How can I believe in a god that commands deceit? What can I think of a faith that teaches you to despise every man that differs from your opinion?' Montezuma
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Carl Heinrich Graun's opera Montezuma bears witness to a clash of civilisations of epic proportions. In a devastating contest between old and new worlds, Montezuma becomes a battle for domination of one great empire over another.
The ornately gilded temples and palaces of the Aztec empire provide a magnificent backdrop for a spectacular welcome to the adventurer Fernando Cortes and his Spanish Conquistadors.
But it does not take long for these unscrupulous Europeans to vanquish and brutally slaughter their Aztec hosts and ruthlessly plunder and lay waste to their extraordinary wealth and culture.
It was a brutal subjugation of a people seen as heathen and barely human by an invading colonising power.
How did it happen? And why did Aztec King Montezuma appear to allow it to happen?
Was Montezuma a hero, a traitor or a visionary?
Written in 1755, over 200 years after these tragic events occurred, Montezuma is a remarkable collaboration between one of the great masters of coloratura composition and a politically sophisticated and artistically talented monarch. Carl Heinrich Graun and Frederick II of Prussia explore through words and music the very complex relationship between the ambitious Cortes and the fatalistic Montezuma.
Graun's rarely-performed operatic gem is the basis for an innovative new production from one of Mexico's most exciting young directors, Claudio Valdés Kuri. A cast of fine European and Mexican singers, artists drawn equally from old and new worlds, is led by Concerto Elyma and its conductor Gabriel Garrido.
This was opera by numbers.
It all came together in a seething, carnivalesque finale
A concert performance would have been preferable to this unfocused and idiosyncratic production.
I think I deserve some sort of prize, too, for staying fully conscious throughout such a feeble show.
A mere parody of opera, Montezuma was more Monty Python.
Entertaining as it is intellectual.
An opera about Mexico's conflicted past
King's Theatre, Edinburgh from Saturday August 14, 2010, until Tuesday August 17, 2010. 7.15pm. No performance on the 16th.. More info: http://www.edtheatres.com/kings
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