In a new light

When Osvaldo Golijov’s opera ‘‘Ainadamar’’ premiered at Tanglewood in 2003, it met with general acclaim, though not the kind of instantaneous and unified praise other projects of his had engendered. The music was often beautiful, but to some listeners, there seemed a lack of dramatic tension, and some critics saw a misfit between the play and the score. Something just seemed off-kilter.

One of the dissatisfied, it turns out, was the composer himself, who had rushed this work, inspired by the life of the Spanish poet/playwright Federico García Lorca, into being under extreme time pressure. ‘‘I felt that the piece was pretty bad,’’ says Golijov now, and though he says it with a laugh, he’s serious. ‘‘I was going to abandon it — just let it die.’’

Golijov didn’t let ‘‘Ainadamar’’ die. Instead, with the help of director Peter Sellars, he and librettist David Henry Hwang undertook a substantial revision. The new version, dramatically tighter and musically richer, was first heard in Santa Fe in 2005 and then in New York in 2006. A recording on the Deutsche Grammophon label won two Grammy awards this year.

Tonight ‘‘Ainadamar’’ opens on Golijov’s home turf, courtesy of Opera Boston. What audiences will see and hear is an exceptionally poignant and multifaceted work that has continued to evolve in subtle yet meaningful ways. They will also get the benefit of the deepened understanding of several key people who have been involved with the opera from its beginnings to its final (or at least current) flowering.

‘‘Ainadamar’’ (‘‘fountain of tears’’ in Spanish) refers to the place in Granada where Lorca was assassinated by Spanish Fascists in 1936. The opera’s main character is the actress Margarita Xirgu, Lorca’s early muse and frequent collaborator. The fulcrum of the action is Lorca’s brutal murder, seen through her imagination in the second of the opera’s three ‘‘images,’’ as Golijov calls the acts. Her struggle, and one of the principal themes of the opera, is how, nearing her own death, she can pass on his burning ideals — artistic and political freedom — to a younger generation.

x The role of Margarita was created for Golijov’s own muse, soprano Dawn Upshaw, to explore what he calls ‘‘her deeper, darker side.’’ She has sung every fully staged performance so far.

‘‘I think that with each performance, my understanding of the sense of urgency in the character becomes deeper,’’ Upshaw says over lunch in Brookline. ‘‘Each time we work on it I feel like I can connect to her wanting to pass on something of meaning to her students, especially about Lorca and about expression through performance.’’

Handing down wisdom and inspiration from one generation to the next is a theme that was nonexistent in the first version of the opera, in which Margarita had dialogues with a younger version of herself. Now her counterpoint is the brilliant student Nuria, who represents the future — the continuation of what Lorca started. ‘‘For me, there was an absolutely earth-shaking difference between the Margarita in the first [version] and the one in the second, just because of that,’’ Upshaw says.

The revision also foregrounds the Spanish Civil War and hones in on what made Lorca so dangerous to the Fascists. Political pungency is a recurring characteristic of Peter Sellars’s productions, and it’s also a conversational hallmark. During a recent break in rehearsals, he inveighs strongly about ‘‘the constant temptation of fascism in a time of democracy. We’re in a period in America where you feel so many of the same things that brought down the Spanish Republic.’’ He cites what he sees as an erasure of individuality and a ruthless drive toward uniformity.

As artists, he continues, ‘‘what we do is create beauty. Our job is to make sure that the alternative’’ to that regimented society ‘‘is alive and well and ravishing.’’

‘‘Ravishing’’ is a tag often applied to Golijov’s polystylistic music, and it fits nowhere so well as in ‘‘Ainadamar,’’ whose long, deep melodies exert an inexorable pull on the listener. Sellars also applies the term to the sets, which were designed by the artist Gronk, a seminal figure in the Chicano art movement. Sellars labels his vibrant, dramatic sets ‘‘a reinterpretation of cubism’’ that mix beauty and violence in equal measure.

‘‘All over Andalusia, to this day, there are unmarked mass graves,’’ he says. ‘‘Gronk gives you the body parts that are chopped up and buried there, but, being a great artist, his vision is that they are seeds. This is a fertile earth.’’

One aspect that’s especially important to the composer occurs near the end of the opera. Margarita, on the threshold of death, encounters Lorca’s spirit in a hallucinatory, deeply moving scene. ‘‘People do talk to the dead,’’ Golijov says. ‘‘That reality, which is so hard to translate into a novel, a movie — it makes absolute sense in the world of opera. I think this is one thing opera and only opera can do, in a very deep and real way.’’

That all these strands of meaning can now be explored in performance is largely due to the cadre of people whose grasp of the piece has been enriched by their repeated experience with it. It isn’t a stretch to say that ‘‘Ainadamar’’ is less a composition by Golijov than it is the joint product of his relationships with Hwang, Upshaw, Sellars, and others who have been involved in the project. Upshaw mentions Gustavo Santaolalla, who created the opera’s electronic sounds, and percussionist Gonzalo Grau, who often adds advice on percussion matters. Sellars includes stage director Robert Castro, who, he says, ‘‘many people feel is the great director of Lorca today.’’

‘‘A real theater piece is never the work of an isolated individual,’’ Golijov says, by phone. ‘‘There is a family, and there are people that love each other and hate each other but actually care for the work more than for their own feelings.’’

Of course, the ‘‘family’’ will not always be there in future productions of ‘‘Ainadamar,’’ but that is part of the way in which a work of art emerges into the public consciousness. From its tortuous origins, the opera is doing just that.

‘‘I feel like something actually happens to a new piece over time,’’ Upshaw says. ‘‘It’s like osmosis in the air. As you repeat it, it lives differently in time and in sound. It kind of grows up itself from its infancy.’’

And when that happens, Sellars adds, ‘‘the piece itself begins to speak in its own voice. At the beginning we’re trying to tell it what it is. Now it can tell us. And we hear it.’’