Daniel Catán obituary

The Mexico-born composer Daniel Catán, who has died aged 62 from a heart attack, was one of the many significant musical figures to emerge from Central and South America in recent years. The five operas he wrote – most recently Il Postino – shed the last inhibitions in his generation's retreat from modernism into unabashed romanticism.

Though his style was often compared to that of Puccini and Debussy, it changed with every work, from the lush nature painting of Florencia en El Amazonas (1996) to the Cuban ethnic influences of Salsipuedes (2004), and the more integrated sonorities that portrayed the inner emotions of Il Postino (2010). Critics, especially European ones, could be reserved in their praise, but US audiences embraced his output with relief that such music could still be written with such conviction. "Daniel always strove for authenticity in his work and in his life," said Jake Heggie, composer of the opera Dead Man Walking. "He was a true man of the theatre, whose main goal was to serve the drama with art, clarity, wit and sparkle."

Catán was also influential. Whether attracted to the directness of his storytelling or his luminous orchestrations, composers boarded planes to hear his newest works, and upon meeting him, were drawn to his personal warmth and sense of life's absurdities. He often characterised himself as spending several lonely years composing an opera, only to suddenly be invaded by an army of musicians and designers. "I feel like I'm crashing somebody else's party," he quipped.

That personality was also his key to landing operatic rights to high-profile properties. Besides persuading Nobel prizewinning novelist Gabriel García Márquez to let him convert Love in the Time of Cholera into what became Catán's breakthrough opera, Florencia en El Amazonas (Florence in the Amazon), his biggest diplomatic coup was to obtain the rights to the acclaimed 1994 film Il Postino, which had been owned by its deceased star, Massimo Troisi, and willed to his five brothers. Rather than leaving negotiations to lawyers, Catán personally went to Italy, visiting all five brothers individually.

The result was his greatest success. Written for the Los Angeles Opera, the piece promised to have Plácido Domingo and Rolando Villazón on the same stage, the former playing the exiled poet Pablo Neruda, the latter as the postman Mario. When the premiere was delayed for a season, Villazón dropped out. Still, the September 2010 premiere was a hit, the Los Angeles Times critic Mark Swed observing: "Happily ... Il Postino delivered good news."

Catán's deceptively focused compositional personality could not have been predicted from such a polyglot upbringing. Born in Mexico to Sephardic Russian parents, he was educated in Britain: after Millfield school, Somerset, he gained a philosophy degree at Sussex University, where he met his first wife, Liza, and then a music degree at Southampton. In 1973, he embarked on a PhD at Princeton University, New Jersey, with the arch-modernist Milton Babbitt.

Once back in Mexico, Catán discovered the power of reconnecting with his native language. "When I refer to language," he once wrote, "I'm talking about something much deeper than the tongue. I'm referring to culture in its broadest sense. When we speak of 'the language of Cervantes' we are speaking of something far more vast than the mere tongue it was spoken in."

Subsequently, he negotiated with author Octavio Paz for years to gain the rights for what would become Rappaccini's Daughter, the 1991 opera that, three years later, was mounted in San Diego and was the first Mexican work to have a major US production. More important was the artistic breakthrough the piece represented. "I needed to write music that was seductive, glittering, mesmerising," he wrote. And he did.

Moving to Pasadena, in California, Catán made the south-western US his artistic base. Both Florencia en El Amazonas and Salsipuedes (its title the name of a mythical island - "get out if you can") were premiered by the Houston Grand Opera. The two works showed that harmonic dissonance was hardly a requirement for dramatic substance, partly because he redefined when dissonance was warranted. The shipwreck at the climax of Act I of Florencia sounds as cathartic as it does tragic. Though composers from Gluck to Fauré and Delius had theatrical failures with works that were too beautiful for their own good, Catán's sense of musical architecture enabled his relatively non-dissonant works to hold audience interest. He favoured short, cinematic scenes, and at the time of his death was at least halfway to adapting the Frank Capra film Meet John Doe.

The conviction in his operas came not from words or harmonies, but characters. "If he was ever blocked, it was because there was something emotional or psychological in the characters that he couldn't understand," said his third wife, the harpist Andrea Puente. That problem seldom arose in Il Postino. Characterisations were formulated almost completely before the actual composition, said his son Tom: the manuscripts contained relatively few revisions.

The Los Angeles commission of Il Postino also came with productions in Vienna last December and, opening in June, at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris. But Catán was also eager to get his work out to the public in every possible forum. He was working with the University of Houston on "The Catán Project", in which all of his works would be performed – his way of encouraging opera to be part of "the cultural conversation of this country" in ways that are not possible when a particular piece turns up only every few years. "We are about to enter the golden age of opera in the US," he maintained.

His marriages to Liza and his second wife, Beatriz, ended in divorce. He is survived by his mother, Luisa Porteny; by Andrea; by his children, Tom and Chloe, from his first marriage; and by his stepson, Alan, from his third.

Daniel Catán, opera composer, born 3 April 1949; died 9 April 2011

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