Daniel Catán

'I started composing instrumental music, but I quickly moved to vocal music because I knew from the beginning that I wanted to write opera. I always found that having a dramatic text was very inspirational for me. That really got my creative ideas flowing.' - Daniel Catán, in conversation with Maria Nockin in 2010

Mexican composer Daniel Catán died suddenly in 2011, aged only sixty-two, leaving an unfinished opera Meet John Doe, based on Frank Capra's 1941 film of the same name. The composer's widow, Andrea Puente Catán, has described how Catán had been in a very creative and busy period, at the time of his death, working on both music and libretto, and had left lots of material for the opera - manuscripts, sketches, poetic and musical sources and a clear road map, almost as if he knew that others would have to complete the work.

Born in Mexico City in 1949 to Sephardic-Jewish and Russian parents, Daniel Catán studied in England - philosophy at Sussex University and music at Southampton University, and later received a PhD from Princeton University (where his teachers included Milton Babbitt). When San Diego Opera produced Catán's opera La Hija de Rappaccini ('Rappaccini's Daughter') in 1994, it was the first opera by a Mexican composer to be produced in the USA. Florencia en el Amazonas (1996) was the first opera in Spanish to be commissioned by a US opera company. Catán was a friend of Plácido Domingo, who sang the role of Pablo Neruda in the composer's last completed opera, Il Postino at its first performance at Los Angeles Opera. Catán tended to use woodwind instruments rather than strings to carry the melody — something which differentiated him from many other modern composers.

Meet John Doe follows the story of Ann Mitchell, a newspaper columnist whose fictional letter to the editor from 'John Doe', protesting society's ills, sparks a grassroots populist movement, and she hires John Willoughby, a homeless former baseball player, to pose as the public face of John Doe.

Opera Fusion: New Works has now put a team in place to construct a completed opera, with Andrea Catán serving as adviser, associate editor and project manager. Other team members are editor in chief Eduardo Diazmuñoz, who will also compose structural scenes and conduct a workshop in January 2015, stage director Robin Guarino, also responsible for dramaturgy, and a married couple, Michaela Eremiásová and Jairo Duarte-López, who will write further scenes and edit the score.

Opera Fusion: New Works, now in its fourth year, was set up to contribute to the vitality of opera in North America through the development and production of new operatic works. Funded by a grant from The Andrew W Mellon Foundation, Opera Fusion: New Works offers composers or composer/librettist teams the opportunity to workshop an opera during a ten day residency.

The workshop in Cincinnati runs from 21-31 January 2015, culminating in a public reading of excerpts from the work at 7.30pm on 31 January at Memorial Hall, Over-the-Rhine, Cincinnati, Ohio, USA. Entrance is free of charge, but reservations are required (at Cincinnati Opera box office, +1 513 241 2742).

Information: www.cincinnatiopera.org/event/opera-fusion-new-works-winter-2015

Posted: 14 December 2014

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