Baroque Chamber Opera to Celebrate Jesuit Anniversaries Year

The Jesuit Institute of Boston College will present “The Mission Baroque San Ignacio De Loyola,” a Baroque chamber opera from the Jesuit missions of 18th century Paraguay on Oct. 15 at 8:15 p.m. in the Brooks Concert Hall at the College of the Holy Cross. The event is free and open to the public. There will be a limited number of chairs with unreserved seating; early arrival is encouraged.

The program will include music composed by Domenico Zipoli, S.J. (1688-1726); Martin Schmid, S.J. (1694-1772); and anonymous composers.

Performers will include Randall Wong, sopranist; Andrei Caracoti, countertenor; Susan Consoli, soprano; and Murray Kidd, tenor; the period instrument orchestra will be the highly-acclaimed early music group Ensemble Abendmusik, led from the harpsichord by John Finney, a faculty member in the music department at Boston College and associate conductor of Boston’s Handel & Haydn Society. Rev. Michael A. Zampelli, S.J., of the theatre department at the University of Santa Clara, will be the stage director.

The event celebrates the Jesuit anniversaries year. The year 2006 marks the 450th anniversary of the death of the founder of the Jesuits, St. Ignatius of Loyola, and the 500th anniversary of the birth of two of his original companions, St. Francis Xavier and Blessed Peter Faber.

In 1716 in Seville, Spain a young Italian musician from Prato named Domenico Zipoli (1688-1726) entered the Society of Jesus in order to travel to the New World to work in the famous Jesuit Reductions of Paraguay. Zipoli was a noted composer and organist in Rome when he entered the Jesuits and set out for Buenos Aires, arriving there on the fifth of April 1717. Zipoli spent the rest of his life in Cordoba, now Argentina, studying theology and composing music up until his death in 1726.

The Chamber Opera San Ignacio is a musical work that became emblematic of the whole Jesuit Missionary enterprise in Paraguay and, indeed, the whole world as well. The music for this little opera was composed not only by Domenico Zipoli, but also by another Jesuit composer, and architect as well, the Swiss Martin Schmid (1694-1772) and an unknown, third composer. This third collaborator may well have been one of the indigenous musicians of the Chiquito townships where the score was evidently collated sometime in the second quarter of the 18th century.

The opera is in two acts. Act I portrays the response of St. Ignatius Loyola to God’s call, and Act II narrates the sending of Francis Xavier to the far East to spread the Gospel of Christ. In broad strokes, the opera incarnates many of the central themes of Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises, prompting again the eternal questions of human identity. This 21st century production of San Igancio is an attempt to enter once again into that mystery, not only of who we are and where we are going, but also the mission itself, which is the journey of each of us as the drama of life unfolds.

For more information, please call the Holy Cross Concert Line at 508-793-3528.