FULL ¡Únicamente La Verdad! (Ortiz) Mexico City 2010
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Information on the Performance
- Work Title: ¡Únicamente La Verdad! (Only the Truth) The Real Story of Camelia La Tejana
- Composer: Ortiz Gabriela
- Libretto: Rubén Ortiz Torres Libretto Text, Libretto Index
- Venue & Opera Company: Julio Castillo Theater in Mexico City
- Recorded: 2010
- Type: Staged Opera Live
- Singers: Nieves Navarro, Enivia Mendoza, Marcela Chacón, José Luis Ordoñez, Gerardo Reynoso, Armando Gama, Gabriel Ruiz
- Conductor: José Arean
- Orchestra: Orchestra of the Teatro de Bellas Artes
- Chorus: Choir of the Teatro de Bellas Artes
- Chorus Master: Alfredo Domínguez
Information about the Recording
- Published by: Manuel Yrizar
- TV Director: Rodolfo Ortega Arnaíz
- Date Published: 2024
- Format: Broadcast
- Quality Video: 3 Audio:3
- Subtitles: yessubs, essubs
- Video Recording from: YouTube FULL VIDEO
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON THIS PERFORMANCE
Únicamente la verdad or Only the Truth is an opera with a libretto by Rubén Ortiz Torres and music by Gabriela Ortiz .
The play tells a story of love, betrayal and murder of passion in the context of drug traffickers on the border between Mexico and the United States. The play, based on a corrido by the popular music group Los Tigres del Norte , takes up the story of a woman, Camelia la Tejana, who kills her lover Emilio Varela. The story was well known in the North of Mexico thanks to the corrido spread by the popular group mentioned. The story tells that Emilio Varela betrayed Camelia la Tejana after they both smuggled a shipment of marijuana. Long after these events, another man commits suicide by lying down on the train tracks in Ciudad Juárez . The newspaper Alarma , which publishes red notes in Mexico, announces that it knows the truth of the events and states that the man’s suicide is related to Camelia la Tejana and that, consequently, this woman is not a myth but a reality. In this context, various men narrate during the opera their relationship with Camelia la Tejana while a journalist tries to unravel which elements of the story are reliable and which are part of a growing myth surrounding this woman.
The libretto is based on the corrido Contrabando y traición (Smuggling and Betrayal) , a group of news stories published in various media (newspapers, television, radio, etc.), radio interviews, and university essays that dealt with the case of a woman known as Camelia la Tejana (Texan ), who murdered her lover after he betrayed her at the end of a marijuana trafficking job on the border with the United States. The libretto aims at reconstructing the true story of the crime of passion based on the use of different social discourses used in various media that reported on the crime. The author of the libretto filmed, as a central part of the work, several sequences on video. The central sequence offers a dialogue between the film and the characters on stage. Allende deals with a red note, the libretto studies the unique border culture of Mexico and the United States, and the way in which the corrido, heir to a centuries-old tradition that dates back to medieval romances, constitutes for the Mexican population a means that legitimizes and accredits events by canonizing a historical narrative as true.