Poet William Hoffman paints a scene of the paths of Fort Tryon Park, the rambling tangle of land upon which the Cloisters sits like an alien jewel, with “Alone in these woods, among vagaries of leaves and plummeting berries, we founder and flee into dreams of permanence.” The Cloisters is a place worthy of poetry and—as John Corigliano, who set Hoffman’s words in the 1960s, knew—of music, too. This weekend it was the home of a new opera, Primero Sueño, about an artist who herself founders, flees and dreams in search of infinite vision.
A collaboration between Paola Prestini, composer and director of National Sawdust, amongst other things, and Magos Herrera, Mexican jazz singer, songwriter and educator, Primero Sueño is a processional opera made for The Cloisters about Mexican writer, nun, mystic and early feminist figure Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. In addition to writing some of the most beautiful poetry of her era, Sor Juana was also a passionate advocate for women’s education in an age that consistently sought to forbid her access to knowledge. Prestini and Herrera depict Sor Juana as, rightfully, a visionary but also a creature of blood and bone, someone who has to fight and ultimately embrace her own humanity to see herself clearly.
Future collaborations between these fully-fledged artists should be swiftly funded—they work fantastically well together (this isn’t their first time doing so), with Prestini’s sharp, occasionally spiky harmonies both clarified and mellowed by Herrera’s depth and radiance. Their score is medieval meets modern meets Latin jazz meets Mexican folk. Anchored by two musicians, who take up a bevy of instruments, including theorbo, Spanish guitar, harp, charango and various types of percussion, Primero Sueño is a deeply satisfying blend of styles, one that nevertheless tends toward the gentle, the mystical and the joyous.
Herrera herself sings Sor Juana with a gentle strength; her voice is a marvelous instrument, shimmering and hazy, earthy and light at once. Six nuns flank her, sometimes her Greek chorus, other times the environment around her, other times just her sisters, with whom she shares her days. Prestini writes beautifully for choir, as Primero Sueño displayed to great effect. One scene has nuns passing notes from one throat to another, like hands passing the shuttle of a loom. Other times, the nuns chatter, hiss and buzz with a stuttering n-n-n or ch-ch-ch that brought us firmly into the present day of extended vocal techniques. Her nemesis, the Archbishop (dancer and choreographer Jorrell Lawyer-Jefferson), attempts to keep the nuns from singing. Herrera and Prestini wisely render this character silent, but the threat is serious indeed.
Together they weave a libretto out of history and poetry, liberally dipping in and out of Sor Juana’s immense, luminous “Primero Sueño” of 1685 to craft their narrative of a woman both in and out of the world. Many of their words are Sor Juana’s own, translated in rich and mystical beauty. But this is their story, and its scope is both narrow and infinite. This is an opera about a woman trying to finish a poem. Various things collude to stop her, firstly the nasty Archbishop who forbids women to write and to sing, then a vision of Death (also Lawyer-Jefferson), who frightens Sor Juana and her nuns, and then, at last, her body fails her. How can she finish it? Any artist knows such a task is as easy as it is impossible—ask Sondheim about what it takes to finish a hat. It’s also an opera about grand visions, striving and the beauty of failure.
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As she ascends the pyramid of her vision, attempting to capture all in her gaze, she becomes too dizzy. She’s betrayed by her own flesh. She carves out a line in her own blood, breaks her pen and gives up. Only the memory of another story, that of Phaeton, who tried to drive the chariot of the sun but lost control, can recall her to her mission. He fell but was remembered in the stars. As in the real “Primero Sueño,” Sor Juana’s attempts to get beyond herself are doomed, but they’re not useless. The attempt is valuable, if only as a reminder to be grateful for our pitiful, beautiful bodies, and our sharp, fallible vision.
Director Louisa Proske, a neighbor of the Cloisters (like myself), revels in her setting—amongst the strangest and most enticing in the whole city—leveraging its startling anachronisms to tell the story of another creature out of time. Her use of space and materials is ingenious, particularly when it came to projections; a nun’s silky habit glides off to become the projection screen for the translations. Andrea Lauer’s costumes are a marvel. Escudos (like the one you can see on Miguel Cabrera’s portrait of Sor Juana), looking like tambourine heads and nichos and bombs all at once, are strapped to the nuns’ chests and glow like flaming hearts—one is revealed to be a minuscule projector, shining a heart onto Sor Juana’s breast. Juana pulls a length of cloth out of her own robe, onto which a sketched version of her soul was projected. It gently turns and tumbles above her sleeping form as if it, too, were breathing. David Herrera’s breathtaking sculpture design—a massive eye, a wire bird—merges the piece even more fully with the space, as do Jorge Cousineau’s simple, stunning projections of hand-drawn sketches and handwritten lines.
Prestini and Herrera’s opera is a work of great beauty and clarity, alighting on small phrases like “kind labor” to depict the daily rhythms of art and life as providing delicious, surprising translations of some of Sor Juana’s most challenging mystical language. This rich, meditative opera succeeds where other operatic treatments of Sor Juana do not, in part because it eschews strict biography in favor of poetry. When she finishes her poem, we rejoice with Sor Juana, not only because we want to know how this artist confronts her failure and triumphs anyway, but because the end of the poem itself is about artistic renewal, a cycle that repeats like the sunrise. Proske’s directing brings poetry of its own. At the end, Sor Juana stands alone in the chapel, music swirling about her. Death approaches, poem in hand. Juana clasps her text to her heart and leans forward, pressing her forehead to Death’s in an embrace. The sun rises, and she sings, “The world illuminates, and I am awake.”
