The Met Cloisters were alive with the sound of music on a frigid January afternoon. Six nuns in white surrounded a seventh dressed in black, and all were singing. The scene was beautifully formal but it also felt organic, as if the women had been there for centuries.
Watching a rehearsal of Magos Herrera and Paola Prestini’s opera “Primero Sueño,” which the Metropolitan Museum of Art is presenting tomorrow through Sunday, Ronda Kasl, a curator of Latin American art at the Met and a consultant on the project, could not contain a smile. “This is so exciting,” she murmured as chants bounced around the limestone walls that keep the world at bay.
Based on a mystical poem from 1692 by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the 17th-century nun and proto-feminist polymath, “Primero Sueño” (“First Dream”) was conceived as a processional opera that would take over the Cloisters as it meandered from room to room, audience in tow.
“The poem is about a soul journey,” the director Louise Proske said. “So we thought, ‘What if we translated that soul journey into a physical journey at the Cloisters spaces?’ Each room has a new possibility of how the audience relates to the performers.” In some rooms, Proske said, people sit together on benches, while in others they are free to roam around the singers.
After Proske, a founder of the innovative Heartbeat Opera company, directed Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein’s “The Mother of Us All” at the Metropolitan Museum in 2020, the Met invited her to stage another piece in a museum space. She had her eye on the Cloisters, so when the New York composer Prestini mentioned that she’d been working on a Sor Juana project with Herrera, Proske knew she had found what she was looking for.
Sor Juana spent most of her time in a convent in Mexico City — then the capital of the sprawling colony territory of New Spain — and was a prolific writer in several genres. But unlike other contemporary Sor Juana depictions, such as the María Luisa Bemberg film “I, the Worst of All” (1990) or Ballet Hispánico’s “Sor Juana,” (2023), “Primero Sueño” does not concern itself with biographical details.
Rather, the opera sets to music her words, taken from a poem she wrote later in life. Herrera, a Mexico City-born singer and songwriter, had given a Sor Juana book as a birthday gift to Prestini, with whom the poem immediately resonated. “The piece really takes this kind of identity of Mexico — the Indigenous reality, the Black slaves — and the Spanish influence, and mixes it in,” Prestini said. “You get a very Baroque style, a lot of influence of Greek — all she was reading at the time — but then you also get these amazing Aztec symbols, you have a kind of different iconography.”
“Primero Sueño” was the work that Sor Juana “wanted to put out in the world,” she added. “This piece, in a way, symbolizes her pursuit of knowledge.”
And unlike much of Sor Juana’s output, it was not a commission from a royal or an aristocrat. “This is a poem that she wrote because she wanted to write it,” Herrera said. “So in a way it was her most honest, truthful thing to say. My process has been to understand that everything that we’re going to see in the performance happens because of Juana’s mind.”
Herrera described creating “Primero Sueño” with Prestini as “knitting, a process where she gives me a thread, her personality, her line, and then I put my line over that, and then I send it back.” Just as the score mixes the devotional with almost rootsy strands, Herrera’s Sor Juana, the nun in black, sings in an earthy mezzo that complements the heavenly harmonies of the six nuns in white, performed by the German vocal ensemble Sjaella. (Celso Duarte on harps and hand percussion and Luca Tarantino on theorbo and Spanish guitar provide the accompaniment.)
Sor Juana’s presence is also embedded in important design elements. The members of Sjaella wear what look like nuns’ robes but are actually flowing, pleated pants with intricate patterns. On a research trip to Mexico City with the creative team, the designer Andrea Lauer took photos of Sor Juana’s signature, drawn in her blood, from her “Book of Professions.” She then created a digital collage that she printed onto the pleats.
That detail is not immediately discernible to the naked eye, unlike the large, attention-catching disks the performers wear around their necks, and which Lauer also designed. These artifacts of “wearable technology” represent the “escudos de monjas” or nuns’ badges worn centuries ago to answer a double constraint: Nuns were forbidden to wear jewelry and they had to signal their devotion, so in New Spain they started wearing what were basically elaborately designed and ornamented artworks.
“They’re over the heart so it’s a very meaningful placement on the body, and they depict religious scenes so they are, in a way, externalizing what the nun might be meditating on all her life — usually it’s something having to do with the Virgin Mary,” Proske said.
In the opera, too, these ornaments double as ways to deliver information and illuminate, sometimes literally.
“We realized we could totally reinvent what these escudos are,” Proske said. “They could become speakers, amplifiers, projection sources. Some of them have little projectors in them, so in the spaces where it’s hard to fit large projectors the nuns are projecting the text themselves.”
“Each of them is different,” she added, “and each has a sort of the secret of that sister.”
Those high-tech escudos carry into the 21st century a concept their predecessors illustrated: the transmission of knowledge and artistry. Cloistered life may look punitive and repressive to modern sensibilities, but for many women like Sor Juana, it represented an opportunity to nurture intellect without having to serve men.
“This was the place they could study, this was the place they could live quite free lives,” Prestini said. “They were staging plays, they were musical. It was a way to be yourself, to not just do what society told you — to be able to actually be free.”
