english

Cantos de Sombras (songs of shadows) is a further attempt to approach the work of Mexican writer Juan Rulfo and was conceived as a part of a music theater work after his single novel Pedro Páramo. Although it might be almost impossible to contextualize the selected texts without having an overview of the novel, the four movements should at least introduce the audience to Rulfo’s underworld.

We can understand Pedro Páramo as the history of the fall of a rural town called Comala during the time of the Mexican Revolution. Prisoners in a labyrinth of violence, hopelessness and superstition and dominated by the tyrannical landowner Pedro Páramo, the inhabitants of Comala are unable to assume their own historical destiny. From this perspective Susana San Juan, the idealized love of Pedro’s childhood, the subject of his unrealized mature love and the ultimate reason of Pedro’s subjugation and destruction of Comala, offers an antithetical position. She appears as the only figure able to maintain her autonomy and to escape to the triple dependence on Pedro, on her father, and on the narrow social and religious context of her time represented by Reverent Rentería. The figure of Susana San Juan gives the idea of revolution as an act of personal liberation a new meaning.

The selected texts correspond to key moments in Susana’s life: the ‘time of the air’, Pedro’s idealized memories of his childhood near Susana; her sensual purification rites in the sea as the moments of total freedom; the time of her delirium symbolized by the unceasingly rain and finally, the moment previous to dead, in her struggle to resist the infernal visions that Reverend Rentería whispers to her in order to move her to repent and save her soul.

The conception of the piece and the composition of the first two parts were accomplished in Druskininkai, Lithuania, during a residency enabled by the Lithuanian Association of Composers in July 2013.