About the work
“La Cubana oder Ein Leben für die Kunst” (La Cubana, or A Life for the Arts) is a vaudeville in five scenes by Hans Werner Henze to a libretto by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, freely based on Miguel Barnet’s documentary novel “Canción de Rachel” (1969). Henze wrote it in 1973 as a television opera commissioned by the WNET Opera Theatre in New York; it was first broadcast on 4 March 1974 under his baton, and the first staged performance followed on 28 May 1975 at the Gärtnerplatztheater in Munich. The chamber version “La piccola Cubana”, sketched by Henze and Enzensberger in 1990/91, was arranged by Jobst Liebrecht in 2019 and premiered on 27 October 2022 at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden in Berlin.
Plot
Havana, shortly after the revolution of 1959: Rachel, a variety diva grown old, looks back on her life. In flashbacks her career between 1906 and 1934 passes by, from small pleasure stages and the circus to her heyday at the Teatro Alhambra, surrounded by wealthy admirers, pimps, gangsters and politicians. Presidents come and go, crises and revolts shake the country, yet Rachel clings to her dream of a great artistic life until her theatre closes and the audience stays away.
Cultural significance
Henze had spent a year in Cuba in 1969/70 and had already drawn on Barnet for “El Cimarrón”; with wit and parody, “La Cubana” questions an art that considers itself apolitical. The score draws on chansons, couplets and dances such as rumba, tango, charleston and ragtime. On stage (Munich 1975, London 1978, Rostock 1981) the cinematically structured TV opera, with its many solo roles and large forces including a big band, rarely convinced, which is why Henze sought a smaller version.