The magic opal, Opera, lyrical comedy by Isaac Albeniz
Title: The magic opal
Author: Isaac Albeniz
Genre: Opera, lyrical comedy
Year: 1892-93
The Magic Opal, Isaac Albéniz's English operetta in two acts, is a love comedy set in Ancient Greece, in which a magic ring made anyone who touched it fall in love with its wearer.
Isaac Albéniz is known throughout the world for his great works for piano, such as his famous Iberia suite and his Spanish suites, also in his version for orchestra. Less well known, however, is his fruitful facet as a composer of stage music. Albéniz composed zarzuelas, operas and operettas. Curiously, much of his lyrical output was written in English, due to the time he spent in London and later because of his collaboration with Francis Burdett Money-Coutts, who left us works such as Merlin, Henry Clifford and Pepita Jiménez. In 1893, he premiered The Magic Opal at the Lyric Theatre in London, a comic operetta about a love affair in ancient Greece, with a libretto by Arthur Law. The success was such that Bernard Shaw said that he had gone ahead of all other creators, at a time when Gilbert and Sullivan were the kings of the genre. Certainly, and as always in Spain, one's own is the last thing to be valued. At a time when Puccini, Wagner and Verdi were acclaimed in all the theatres of our country, attempts to create a national opera failed time and again. Albéniz, like Pedrell and later Falla, would not only have to compete with those exalted foreign geniuses, but also be systematically ignored in the programmes of theatres where zarzuela was not the principal lyric genre.
Bretón, Arrieta and Chapí had great successes, but they were honourable exceptions which in any case did not establish a national lyric, a void which zarzuela continues to fill.
Albéniz's lyric production did not have the luck it deserved. Henry Clifford was premiered in Barcelona in Italian, with success, but was quickly forgotten. Of the Arthurian trilogy he attempted with Money-Coutts he only completed Merlin, and was unable to premiere it. Pepita Jiménez was also premiered in Italian in Barcelona, but after Albéniz's death it did not have many revivals until Pablo Sorozábal's re-orchestration in the 1960s. In the early 2000s Merlin received some belated recognition, with the famous recording with Plácido Domingo and the production at the Teatro Real in 2003 (which I saw, aged 15), but while the recording was very successful, the stage production was received with divided opinion, and has not been seen in Spain until now, apart from a timid piano performance at a cultural centre in Madrid in 2009 with little impact. Pepita Jiménez was seen at the Teatros del Canal in 2013, to good acclaim. Henry Clifford was revived in the Canary Islands in 2009, and like Merlín, both works were recorded; always by the great champion of Albéniz's lyric poetry of the time, the maestro José de Eusebio.
As for the work in question, it was first performed in Spain in 1894, at the Teatro de la Zarzuela, in Spanish, under the title La Sortija. It was not until 2010 that it was heard in the capital again, now at the Auditorio Nacional. And it is now in 2022, when it returns to the same stage where it was heard almost a hundred and thirty years ago. However, it does so in an adaptation by Paco Azorín, also stage director, and Carlos Martos de la Vega, and in a Spanish translation by Javier L. Ibarz and Pachi Turmo. Why in Spanish and not in the original English? This is what many of us asked ourselves before going in. But on leaving, the conclusion is that the dramaturgy is such, and possibly also the adaptation, that it would not sit well in an English version, since the language alone, let alone the dialogue, where it makes perfect sense is with the reality of today's Spain.
A play as forgotten as this one is a total stranger to today's audiences, a love comedy set in Ancient Greece, in which a magic ring made anyone who touched it fall in love with its wearer.
The young Albéniz gives us delightful, bewitching, joyful music, light in comparison to the Merlin or Henry Clifford epics, but with that recognisably Spanish touch, so folkloric and colourful, that it is exotic, as the audiences of the time demanded. In the dances, such as the one in Act II, there is that style that we find in part of the third act of Merlin. At other times, the music sounds like a conventional operetta.
Isaac Albeniz best work
Albéniz's most notable composition is Iberia, a piano suite composed between 1905 and 1909 by the Spanish composer.
It consists of four books of three pieces each; a complete performance lasts approximately 90 minutes.
It is considered one of the most challenging works for the piano.