Opera – Por treze, tres.

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Teatroteca, the video library of the Centro de Documentación de las Artes Escénicas y de la Música (CDAEM) of the Instituto Nacional de las Artes Escénicas y de la Música (INAEM) makes available on-line and for free six modern stage adaptations of Celestina:

La Celestina (2008), adapted by Eduardo Galán and directed by Alejandro Arestegui.
The opera version by Joaquín Nin-Culmell, La Celestina (2008), directed by Ignacio García.
La Celestina (1988), adapted by Gonzalo Torrente Ballester and directed by Adolfo Marsillach.
La Celestina (2012), adapted by Eduardo Galán and directed by Mariano de Paco Serrano.
La Celestina (1999), adapted by Luis García Montero and directed by Joaquín Vida.
La Celestina allá cerca de las tenerías, a la orilla del río (2004), adapted by Michel Garneau and directed by Robert Lepage.

This is a great chance to watch some of the most important stage adaptations of Celestina of the last decades, in particular for those who were not in Spain when they were in theatres.

There is nothing new I can add to Snow’s bibliographical appendix of Celestina‘s operas in the twentieth century¹, however, as an adept net-surfer I have been able to locate several related on-line resources of interest for celestinistas and music lovers.

For example, digitised versions of the full Castilian libretto of Felipe Pedrell’s La Celestina. Tragicomedia lírica de Calisto y Melibea² and its reduction for voice and piano, with the French and the Italian translations of the libretto³, can be found at the Biblioteca Digital Hispánica (libretto and voice-piano score), the Memòria Digital de Catalunya (voice-piano score), and Archive.org (libretto). The libretto of Joaquín Nin-Culmell’s La Celestina is also available as part of the programme of the 2008 world premiere at the Teatro de la Zarzuela (Madrid).

Finding recordings of operas based on Celestina proves far more difficult. I know positively that the fifth scene of Pedrell’s Celestina was recorded during the 1999 world premiere at L’Auditori de Barcelona and released in 2001 in the collection “Colección Autor” of Tritó Edicions ⁴. Apparently, there is a video recording of Jerome Rosen’s Calisto and Melibea: A Comedy of Love, Seduction, and Death 1979 premiere at the University of California in Davis, kept in the Berkeley Library, and there are several pictures of Maurice Ohana’s La Célestine: tragi-comédie lyrique en un prologue et onze tableaux 1988 premiere at the Palais Garnier (Paris) in Gallica. By contrast, I could find several videos of Nin-Culmell’s La Celestina performance at the Teatro de la Zarzuela:

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These are the on-line resources for the study of the operas based on Celestina I could find so far. However, should something be missing, please contact me.

¹Snow, Joseph T. (2007), “Richard Strauss, Stefan Zweig, Joseph Gregor and the Story of the Celestina Opera that Almost was, with a Bibliographical Appendix of Celestina Operas in the Twentieth Century”, Celestinesca 31, pp. 133-164. Available on-line.

²Pedrell, Felipe (1903), La Celestina. Tragicomedia lírica de Calisto y Melibea (Barcelona: Tipolitografía de Salvat).

³Pedrell, Felipe; Curzon, Henri de (trad.), and Bignotti, Angelo (trad.), (1903), La Celestina. Tragicomedia lírica de Calisto y Melibea (Barcelona, Bilbao and Madrid: Casa Dotesio).

⁴Pedrell, Felipe (2001), Excelsior. La Celestina, Orquestra Simfònica de Barcelona i Nacional de Catalunya (Barcelona: Tritó Edicions).

Tag: Opera

Six adaptations of Celestina at the video library “Teatroteca” of the Centro de Documentación de las Artes Escénicas y de la Música

Opera and Celestina: On-line resources