Part 2. The Conquistador - The Story and the Role


What do you think of the story of The Conquistador?

I think that the story is an unbeatable story; and it's a true story. All that stuff that we see in the opera happened with the exception of the love interest of Don Luis for Dona Elena. But I think that was a device that was carefully considered by the librettist and the composer - in order to show another side of Don Luis, so that he doesn't come across as a one-dimensional character. It humanizes him. Were we not able to see his capacity for love, then the brutality that he indulged in wouldn't strike us as being so terrible. If all we saw was the brutality of this man and his unsavory side, I think it would not be too easy to feel anything for him including distaste, but when one sees both sides of the coin, one sees that his brutality is a choice that he makes, and that makes it all the more disturbing.



How about the character of Don Luis de Carvajal?

I found it very interesting to portray Don Luis.

In my career up until the last couple of years most of the people that I've portrayed on stage have been the young ingenue - the lover types. Although I've been playingTom Rakewell in The Rake's Progress in for the last 25 years, he was sort of the exception to the rule. In the last 10 years or so I have essayed more roles where the characters were complicated like all of us are. And now I find that I'm playing more and more characters who are not so easily sorted out, people that have some real problems.

I haven't played anyone who was quite as complicated as Don Luis Carvajal though. He certainly was a product of his time. He was someone who on the one hand believed fervently in the Franciscan ideal of a New World Utopia, but one that also carried with it the idea that if some blood had to be spilled along the way, then so be it - may the souls of these poor wretched creatures...!

It was very Machiavellian, you know, the means justifying the end. Plus there was that fact that he was hiding a terrible secret. He knew what his ancestry was about the time he became an adult which in those days was about the age of 14 or 15. He knew what his background was and he spent the rest of his life hiding it, because if anyone found out, it would have meant his undoing. That was one of the reasons why he took his sister and her family under his wing. He said, "Yes, I was born into the same family that you were, but I lived for 14 years believing that I was born a Catholic. And I am a Catholic and I am not a Jew. I will protect you and I will use my disposal of power to continue to protect you, but swear to me that you have put aside the beliefs and practices of the old way."

And of course, they lied to him. One of the scenes I found most difficult emotionally to portray was the scene in which he violently turns on his favorite niece - when she tries to convert him and she ceases to exist for him. The capacity of the man to deny his dual nature! Remember that this is a man who was used to being in control - he had the power of life and death and the ironic thing was the one thing he could not control was who he was. He could not control the blood that flowed through his veins. Myron has said this many times - that this conqueror, this Conquistador, makes his ultimate conquest in that prison cell when he conquers his own soul and he accepts what he is.  But of course he accepts it too late for happiness in this world.

The thing that I found so interesting about the piece is - it certainly left a lot of questions unanswered in terms of Don Luis. But there was some certainty too - the door was left wide open for one to believe that somehow, he did find some peace and some redemption. 

It's a fascinating character.  I think the Hispanic experience has not really been all that well portrayed in the operatic world and even though this was done in English I would think that Don Luis de Carvajal, even though the Inquistion expunged from the historical record much about his life, was a major, major historical figure in the New World. For his generation he was on a par with Cortes, Pizarro, and all those people and yet we know nothing about him.



How did you go about creating a new operatic role?

Doing that opera in front of an audience only four times was in some ways a bit of an anti-climax, because like any piece that's done over and over and over, one becomes more at one with the character that he or she is portraying the more one does it. 

Now mind you, I spent a lot of time ( 3 years!) before we actually got on stage with this thing - thinking and pondering and meditating and reading everything I could about Don Luis Carvajal. And reading everything I could about the time period this takes place, reading everything I could about the Jews in Spain and I came to the rehearsals probably better prepared dramatically than I've been for anything I've done, because I knew that I had nothing to draw upon. We were plucking it out of the air. No precedent. We were setting the precedent and I felt that it was very important that we set one that was very honest and that brought to life what Myron and Don put on the page as much as we could.

I dreamed about The Conquistador a lot. I do opera for a living and have the ability to focus on whatever I have to be doing at the moment. But I would go to bed at night if I had worked on Conquistador that day, read through the libretto, and I would dream about it and it really stayed with me and I must say that for a couple of months after we did the performance there in San Diego I had dreams about Don Luis.

This is the biggest part I have ever created. When I was a beginner I was in a lot of world premieres, but singing small parts. I'm going to create a role at the Metropolitan Opera in 1999.  John Harbison has written an opera based on Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby". And I'm singing the role of Gatsby. So I'm really looking forward to that.

It's a different process when you're creating a part, because as I said before for most of the other operatic roles I've done, I've had lots of guides to follow. I have lots of recordings of great performers who have preceeded me. There is usually a performing tradition about all those parts. 

But when you're creating a role for the first time, there's a tremendous amount of responsibility on you if you choose to accept it. To decide your own ego in a way that sometimes you don't have to do when you're doing Rodolfo in La Boheme, because everybody knows how the opera goes. It's just easier, it's just easier, because you have guidelines.

When you're creating a role from scratch all you have are your own instincts and what the composer puts on the page - you don't have any guidelines. It's like jumping off the edge of a cliff.  In some ways I find that responsibility a lot more nerve-racking, but it's also a lot more fulfilling because you can tell in an instant whether the way you're phrasing something or the way in which you're trying to portray the role is right or not. Somehow when it comes together, when you feel that you have found the most effective way to portray a particular moment, the sense of joy and release that you feel is uncanny and overwhelming. And very, very rewarding.



How would you compare the character of Don Luis de Carvajal with other operatic roles?

It's a most challenging role. In some ways it reminds me very much of the process I go through when I do Tom Rakewell in Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress, even if the story is totally different.

I find, having done Don Luis and tapped a part of my artistic self that I have not really explored before, that there are lots of roles now that I'm looking forward to doing that at one point I would not have done. If I get to do Don Luis again, I wouldn't make any changes in my basic approach to Don Luis, but I'm sure that Don Luis will evolve - just because of the fact that every role that I do evolves by itself the more I do it.

The way I do Hoffman now is very different from the way I did it 10 years ago, because I understand Hoffman better than I did 10 years ago. And I think that as you do a role more and more and more, your approach to the role becomes much simpler and more focused. Instead of illustrating to the audience everything that you're thinking, you simply stand still and talk. And all of that thought process which you've done before you go onstage is there and it informs what you're saying. The more directness and simplicity that one brings to any role that one does onstage, the better it is for the audience. Because then the audience participates in a different way. And the audience then can draw lots of inferences based upon the fact that you as the performer are not cluttering it up with your own acting process, but you're simply there in the moment, speaking spontaneously.



CLICK the links below for more of the interview:

The Music  /  The Story & The Role  /  At San Diego Opera: Working with the Composer  

JERRY HADLEY sadly passed away on July 18, 2007. Let us remember him in our prayers.

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