opera in English.
All of Catán’s other operas were written in Spanish, introducing a new language into the operatic repertoire.
“What Mozart did for German, what Britten did for English, what Debussy, or for that matter, what Charles Gounod did for French, what Glinka did for Russian – to me, Catán has done for Spanish,” Diazmuñoz said. “His works are in opera houses around the world, being sung in Spanish. I told Dany: ‘You nailed it. You achieved your dream of having your own musical language married to our mother tongue.’
“What he worked for all his life, literally, he achieved it,” Diazmuñoz said. “And when he was at his peak, he died.”