Bomarzo

This piece focuses on the Argentine opera Bomarzo, whose performance history has been presented as a locus of dispute between dictatorship and democracy, totalitarianism and freedom.A fencer without visible enemies pokes the impalpable air contained by the Grand Arch, the axial structure of Paris’ business district La Defense.Segments of plain black join and disjoin the fencer scene with those of an abandoned and polluted beach, sprinkled with debris and foreign elements.The history of Bomarzo’s performances tells an intricate story of a debate within the Argentine right, the old right resorting to censorship and the new right pretending to endorse tolerance by supporting a bogus progressive opera such as Bomarzo–two faces of the same coin, one censoring and enforcing the other one creating an illusion of democracy and freedom.The Washington Opera Society commissioned Bomarzo to composer Alberto Ginastera, who based his opera on the homonymous novel by writer Manuel Mujica Lainez. Both Ginastera and Mujica Lainez were noted for their right-wing ideology and complicity with Argentine dictatorship from the 60’s. Yet, the 1967 DC premiere included sado-masochistic, hallucinatory and orgiastic scenes reputedly provoking four dancers to quit the production. And the Argentine ambassador to the USA, representing the new right-wing, widely promoted Bomarzo, which obtained a very favorable review in the USA. Consequently, Bomarzo was scheduled to be performed in Argentina, but de facto President Juan Carlos Ongania banned it unexpectedly. As the New York Times reported back then, “For a while, Bomarzo was the pride of the government… Then, just before the opera’s scheduled opening in Buenos Aires this month, Ongania changed his mind and decided that it was “too obsessed with sex.”"Bomarzo, however, did not have to wait for an elected government to be performed in Argentina. In 1972, the new de facto President Agustin Lanusse authorized its premiere in Buenos Aires. Bomarzo will also be performed under elected governments, coincidentally, during the rosy times of Raul Alfonsin’s government, in 1984, and within the first of month of Nestor Kirchner’s mandate coinciding with the anniversary of Ginastera’s death, in 2003.