Excerpt from

Peter Child's cantata of rage

Peter Child composed his "Estrella" out of his rage and frustration over the situation of Nicaragua. But it is not an agitprop piece. The cantata narrates the assassination of Augusto Cesar Sandino in 1934, but the strong, dark, compelling music makes it an archetypal event: the cantata is a dramatic depiction on a specific moment in history but also a moving reflection on a process history has seen far too often.

Child's texts are drawn from the Nicaraguan poets Ernesto Cardenal and Pablo Antonio Cuardra and the Chilean writer Pablo Neruda. Cardenal's poem repeatedly invokes the Mexican revolutionary song "La Adelita," and that is in the piece as well. Child's recomposition of "La Adelita" is the basis of much of the cantata, serving the same function that chorale does in Bach's cantatas.

Child makes little attempt to make his music sound Latin-American; that is one way his piece moves beyond local circumstances. The development of the music is another. The cantata begins with atmospheric depiction, heavily chromatic, of tropical night; "La Adelita" is one line in the texture; by no. 7 it has flowered into a full chorus. After much vigorously pictorial music, the crucial narrative of the assassination is sung over sustained open intervals, like and Evangelists's recitative. "Estrella," like the last English poem in Britten's "War Requiem," closes with a poignant dialogue, at once individual and universal; in this instance the dialogue is between a slain revolutionary and his mother. An extended postlude brings together the principal musical ideas of the work -- "La Adelita" and the image of the star -- but it does not attempt to resolve irreconcileable conflicts. Instead it has articulated just how disturbing they are.

The work is not unflawed. The bilingual text is sometimes difficult to follow, particularly in the opening chorus, which is simultaneously bilingual. The English translations sometimes fail to become poetry and sometimes the composer overplays his hand -- it's corny when the chorus hisses the last "s" in the words "North Americans." And while Child writes idiomatically for chorus, orchestra, and instrumental soloists, his writing for the solo singers is frequently ungrateful: It is not uncommon for a phrase or linked phrases to encompass the whole useful range of the voice. This obscures text and turns everything into climax -- which paradoxically is the agitprop way of doing things. And the singers, even such accomplished ones as Gloria Raymond and John Osborn, are inevitably going to have to concentrate on questions of technique at the expense of questions of expression.