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Nashville Opera’s Florencia en el Amazonas asks you two questions: “Can you ever really go home again?” and “Would you give everything up to find a lost love?”  Florencia is a modern opera written in 1986, but with a beautifully flowing score by the late Daniel Catán that sounds so romantic it could have been written by Puccini or Ravel.   

At the heart of the story is Florencia Grimaldi, the world’s most famous opera singer, as she returns to her homeland for the first time in twenty years. On the surface, she’s traveling the Amazon River to sing a recital at the Teatro Amazonas.  No one else aboard the El Dorado knows she’s really in Brazil to search for her lost love, Cristobal, a butterfly hunter lost in the rainforest.   

Librettist Marcela Fuentes-Berain, a student of Gabriel García Márquez’s, created a story with one foot planted in the real and the other tracing circles in the surreal.  For anyone familiar with Márquez’s writings and the idea of “Magical Realism,” they’re surreal, dreamlike, romantic works that balance moments of the mundane and the mystical.  The actual and the implausible dance hand in hand, both in Florencia and in Márquez’s famed “One Hundred Years of Solitude” and “Love in the Time of Cholera.”  Such is the magic and the mystery of Florencia en el Amazonas. 

Before his untimely death in 2011, composer Daniel Catán spoke about his work: “In the opera, Florencia undertakes a journey that will bring her back to her origins. It is, I believe, the story of the return journey that we all undertake at a certain point in our lives: the moment when we look back at what we once dreamed of becoming, and then confront what we have now become. As Florencia sings her final aria (… ) Love and beauty become indistinguishable from each other. 

Nashville Opera’s production gave Florencia its New York premiere in 2016 at Lincoln Center, seven years before the Metropolitan Opera’s recent production.  It’s back onstage at TPAC with an all-star cast this weekend for three performances only.  Tickets are available at TPAC.org.