Description
In her Music in Imperial Rio de Janeiro, Cristina Magaldi describes Italian opera as an “enduring force in European colonialism.” During the nineteenth century, European companies populated opera theaters in Latin America, bringing with them the belief that opera had the power of elevating or modernizing its audiences–a particularly important feature to local elites trying to escape racialization and otherization by external powers.
The aim of this work is to examine how the transnational traveling opera circuit operated in the post-colonial nations of Latin America during the second half of the nineteenth century, particularly in the triangle Rio de Janeiro-Buenos Aires-Montevideo. While these companies impacted the identitarian formation of South American nations by promoting the diffusion of European musical and ideological ideals, they also had to make a multitude of adjustments in their business model to make it thrive in the region–like using derivative arrangements for voice and piano, or the performance of opera in events that mixed the genre with dance musics, some of them with African influences. Particularly in Brazil, Italian opera was also implicated with remnants of colonialism, sometimes exploiting the labor of enslaved Black musicians and choir singers in their regional productions. In this sense, Italian opera presence in the region may have been much more diverse, multi racial, and transcultural than the categorization as a “force in European colonialism” may reveal. Migration and the growth of Italian communities, as well as racial theories that perceived European presence in the region as a way of improving population profile by whitewashing also explain the preference for a music genre that represented European whiteness. Drawing from a decolonial framework (with particular emphasis on works by Anibal Quijano and Walter Mignolo, but also with contributions from feminist decolonial scholars like Maria Lugones), this paper intends to examine how colonialism, racial theories, migration and diaspora modified the business of traveling opera in South America, while highlighting the participation of a racialized workforce that has been overlooked and marginalized in Latin American musicology.
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