After a creative dry spell, composer Osvaldo Golijov returns to the spotlight

Four years after what the New York Times called a decade of near silence, Osvaldo Golijov has reclaimed his place as one of classical music’s most in-demand and admired composers. The evidence is plentiful.

One of his works is finally receiving its debut Oct. 15-Nov. 9 at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, which is staging a co-production of Ainadamar, a much-praised 2003 flamenco-infused opera that revolves around the life of Spanish poet-playwright Federico García Lorca. Fascists gunned him down Aug. 19, 1936, at Ainadamar, a medieval aqueduct known in Spanish as Fuente de Lágrimas (Fountain of Tears).

The composer’s fourth collaboration with celebrated director Francis Ford Coppola hit theaters on Sept 27, a big-budget, sci-fi extravaganza titled “Megalopolis.” The movie debuted in May at the Cannes Film Festival and has divided critics and generated no shortage of controversy.

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra commissioned a 16- to 17-minute suite drawn from the two or so hours of music that Golijov wrote for the film; Riccardo Muti, Music Director Emeritus for Life, and the CSO will present the world premiere of the suite on Nov. 8-9. The work is part of a program that also includes Emmanuel Chabrier’s España and the Suite No. 2 from Manuel de Falla’s The Three-Cornered Hat. (He was the CSO’s Mead Composer-in-Residence from 2007 to 2010.)

Now 63, Golijov, a 2003 winner of a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” was born in Argentina to Jewish parents who immigrated from Romania and Ukraine. Inspired in part by his own mixed heritage, his music has often drawn on multiple ethnic and cultural influences and has looked as much to classical music’s past as its present.

The composer believes that the New York Times article that signaled his return from a creative hiatus, what he called “starting things but not finishing them,” was largely fair and accurate, though he thinks his period out of the spotlight was probably closer to seven years than 10. “It was tough but not so long,” he said. In 2011, he finished the score for another Coppola film, “Twixt,” and other than a smaller piece for the Tanglewood Music Festival, he didn’t write anything else until 2018 when he started on Falling Out of Time, an 80-minute song cycle based on Israeli novelist David Grossman’s 2011 book. A recording of that work released in 2020 by the Silkroad Ensemble sparked the Times piece about his career revival.

For some 20 years, Golijov had been exploring similar subject matter to that contained in Falling Out of Time, which deals with the author’s grief over the loss of his son, a soldier who died in Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 2006. Ainadamar started as a project centered around a story of Palestinian and Israeli parents who had lost children to violence. But the composer didn’t feel the libretto he received told the story in a way that would work for him. So, he changed direction to what became the Lorca-based tale. Similarly, he was commissioned by the Met in 2013 to write an opera based on the Iphigenia myth, which tells of Agamemnon sacrificing his daughter to appease the goddess, Artemis, during the Trojan War. But that work never came to fruition.

“Then I discovered the book by David Grossman,” Golijov said, “and I thought, ‘wow, this is it.’ It’s basically my failure to understand how land can be more sacred than life. That’s what it is. Or in the case of Iphigenia, victory. The sanctity of life being violated.”

Because Grossman’s book, a kind of novel, play and epic poem all in one, is “so nuanced, so fragile and so delicate,” Golijov said, he did not believe it was suited to being an opera. So he turned to what is described by his publisher and others as a song cycle, though he is not sure that is the right term. “It’s more like a tone poem for voices and instruments,” he said, “and it’s something that is very, very difficult. This goes to places that are in between the emotions that we know. I thought that instrumentalists and singers with whom I worked were able to go to those very evanescent places.”

The Met’s presentation of Ainadamar is just the latest success for this opera, which has been performed regularly since its debut more than two decades ago. “Somehow, something resonated in the piece, and it never went out of view,” Golijov said. The Met’s take is a co-production with Opera Ventures, Scottish Opera, Detroit Opera and Welsh National Opera. “I love the production,” he said. “I really it feels it’s extraordinary and revelatory about the music and the drama.”

One thing that Golijov feels has been missing in some of his recent music is the “chutzpah” that he believes undergirded such important earlier works like Ainadamar, St. Mark Passion and The Dreams and Prayers for Isaac the Blind, a work for clarinet and string quartet. “On the other hand,” he said, “I’ve gone to some very difficult places that I feel I needed to go in Falling Out of Time. I think, yes, I’ve changed. Of course, the experience of the depression [during his creative block] led to writing things that are dark, but, then, since Falling Out of Time, I had almost a vow to write joyful music, and that is what is happening.” As examples of more joyful recent works, he cited his seven-movement Violin Concerto, which was premiered in May by soloist Johnny Gandelsman and The Knights, and his score for Megalopolis, which he said was mostly “very vital and affirmative.”

Golijov and his wife recently visited the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, and he found it affirming to see how the famed painter dealt with mental illness by pursuing joy. “I feel,” he said, “very close to that — the idea of celebrating especially after Falling Out of Time, which was a hard one.”