A Rainha Louca

The stage premiere of a contemporary Portuguese opera is in itself unusual; however, it was by no means common that Alexandre Delgado not only repeated the presentation of a new opera in 2011 – having premiered O Doido e a Morte in 1994, based on the homonymous play by Raul Brandão – but also once again recovered in the libretto of A Rainha Louca a dramatic text that had been unjustifiably erased from theatre companies’ repertoires: the play O tempo feminino by Miguel Rovisco (1959–1987), third part of the Trilogia portuguesa, written in 1986.

In writing the libretto, the composer closely followed the play on which he based it, only choosing to condense into the musical apotheosis that precedes the opera’s finale the 3rd Scene (and last) of the play, the one in which the queen’s madness is explained. More an icon of a disjointed contemporary Portugal than a historical portrait, this D. Maria is pure excess, the stage of a delirious and tormented imagination in which the fearsome news reaching her from the French Revolution, the doubt about the eternal destiny of D. José I, her father (ultimately responsible for the actions of the Marquis of Pombal, whom the queen had outright renounced), or even the death of the Infante D. José, her son, to whom she supposedly refused the smallpox vaccine, trusting in a distorted miracle-seeking religiosity, are all stirred up.

In the first of the two parts into which the opera A Rainha Louca is divided, Alexandre Delgado characterises the co-protagonists of the drama, distinguishing them by timbres and leitmotifs that seal their fate. The harp marks the poetic and faltering D. Maria; the harpsichord the edgy and bitter Henriqueta; and the marimba signals the servant, in a musical-dramatic echo of the festive and intoxicating innocence attributed by 18th-century European culture to the overseas “noble savage”.

In the second part, the composer draws a delirium that wanders between D. Maria’s oneirism and the diabolical intervention of the spectre-women who torment her, having as its horizon the typical frenzy of operetta or late 19th-century boulevard theatre. In this beautiful sequence, it is particularly touching how text and music interweave the protagonist’s afflictive conflict, as she tries to escape the heavy exercise of memory as a relentless scourge (so characteristic of Portuguese self-reflexivity) through a very light poetic flight, recalling her only moment of happiness, “on that April afternoon, decades and decades ago”, when in the gardens of the Ajuda Palace the aerostat rose into the air, “a paper balloon, oval in shape, eighteen feet long”. This impressive suspension leads to a festive epitome of the opera’s motifs and the most bewildering quotations from the composer’s musical memory – with fairy-like and spectral irruptions of Wagner, Puccini, Bizet, Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky… –, ending A Rainha Louca in an unexpected fofa, the servant’s liberating dance, which exorcises in a beneficent timbral and rhythmic vitality the tormented memories of a postponed country.

This “ramified study on madness” – a definition in which the composer sums up his new opera (after all a “study” already begun in O Doido e a Morte, although what in the 1994 work was a festive comic jouissance is here densified) – had its absolute premiere at the Pequeno Auditório of the CCB, in a production integrated into the 2011 Almada Festival. Joaquim Benite’s staging acutely signalled this set of surrealising variations over which madness presides, both by circumscribing a space as oppressive as the tortured mind of the queen, and by highlighting the emancipatory strangeness of intermittent and contrasting desires for escape.

Miguel-Pedro Quadrio