Manipulating the suspicions about his family, they succeed in bringing him down. De Carvahal, stripped of his wealth and position by the Inquisition, mysteriously dies in prison. Almost all of his family is eventually burned at the stake in Mexico City. Cross-fertilizations between art forms have long been a fact. Being episodic, moving rapidly within time and space, is certainly acceptable as a dramatic structural device in our time.
Contemporary audiences make such leaps easily.
However, in this instance, depths of character and true ambience of place remained undiscovered because of the device. The work covers too much time and territory. It fails as opera on this count. Composers have long striven for compositional styles in opera that more genuinely reflect the way humans speak while designing music to intensify, enrich and explain characters and plot. The concern has continued throughout the 20th century.