Music Theatre since 1990 - Schott Music

Synopsis
Peter Eötvös’ opera Love and Other Demons is a story about forbidden love. It plays in the tropical
and magical world of 18th-century Colombia, adapted from the novella Del amor y otros
demonios from Nobel prizewinner, Gabriel García Márquez.
One Sunday in the slave market in the port of Cartagena de Indias, a young girl is bitten by a
dog. The girl is Sierva Maria of All the Angels, daughter of the Marquis, and the dog is rabid.
Although Sierva herself seems unhurt, this is a town where reason and superstition are at war,
and soon the talk is not of rabies, but of possession.
Sierva finds herself imprisoned in the Convent of St Clare, where Cayetauno Delaura, the bishop’s
exorcist, comes to drive out her demons. But soon it is Delaura himself who is possessed,
consumed by love, ‘the most terrible demon of all’. As the lovers’ obsession grows, so too does
the desire of the authorities to purge this sickness from their midst.
The libretto was written by the famous Hungarian author Kornél Hamvai. One of the main
features of Love and Other Demons is the consistent use of multilingualism. Peter Eötvös and
Kornél Hamvai have given the different levels of narration and action in the story their own
characteristic language: English is the everyday life language of the noblemen, Latin is the language
of the church rites, Spanish is used by Delaura whenever he is talking with Sierva about
his emotions and Yoruba is the secret language of the slaves.
Love and Other Demons
31.01.2009 Oper Chemnitz
What we have is the framework of a play infused with music. Eötvös sets his text as heightened
speech, the better to convey the words, which are ritualised, carried on an instrumental current
that behaves like underscoring, recalling Eötvös‘s early days as a composer of incidental theatre
music. But here his music is organic and superbly accomplished, upper and lower frequencies set in
thrilling opposition to suggest the opposing forces that eventually tear our heroine apart.
(The Independent, 14.08.08)
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