Cecilia Giménez, an 80-year-old woman who became famous around the world in 2012 after she unrecognizably “restored” a fresco of Jesus Christ from the church of Santuario de la Misericordia, in the Spanish town Borja, inspired an opera.
Although widely ridiculed on the Internet, the amateur-restorer granny came out of the whole story as the winner. Her failed version of the fresco Ecce Homo attracted more than 150,000 tourists who paid one euro to see her work, and she herself, in the name of copyright, received half of that amount.
Giménez, meanwhile, also became the heroine of a comic opera whose libretto was written by the American Andrew Fleck. “It’s a humorous show, with very comical parts, but without the intention of making fun of Cecilia,” the librettist explained to the London Guardian. “What Cecilia did was in a way a miracle,” he adds, explaining that the opera wanted to pay tribute to all the internet content that emerged after the affair with the restoration of the fresco.
“The Internet is one of the heroes of the opera because it actually created a sensation,” said Fleck.
Before he started writing the text, Fleck visited the famous restorer in Borja in 2013 and received the consent of her family to create an opera inspired by her tragicomic story.
The music for the opera, entitled Behold the Man, was composed by Paul Fouler, and the premiere will be held next spring in Boulder, Colorado, unless, as the Guardian writes, the organizers fail to do so in Borja.
SOURCE: TANJUG
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