San Buenaventura: Verdi's Friars and the Force of Destiny
Why is it significant?
Behind a plain, almost severe front on this quiet Arenal street stands the church of San Buenaventura, built in the early seventeenth century for a college of Franciscan friars.
Key Facts
| Place | San Buenaventura: Verdi's Friars and the Force of Destiny |
|---|---|
| Address | Calle Carlos Cañal, 41001 Sevilla, Spain |
| Geo Coordinates | 37.38900, -5.99730 |
| Part of Walk | Opera City: Carmen, Figaro and Don Juan in Seville's Arenal |
| Generated | Generated |
Behind a plain, almost severe front on this quiet Arenal street stands the church of San Buenaventura, built in the early seventeenth century for a college of Franciscan friars. From the pavement you would never guess that it once held one of the most ambitious picture cycles of Seville's Golden Age.
In the late 1620s the friars commissioned a series of paintings on the life of their great theologian, Saint Bonaventure. Francisco de Herrera the Elder began it, and a young painter from Extremadura, Francisco de Zurbarán, completed it. Over the centuries the canvases were carried off and scattered among museums such as the Louvre, but they helped make Zurbarán's name in Seville, the city that would become his home for decades.
Franciscans are also the key to an opera that begins right here in Seville: Verdi's La forza del destino, The Force of Destiny, first performed in Saint Petersburg in 1862. It is based on a Spanish Romantic play by the Duke of Rivas, Don Álvaro, or the Force of Fate. In the first act, in a palace in Seville, Leonora is about to elope with her lover Álvaro when her father bursts in. Álvaro throws down his pistol in surrender, it goes off by accident, and the old marquis falls dead.
From then on, everybody runs from fate, and everybody ends up among Franciscans. Leonora, disguised as a man, begs the friars of a remote monastery in the mountains near Córdoba to let her live as a hermit in a cave. Álvaro, believing her dead, becomes a friar in the very same monastery. And Verdi adds one of his rare comic characters, the grumpy Fra Melitone, who hands out soup to the beggars while scolding them for being hungry.
The opera has a dark reputation of its own. Some Italian singers would rather not even say its title, calling it bad luck, and in 1960 the American baritone Leonard Warren collapsed and died on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera in the middle of a performance of it. Fate, it seems, likes to have the last word. Now walk west down towards the river, to the quay called the Muelle de la Sal, where a massive concrete sculpture faces the far bank.