photo by Ellen Appel
composer Jorge Martin
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"Before Night Falls" is gay Cuban dissident writer Reinaldo Arenas' moving memoir, completed shortly before his death from AIDS in New York in 1990 and published posthumously, in Spain in 1992, as "Antes que anocheza," and in the United States in 1993, in English translation by Dolores M. Koch. "Before Night Falls" is also Julian Schnabel's film, based on the book, made in 2000, and starring Javier Bardem and Johnny Depp. "Before Night Falls'" next incarnation will be an opera, by openly gay, Cuban born American composer Jorge Martín, with libretto by Martín and Koch, and its world premiere performances will be given on May 29, the Saturday of Memorial Day Weekend, at 8 p.m., and June 6, the following Sunday matinee, at 2 p.m., at Bass Performance Hall in Fort Worth, Texas, as part of the Fort Worth Opera Festival, when it plays in repertory with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's "Don Giovanni" and Gaetano Donizetti's "L'Elisir d'Amore."

Baritone Wes Mason portrays Rey (Reinaldo Arenas) in the premiere; tenor Jesús García plays Ovidio (Ovid), Rey's mentor, a composite of individuals in Arenas' life; bass-baritone Seth Mease Carico is Victor, and tenor Javier Abreu, remembered from performances at Juilliard, is Pepe, both of whom betray him; tenor Jonathan Blalock is Lázaro, who is by his side at the end of his life; soprano Janice Hall, who sang Belinda in the New York City Opera premiere of Henry Purcell's "Dido and Aeneas" and Violetta in Renata Scotto's production of Giuseppe Verdi's "La Traviata" there, plays Arenas' mother and his Muse, the Sea; soprano Courtney Ross is his Muse, the Moon; and tenor Corey Trahan doubles as the custom's officer and the visa official. Joe Illick conducts and David Gately directs.

I reviewed Martín's quartet of compelling chamber operas, after Saki (H.H. Munro), about people and animals, and how we see ourselves, "The Interlopers," "Sredni Vashtar," "The Mappined Life," and "Tobermory," given by the American Chamber Opera Company and billed as "Beast and Superbeast," for the New York Native in 1996, and wrote of the "expansive, unabashedly romantic, post-Wagnerian idiom" that marked some of them and, of the last, about a talking cat, its "eclectic score that spoofs a range of Italian opera conventions-the elegiac bel canto aria, the "vendetta" ensemble-and draw[ing], as well, on Richard Straussian lyricism; ragtime; and jazz." Thanks to publicist Philip Caggiano, I got to hear four tantalizing, transcendently lyrical excerpts from "Before Night Falls," performed at New York University on March 9, by Martín, at the piano, and three Yale Opera students of the class of 2010, thanks to Yale Alumni Association of Metropolitan New York; Yale GALA, the LGBT Alumni Association; the Yale Latino Alumni Association; and NYU's Tisch School of the Arts Graduate Musical Theare Writing, and these arias certainly whet the appetite for more of the opera. Martín himself is a graduate of Yale and his teacher was Jack Beeson, composer of the opera "Lizzie Borden." He and the Yale Opera students are also offering this preview of "Before Night Falls" in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

The prologue and epilogue to the new opera take place in Manhattan at the end of Arenas' life. He prays to finish his memoir "before night falls," that is, before death takes him, and in the hopeful invocation we heard sung by Yale baritone Vince Vincent, "Now, come, my Muses, sing to me," he calls upon the Sea and the Moon to "inspire me, ... guide my memory;" acknowledges his sadness-"Manhattan, once my freedom, now my final prison;" and hears the voices of the Muses, in vocalise, responding, the women's parts provided here by soprano Chrystal Williams.

The action of the opera's two acts, seen in flashback, takes place in Cuba and, later, New York. From Act One, Scene One, in Cuba, in 1958, when Arenas was 15, we were treated to the mother's uplifting solo, "Promise me, child/You will never forget ... Trust in the return of hope," sung by Williams. Martín laughingly acknowledged, during a question and answer period following the music, that, in having her introduce the second part of the aria with. "My son, listen," he was using "the oldest trick in the opera book-'Ascolta'," or listen, as so many Italian opera characters bid their confidantes.

Having heard from Arenas' mother, we next heard from his father figure, Ovidio-Arenas never knew his actual father-quietly urging, "But you, Reinaldo, must not stay silent!" sung by tenor Eric Barry. Leader of an illicit group that meets and reads banned books, Ovidio, subversively, advises Rey to entrust his manuscripts, which cannot be published in Cuba, to a couple willing to smuggle them out and have them published in France (where they later win prestigious awards), a plan to which Vincent's Rey reacts excitedly. He joins Ovidio (and Pepe) for a mournful, Cuban dance-like refrain of "Oh, our unhappy island!/Your songs were joyful,/Now your tunes are soundless and dull."

Shortly after, Reinaldo, entrapped by police in a sexual situation, orchestrated with Pepe's assistance, is arrested and charged with being a "pervert," a "¡Maricón!" but freed after he signs a spurious 'confession' to his "crime against our glorious Revolution," and agreement "never [to] publish again without [the Revolution's] permission" and "renounce [his] life as a homosexual."

In the final excerpt we heard, from Act Two, Scene, Two, "What magic color is the sea?" Rey struggles angrily against the government's restraints, which have stifled his inspiration and caused his Muses to abandon him, and wistfully laments, "Oh, my country!"

When Fidel Castro's Cuba is ready to deport "undesirables," or as Martín put it, "psychopaths, pimps, homosexuals, basically riffraff," via the Mariel boatlift of 1980, Arenas, playing an exaggerated "Maricón" at the visa office, and falsifying his name at the port, makes his way to the United States, where he lives the last decade of his life, first in Miami and then in New York, and writes plays, novels, essays, and poems.

By 1987, Arenas had learned that he had AIDS. He completes his last manuscript and the epilogue depicts the final moments of his life, in 1990. Refusing to continue to endure illness and depression, Rey, "prepared for death," takes his own life, bidding farewell to his friend Lázaro, singing, "Cuba will be free./I already am," as the Muses hail him with a chorus of, "Reinaldo, your fire will never die./Your works will send their light/Into the darkness of endless night."

For remaining tickets to the eagerly awaited Fort Worth performances, priced from $17 to 154 apiece, go to www.fwopera.org, or telephone 817/731-0726 or, toll free, 877/FWOPERA.