The opera “Primero Sueño” translates Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s poem about the soul’s journey into a musical promenade around the Cloister.
Excerpts from NYT feature by Elisabeth Vincentelli
Photo Credit: Eric WIlson / New York Times
Based on a mystical poem from 1692 by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the 17th-century nun and proto-feminist polymath, “Primero Sueño” (“First Dream”) was conceived as a processional opera that would take over the Cloisters as it meandered from room to room, audience in tow."
“The poem is about a soul journey,” the director Louisa Proske said. “So we thought, ‘What if we translated that soul journey into a physical journey at the Cloisters spaces?’ Each room has a new possibility of how the audience relates to the performers.” In some rooms, Proske said, people sit together on benches, while in others they are free to roam around the singers.
Sor Juana spent most of her time in a convent in Mexico City — then the capital of the sprawling colony territory of New Spain — and was a prolific writer in several genres. But unlike other contemporary Sor Juana depictions, such as the María Luisa Bemberg film “I, the Worst of All” (1990) or Ballet Hispánico’s “Sor Juana,” (2023), “Primero Sueño” does not concern itself with biographical details.
Sor Juana spent most of her time in a convent in Mexico City — then the capital of the sprawling colony territory of New Spain — and was a prolific writer in several genres. But unlike other contemporary Sor Juana depictions, such as the María Luisa Bemberg film “I, the Worst of All” (1990) or Ballet Hispánico’s “Sor Juana,” (2023), “Primero Sueño” does not concern itself with biographical details.
Rather, the opera sets to music her words, taken from a poem she wrote later in life. Herrera, a Mexico City-born singer and songwriter, had given a Sor Juana book as a birthday gift to Prestini, with whom the poem immediately resonated. “The piece really takes this kind of identity of Mexico — the Indigenous reality, the Black slaves — and the Spanish influence, and mixes it in,” Prestini said. “You get a very Baroque style, a lot of influence of Greek — all she was reading at the time — but then you also get these amazing Aztec symbols, you have a kind of different iconography.”
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