Mezzo-soprano Juliette Kaoudji (CFA’26) sings the role of Ginesa in a rehearsal for El Caminante’s (re)premiere at the Tsai Performance Center in 2024.

Opera

Recording of Long-Lost Opera Rediscovered by BU Researcher Now Available to Stream and Buy

El Caminante, a forgotten Latin American opera, was performed at BU for the first time in a century and has just been released by a major label

In 2020, opera tenor and Boston University researcher David Guzmán discovered a buried treasure hidden in an archive: part of the score of a century-old forgotten opera. Over the next few years, he uncovered the rest of the long-neglected masterpiece, finding more of the music, piecing together the libretto. In November 2024, Guzmán coordinated a performance of the work, El Caminante, by Cuban composer Eduardo Sánchez de Fuentes, at BU’s Tsai Performance Center, reintroducing to the world a rare and moving example of the Latin American operatic tradition. 

It was the first time it had been heard in close to 100 years.

Now an all-new recording of the opera is available for all to stream and buy thanks to Navona Records, the Grammy-winning classical imprint of Parma Recordings, which is also home to works by the London Symphony Orchestra.

Listen to a selection from El Caminante, available through Navona Records.

“There are still many Latin American [musical] works that remain largely unknown to the public—many are hidden away in private collections or local music libraries, often in unpublished, handwritten manuscript form,” says Guzmán, a College of Fine Arts assistant professor of music, voice. He found a copy of the handwritten piano-vocal score in Harvard University’s archives, the rest of the score in Cuba’s Museo Nacional de la Música. “These works have never been recorded or performed in modern times,” he says.

A one-act opera that premiered at Havana’s Teatro Nacional in 1921, El Caminante, based on the poem-play “Era Él” (“It Was Him”) by Spanish writer Francisco Villaespesa, was performed only a handful of times before it ended its run and entered obscurity. Unlike many works by European composers, it’s not a tragedy—the themes of faith, myth, and love do not resolve in death.

“Set in a humble rural home, El Caminante tells the story of Yolanda, a young paraplegic woman, and her mother, Ginesa, who both yearn for healing,” Guzmán says. “When a mysterious stranger—El Caminante (“the traveler”)—arrives, he offers Yolanda love and hope, ultimately restoring her ability to walk, before disappearing, leaving only his cloak behind.”

The opera’s reintroduction to the public in 2024 starred Guzmán as the traveler, alongside CFA student Juliette Kaoudji (CFA’26) (mezzo-soprano) as Ginesa and BU alum and opera star Michelle Johnson (CFA’07) (lead soprano) as Yolanda. The three reprised their roles for the 2025 Navona recording.

“Following the premiere, my inbox was flooded with praise for the performance—from ‘terrific’ to ‘stunning’—and expressing admiration for the incredible labor behind the rediscovery and reconstitution of El Caminante,” says Harvey Young, dean of CFA and a College of Arts & Sciences professor of English, a supporting partner of the project. “Navona, the classical arm of Parma Recordings, is a dream partner.” 

Guzmán says Sánchez de Fuentes, a musicologist and composer of five operas in total, sought to incorporate both Indigenous and popular Cuban sounds within the continental Spanish opera tradition. The original production featured an international cast and crew from renowned houses throughout Europe. 

“When Sánchez de Fuentes composed El Caminante, his aim was to demonstrate that artists on our side of the Atlantic also could create rich, complex, inspiring operas infused with local culture,” says Young. “For the listener, the recording is an opportunity to encounter a rarely heard but important genre of Cuban music that was popular in the 1920s before being eclipsed by the rise of Buena Vista-style popular music in the 1930s.”

Despite his skill as a composer—as well as operas, Sánchez de Fuentes wrote multiple musical plays, an oratorio, and more than 100 songs—Guzmán says the odds were against him and his contemporaries in the Latin American opera world. Without as significant investment in Latin American opera—by benefactors and audiences alike—compared to their European counterparts, productions tended to have shorter runs, less notoriety, and oftentimes, smaller budgets. And unlike El Caminante, many of these works have yet to be rescued from obscurity. 

“Many Latin American composers, including Sánchez de Fuentes, lacked the production support and market infrastructure needed to sustain or disseminate [their works] widely,” Guzmán says. “Several factors contributed to this marginalization, including the dominance of the Italian operatic tradition, as well as major historical disruptions like the two world wars, which shifted cultural priorities and resources away from supporting emerging operatic voices from Latin America.”

Guzmán says the BU Opera Institute played a major role in El Caminante’s reemergence, with institute director and conductor William Lumpkin, a CFA associate professor of music, and Oshin Gregorian, managing director of the institute and of CFA’s opera programs, overseeing the production and the eventual partnership with Navona. Lumpkin also conducted the BU Symphony Orchestra performance. 

“Reviving a forgotten work like El Caminante requires the combined efforts of many experts—musicians, scholars, and administrators—each contributing their skills to rediscover and share the rich, often overlooked heritage of Latin American music,” Guzmán says. Allison Voth, a CFA associate professor of music and Opera Institute principal coach, and Matthew Larson, a CFA senior lecturer, vocal coaching, also contributed.

El Caminante’s star continues to rise: it was performed a second time in spring 2025 at the Popayán International Music Festival in Colombia, and the piano-vocal and full orchestral scores will be published this November by the Instituto Complutense de Ciencias Musicales at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, “a major step forward in helping El Caminante reach a wider audience,” Guzmán says, “potentially leading to stagings by opera companies around the world.” Meanwhile, Navona has recently recommended the album to the Recording Academy for Grammy consideration.

“From the very beginning, the vision was clear,” Guzmán says: “to follow the score exactly as written—remaining faithful to the original manuscript.”