People

This chapter concerns the activity of professionals connected with the casas da ópera and the various specializations involved in providing theatrical entertainment to the urban population of Portuguese America. Individual sections focus on singers and actors, music directors, music instructors, instrumentalists, choreographers, dancers, stage producers, playwrights, and managers. The largest section, dealing with singers and actors, raises a variety of issues related to social mobility, training, race, gender, and trans-Atlantic circulation of artists. Lengthier discussions address prevalent practices of cross-dressing onstage, the social status of artists in Portuguese America, the role of mixed-race artists in the performing arts in the colony, perceptions and social mobility of female singers, and controversies regarding religious and secular authorities. This chapter also updates biographical data of several artists, some of them previously unknown in musicological research.

Uses

This chapter investigates the uses and functions of musical theater within the sociopolitical fabric of Portuguese America. It examines its role in the narratives produced in the context of civic festivals and literary academies and how these texts and practices engaged individuals from all layers of colonial society as subjects of the Portuguese empire. It also considers the civilian and political uses of theater as an ideological tool, a means of acquiring and maintaining symbolic capital, and in some cases even a distraction from the wrongdoings of colonial administrators. The last section of the chapter deals with the presence of the Portuguese court in Rio de Janeiro at the dawn of independence, when theater became the locus of political and aesthetic controversies that placed newly arrived Portuguese and local Brazilians on opposite sides. The controversy surrounding the drama O juramento dos numes is at the core of this discussion.

Musical Sources and Archives

This chapter examines the nature and uses of music in early Luso-Brazilian theater from the eighteenth to the early nineteenth century. The first part considers the processes and choices that determined the formation of a theatrical music repertory during the late colonial period. The second part describes the extant musical sources of theatrical music once performed in Portuguese America and now at libraries and archives in Portugal (Paço Ducal de Vila Viçosa, Biblioteca do Palácio da Ajuda) and Brazil (Acervo Curt Lange, Biblioteca da UFRJ, Museu da Música de Mariana), as well as those that have disappeared but can be identified through nonmusical sources. The chapter closes with a discussion ofthe first examples of sung-through Italian operas composed in Brazil.

The Craft of Portuguese Opera

This chapter discusses the role of Brazilian playwright Antonio José da Silva in the emergence of Portuguese comic opera during the early eighteenth century and examines the rationale and mechanisms of circulation and adaptation of folhetos de cordel, pliegos, and libretti that were set to music and staged in Portugal and in Brazil. This analysis examines Silva’s appropriation and subversion of theatrical models of the time and the transformation of the concept of opera in Portugal and Brazil, taking into account local needs and tastes, performance practice, artistic autonomy, and politics. The second part of the chapter examines opera in the context of a theatrical function, considering its integration into spectacles that included a number of diverse genres, some of them with a clear ideological or pedagogical nature (loas, elogios), and others of a more entertaining character (dances, ballets).

Introduction

The introduction provides the historical background and sets the stage for the music-theatrical developments that the following chapters will address in detail. It explains in general terms the reasons for a number of administrative choices made early in the colonization, which had a profound impact in fomenting the sociocultural environment in which music and theatrical arts flourished. It advances the main arguments of the book, stressing that the circulation of repertory and artists between metropolis and colony was a two-way road, and local artists exercised relative agency in adapting old models and forging new paradigms. It concludes by providing an overview of the book.

Venues

This chapter considers the emergence of theatrical spaces in the main captaincies of Portuguese America. The first part examines the typology of such constructions (tablados, pátios de comédias, and casas da ópera) and explores the role played by the accelerated urbanization of the colony and the inconsistent application of enlightened policies in the second half of the eighteenth century. The second part examines the most important constructions, considering the individuals, processes, and ideologies that determined their creation, with an emphasis on the alleged function of the theater as a school of customs. It also argues that a number of theaters in Belém, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Ouro Preto were conceived, and for a period of time even managed, as extensions of the state politico-ideological apparatus. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the early-nineteenth-century concept of theater as monument, a place of overlap between the civic and political spheres.

Epilogue

This concluding section discusses how emerging nationalist discourses during the mid nineteenth century were based on misconstrued narratives of cultural decline. It examines an anonymous 1859 chronicle that claimed for the development of a “national” opera while lamenting the perceived harmful results of the arriving of Italian singers and opera companies after the independence. The ensuing discussion considers how early forms of vernacular opera were met with resistance of the elites throughout the nineteenth century. For centuries promoting an effacing of boundaries between high and low culture, privileging borrowing and adaptation, allowing flexibility and improvisation, vernacular opera was now regarded as obsolete and deemed incompatible with civilization, while Italian opera was legitimized as a cultural propriety of an aristocratic elite.

Foundations

This chapter examines the conventions of Iberian theater with music from the mid-sixteenth to the early eighteenth century, as they surface in written sources and theatrical practices primarily related to Brazilian contexts. It presents an overview of the main theatrical genres, character types, and standard plots and the basic structure of theatrical functions, as well as the role of music in Jesuit autos and tragédias, religious oratorios, and secular comédias and entremezes. The chapter discusses the pedagogical function of musical theater in the early colonial period and the use of Latin, Spanish, Portuguese, and indigenous languages in these plays. It also examines the work of Brazil-born aficionados and playwrights in Europe and their role in the development of music-dramatic arts in Brazil and abroad.