A 300-year-old opera about St Ignatius of Loyola composed for indigenous Latin Americans is to be staged as an opera in England.
The premiere of Loyola will take place on 11 and 12 August at the Grimeborn opera festival in London.
In 1720, the 45-minute opera was composed by Domenico Zipoli, a Jesuit from Italy whose music is still performed at the Gesù, the Jesuit mother Church in Rome
Loyola was originally sung by the indigenous people Zipoli met while working in Jesuit missions in the lowlands of Bolivia, Paraguay and Argentina. In 1990, the opera was discovered in the archives of Chiquitos in Bolivia.
The plot involves a dying St Ignatius, who speaks with angels and a demon, and commissions his protégé St Francis Xavier to continue his missionary work overseas.
Last July, the Argentinean tenor Rafael Montero and his Latin American baroque ensemble El Parnaso Hyspano sang the piece in London to mark the four-hundredth anniversary of St Ignatius’s canonisation.
“This work was written for my ancestors, who were singing and playing music in cathedrals,” said Montero, who is of Aymara, Guarani and Quechua descent.
The singer, who attended the Jesuit-founded Universidad Nacional de Córdoba in Argentina, added: “But this is not only about music – it is part of our culture and history in Latin America.”
“Tens of thousands of pounds” were donated by private Catholic donors to pay for the staging of Loyola as an opera, according to the producer, John Sloboda. The donors had seen the concert performances of Loyola held in 2022 at the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Farm Street and the Little Oratory at Brompton Oratory.
The opera will be sung in Spanish with English surtitles, and performed on Baroque string and indigenous instruments.
Sloboda explained: “The original score says violins and continuo but it is quite plausible this included indigenous flutes and percussion. A flute introduces the opera.”
Michael Walling, the director renowned for his settings of Wagner’s Ring Cycle at the English National Opera, has given Loyola a contemporary setting.
Tickets are available at the Arcola Theatre website.
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