A Star Next to the Moon, Stephen McNeff’s new opera, premiered by the Guildhall School, has been more than 17 years in the making. It was in 2006 that McNeff first read Pedro Páramo, the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo’s strange, discomfiting 1955 novella – sometimes claimed as one of the earliest examples of Latin American magic realism – and soon after he realised its potential as an opera. A few scenes were workshopped as part of Covent Garden’s development programme in 2010, but it was not until the Guildhall School offered McNeff the opportunity to write a new work that he was able to complete the opera as A Star Next to the Moon, which was Rulfo’s original title.
The plot tells the story of Juan Preciado, who promises his mother on her deathbed that he will seek out Pedro Páramo, the father he has never met, in the distant town of Comala. When he arrives there he finds a ghost town ravaged and destroyed by Páramo’s gangster-like greed and brutality. It’s a place in which past and present, the living and the dead, seem to coexist, and Juan finds that he is just one of many children that his father has disowned. Aoife Mannix’s libretto pares down Rulfo’s text to 13 pithy scenes; Juan is at the centre of things in the first half of the opera as he uncovers Comala’s awful history in a series of flashbacks, but in the second he is just an observer, as Páramo’s cruelty and final demise are acted out.
