Sor Juana en el niño de John Adams y Óyeme con los ojos de Allison Sniffin

Abstract

This paper analyzes the representation of Sor Juana in two musical compositions by U.S. American composers: John Adams’s oratorio El Niño (1999–2000) and Allison Sniffin’s cantata Óyeme con los ojos (Hear Me with Your Eyes): Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz on the Nature of Love (2006). Instead of the more common protofeminist and subversive representation of recent decades, Adams opts for “the other” Sor Juana, the author of the lyrical villancicos of the religious society of New Spain. In addition to examining Adams’s musico–poetic and spectacular texts, this article also studies the visual representation that illustrates the CD of El Niño: the prominent serigraph Mujer de mucha enagua, PA’TI XICANA (A Woman with a lot of Petticoat, FOR YOU CHICANA) by chicana artist Yreina D. Cervántez. In this visual representation, Sor Juana becomes part of a political and subversive whole, and joins zapatista revolutionary women, Mexican poet Rosario Castellanos, and the Mesoamerican goddess Tonantzin, in a provocative feminine discourse, both visually and verbally. Cervántez’s Sor Juana constrasts sharply with Adam’s representation, but gets closer to the one found in Sniffin’s work. In Óyeme con los ojos, based exclusively on Sor Juana’s poems, Sniffin explores the Mexican nun’s poetic treatment of love. The central movement of the cantata, “Danza a Tonantzin” (Dance to Tonantzin), is an elaborate fusion of two religious texts in honor of the Virgin Mary. By means of mixing Spanish and Nahuatl, modern and pre–Hispanic musical idioms and sonorities, and the Virgin Mary and the goddess Tonantzin, Sniffin presents a syncretic reading of Sor Juana’s poetic texts which results in an ingenious theological metaphor.