Steam Till It Wilts: The Met’s Florencia en el Amazones

“Couples converge, turn away, and re-embrace aboard a jungle Love Boat.”

Florencia en el Amazonas — both the 1996 opera and its title character — has trouble shaking off troublesome ghosts. In the rare Spanish-language opera ever to make it to the Met, the regretful diva Florencia Grimaldi rushes aboard an Amazon riverboat in a flurry of tulle, and we know from the get-go that her voyage is not just to the theater in Manaus but to the memory of a lost love. The libretto by Marcela Fuentes-Berain and the music by Daniel Catán likewise keeps grasping at so many wisps that I found it hard to keep track of whether I’d actually seen this opera before (I hadn’t) or just recognized its separate parts. Couples converge, turn away, and re-embrace aboard a jungle Love Boat (captained by a genial man in a white uniform and nautical cap). The queenly soprano, whom everyone venerates but somehow fails to recognize, gives off a whiff of Emilia Marty in Janacek’s The Makropulos Case. Ravel’s influence is represented by an assortment of nocturnal atmospherics, adorably menacing creatures, and a gentle wash of musical Latinisms. The arias aspire to Puccini-level rapture. The references go on.

There are times when none of that matters — when Catán’s music and the full force of the Met’s commitment help the audience forget all the footnotes and just sink into the tropical steam and lilting pulsations. It’s easy to surrender. The Met’s fine orchestra, led by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, vibrates with intensity, and Ailyn Pérez has no trouble in the role of a famous soprano whose singing just might turn back time — or at least cheer up a school of piranhas. Despite the dry patches, the first act braids together just enough threads of surreal setting, romantic tension, and exalted ambitions — plus a mighty, possibly murderous storm — to pack the audience off to intermission eager for more of the good stuff.

Alas, Act II only sporadically delivers.

The Mexican-born Catán, who died in 2011, offered Florencia as an operatic counterpart to magical realist fiction, yet the exposition seems more Agatha Christie than Gabriel Garcia Márquez. Aboard the El Dorado, a prosperous couple squabbles incessantly and tries to heal their marriage with high doses of Champagne. (Michael Chioldi and Nancy Fabiola Herrera seem to have a great time in both vicious and make-up phases.) An obsessed journalist named Rosalba stalks the celebrated Grimaldi — and, since she’s sung by the superb Gabriella Reyes, very nearly upstages her too. She also winds up falling for the ship captain’s oozingly sincere nephew and designated deck-swabber, Arcadio. (What he really wants to do is fly planes.) All that’s missing is a tenor Poirot.

Instead, there’s Florencia, who has little interest in her fellow passengers’ troubles. Weighed down by her own obsession, she pines for Cristóbal, a young butterfly hunter she jilted long ago. Unfortunately, he’s vanished into the jungle and she’s left to address her big Act II number, “Escúchame,” to a character she barely remembers and we never meet. These are the wondrous tones she would have lavished on her love, watered by the great river, softened by vegetation, enriched by the rainforest’s choir of chirpings, slithers, and squeaks. You can feel Catán’s desire for a tour de force of lyric opulence, and Pérez sang it as though deeply convinced he had pulled it off. What emerges, though, is a sumptuous echo of a classic, a vocal line that goes soaring in search of memorable romance. And just as Florencia will never find her Cristóbal, the aria never finds its heart.

Director Mary Zimmerman places the river action between high, curving walls of greenery, like vegetal versions of sculptures by Richard Serra. Within this channel, set designer Riccardo Hernández deconstructs the riverboat into movable gangplanks, railings, and vents, then puts it all back together in miniature so that we see the foundered vessel intact but atilt. He and costume designer Ana Kuzmanić fill the stage with blasts of color and movement: fuchsia water lilies, a marionette monkey, giant butterflies, a school of glimmering fish, even a crocodile straight out of Peter Pan. By the end, the production seems to be working extra hard to keep the show’s seductiveness level from sinking, pumping in the odd flicker of magic whenever the score falls down on the job of bewitchment.

Florencia en el Amazonas is at the Metropolitan Opera through December 14.