HANS WERNER HENZE - Schott Music

Two levels of time and two forms of theatre are
interlocked in the plot of La Cubana: a general
spoken plot consisting of a prologue, an epilogue
and four intermezzos is interspersed with five
sung tableaux. The action takes place on 1 January
1959, the day of Fidel Castro’s accession to power
in Cuba. The ageing Vaudeville artist Rachel is recalling
the stages of her earlier life to her maid Ofelia.
The five musical tableaux illustrate these memories
and introduce figures who have accompanied Rachel
through different phases of her life: these persons
comment on her behaviour as witnesses. Each phase
is linked to love affairs with changing partners and
is at the same time associated with concrete political
and social upheaval and radical changes taking place
in Cuba.
The 1st tableau, in which Rachel’s romance with Eusebio,
the son of a manufacturing family, culminates
in Eusebio’s suicide, is set in 1906 – the year of the
second US intervention in Cuba which continued until
1909, precipitating social unrest and led to the formation
of the first proletarian mass party in Cuba, the
Independent Party of Color (Partido Independiente
de Color).
The 2nd tableau depicts Rachel’s relationship to the
Cuban pimp Yarini and his murder during the armed
conflict between rival Cuban and French bands of
pimps which unsettled Cuba in 1910.
The 3rd tableau is set in 1912 – Enzensberger dates
these episodes two years later – and interlinks Rachel’s
experiences in a third-class travelling circus
with the armed conflict by the coloured people under
the leadership of the “Cimarrón” in protest of the
oppression and arbitrary rule by the US occupation
forces: defeat was ultimately sealed in the third US
intervention.
The 4th tableau depicts Rachel as the star of the
Teatro Alhambra in Havana in 1927 and her relationship
with the leftist student Federico whose arrest she
cannot prevent.
The background is provided by the birth of the revolutionary
movement and resistance by the Communist
Party of Cuba which was established in 1925 to
counter Gerardo Machado, the president appointed
by the USA.
The closure of the Teatro Alhambra in 1934 and the
end of Rachel’s stage career in the culmination of the
5th tableau which marks the end of Rachel’s artistic
phase is closely interlinked with the events surrounding
the rise of Fulgencio Batista who was appointed
as the new president of Cuba in the installation of a
military dictatorship under his regime which was later
deposed by Fidel Castro.
Rachel is unmoved by the permanent political and
social unrest and changes and does not register these
events although her private life is constantly interlinked
with them. Her response to the “filthy brew of
politics” is the paradisiacal utopia of love, music and
art. Her answer to American repression is the sham
world of glittering leotards, spotlights and the entertainment
of variety theatre.
“
Essentially, my intention was to invent and
conceive a new form of music theatre. It
soon however became clear that the material – the
memoirs of Amalia Vorg, the old Cuban queen of
Vaudeville, which a Cuban ethnologist, Miguel Barnet,
had recorded, put on tape and transformed
into a book two years later – possessed enormous
potential far in excess of mere entertaining vaudeville.
It not only provides information on Cuban
history during the last forty or fifty years prior to
the liberation by Fidel Castro but also reflects the
underdevelopment of a country. A further facet is
the view through the looking glass or the filter of
the mentality of a vaudeville star – a cabaret artist
who is convinced she is a great artist – which
reveals the relationship between art and effect. We
are provided with a discussion of the essence of art.
We ask ourselves: what is art, how is it valued by
society and what status does it possess? What are
artists? What is their moral disposition and what
is the nature of their social responsibility? To what
degree has the bourgeois ideology of the last few
centuries demanded that the artist should display
anti-social behaviour or take up an alienated stance
within society? All these facets are brought to discussion
within the framework of a humorous, gaudy
and multifaceted form of theatre.
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