THE LIFEWORK OF JUAN DIAZ and GIANNI SCHICCHI
Ray Bradbury used this culture that surrounds death in Mexico as a springboard for his short story “The Lifework of Juan Diaz.” He also added another well-known aspect of Mexican death culture, mummification as it was practiced in Guanajuato. Bradbury had seen the mummy catacombs there after the war and was so fascinated–if not horrified–by the sight of them that they became the basis for at least two of his short stories. In 1964 he adapted “The Lifework of Juan Diaz” for an Alfred Hitchcock Presents teleplay–which Lawrence Rapchak has now used as the basis for his new opera, given its world premiere here April 21.
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The plot centers around an impoverished man who, before he dies, takes what little money he has and pays two years’ rent on a grave in the tiny, overcrowded village cemetery. After he dies, the greedy grave digger comes a year early to extort more money from the dead man’s family, demanding written proof of the two-year agreement. When they are unable to provide such proof or to pay anything further, the grave digger sighs that he will have to evict his “tenant” to the mummy catacombs. But the man’s courageous and loving wife has ideas of her own.
Bradbury’s teleplay clocks in at 50 minutes, Rapchak’s opera at almost 90. That in itself would mean very little if there weren’t the slow spots. I suspect that even Bradbury would agree that his every word did not have to be preserved but should be rethought for opera, much as Verdi’s librettist Boito so brilliantly transposed Shakespeare for Otello and Falstaff. The Lifework of Juan Diaz could probably be tightened up to an hour or so, which would give it the relentless quality Bradbury’s teleplay has. Rapchak and Ratner seem to have forgotten that much can be said without words when there is effective music to communicate it–which in this case there is.
