Florencia En El Amazonas Analysis

Florencia en el Amazonas or Florencia in the Amazon is an opera by David Catán. This opera premiered on October 25, 1996 at the Houston Grand Opera and has continued to entertain audiences for 22 years. David Catán describes his opera as “the journey to transcendent love with all its intricacies, subtleties, wretchedness, and glorious happiness.” I watched Florencia en el Amazonas on March 20, 2018 at the San Diego Opera. I arrived around 6:45 and found my seat after picking up my ticket at will call. The theater seemed to be fairly full except for the upper rows of seats. This was my first time attending an opera so I wasn’t sure what to expect. A few minutes before the start of the show, one of the directors for the San Diego Opera came

Different scenes took place on different sides and levels of the boat which gave the effect that the set was always changing but really the boat was just rotating. At the beginning of every scene the characters would emerge from inside the boat, this made the performance seem even more realistic because the characters could not leave the boat just as they wouldn't be able to if they were passengers on a real amazon riverboat. However, the river spirits and the “water people”, as I like to call them, always stayed on the bank of the river or right next to the boat. While they never came aboard, the water people played the role of mimicking the flow and characteristics of water. They were even responsible for taking Florencia’s notebook after it fell from the boat early in the first act. Despite the main character being female, the cast was made up of mostly males. Florencia’s voice type is Soprano, Riolobo is Bass, Rosalba, the other female lead is a soprano as well, and Arcadio is the only Tenor. This makes for a fairly homogeneous mixture of male voice types and female voice types which is common in most Operas because it shows distinction between

It is sung by Florencia in Act 2 scene 17 and is the last song in the opera. In this scene the passengers on the boat have just arrived in Manaus. Upon arrival the Captain sees coffins floating down the river and realizes that cholera is to blame for these deaths. He instructs the passengers to not get off the boat in fear for their health and safety. Florencia is extremely upset about this, the one and only reason she came back was to sing at the opera house in hopes to reunite with her former lover Cristóbal who went missing in the amazon while searching for a rare butterfly. Florencia’s final aria contains recitatives and expresses her emotions very well. In this scene Florencia is physically, mentally and emotionally exhausted from her journey and heartbreak of the possibility of never seeing Cristóbal again. The music reflects her emotions with soft instruments like the marimba, harp and violins. The orchestra is playing in the tempo adagio and uses sustained chords to express Florencia’s sadness. As the scene goes on there are many sustained notes followed by quick drops that express her desire for