For musicologists working in Latin American and Iberian studies, the past twenty years have brought a significant increase in knowledge about theatrical and musical culture in colonial Brazil. At the same time, scholars of eighteenth-century music more broadly have turned their attention to what Glenda Goodman has termed ‘transatlantic music studies’, increasingly choosing to focus on music relating to the diverse locations, peoples and cultures in and around the Atlantic basin. Rogério Budasz's Opera in the Tropics: Music and Theater in Early Modern Brazil responds to both of these trends, providing a detailed account of theatrical life in Portuguese America from the sixteenth century to the early nineteenth.
The book begins with two chapters that provide a chronological overview of written sources pertaining to the various authors, genres and functions of theatrical music in the region. The first chapter, ‘Foundations’, covers material from the mid-sixteenth, seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, while the second, ‘The Craft of Portuguese Opera’, covers the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The third chapter, ‘Musical Sources and Archives’, will be particularly useful to scholars embarking on new research about music in colonial Brazil. Some of the written sources Budasz deals with in this chapter mention musical scores that are no longer extant, such as a contents list of the music collection of the composer and music director Florêncio José Ferreira Coutinho (c1750–1819) and descriptions of manuscripts once owned by the important German-Uruguayan musicologist Francisco Curt Lange (1903–1997). Budasz also discusses many scores that are currently housed in archives in Brazil and Portugal, and demonstrates how these sources can be read for evidence about musical practices specific to Portuguese America, such as the casting of female singers and the practice of translating Italian operas into Portuguese verse. Budasz ends the chapter with an ‘Addendum: A Tale of Two Operas’, in which he revisits the question of which opera – Le due gemelle, attributed to José Maurício Nunes Garcia, or Zaira by Bernardo José de Sousa Queirós – could have been the first complete opera composed on Brazilian soil.
Each of the next three chapters takes on a different aspect of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century theatrical life in Portuguese America, and will interest a general eighteenth-century musicological readership. In his fourth chapter, ‘Venues’, Budasz provides a typology of theatrical venues built in colonial Brazil, from Type A (wooden structures used for civic festivals) to Type D (permanent theatres that acted as monuments to national culture). These types of buildings were erected all across Portuguese America, and Budasz gives a thorough account of theatrical buildings in Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais, São Paolo, Grão-Pará and Pernambuco. In addition to maps and images, the chapter contains many entertaining anecdotes about the venues, including a description of the shock an auditor felt upon finding a tablado, or wooden platform that functioned as a stage, ‘indecorously’ erected in Salvador's Senate Chamber House and an account of frogs in the orchestra pit of a casa da ópera built later in the same city.
Budasz's fifth chapter, ‘People’, focuses on the people who worked for theatres in Portuguese America and the different positions they held in the theatrical establishment. The chapter begins with a short discussion of three informative lists of theatre workers in the region, which show the artists’ names, specialties and salaries at the Teatro São João da Bahia in 1813, the Casa da Ópera de Vila Rica in 1820 and the Teatro São Pedro de Alcântara in 1830. Each artist is listed as having a different theatrical speciality, which Budasz argues is a move away from an earlier model in which one worker would play several roles in the theatrical company. He then proceeds to treat each speciality – actors and singers, instrumentalists, music directors, dancers and choreographers, librettists and adapters, and stage producers – in its own subsection. He draws some important distinctions between practices in Portugal and Portuguese America (namely, female singers were banned in the former but not in the latter), while at the same time stressing the interconnectedness of the metropole and the colony. A subsection on ‘Circulation’, for example, deals with Portuguese, Italian and Brazilian artists who made transatlantic journeys. Budasz convincingly shows that performers, many of whom were already marginalized because of their racial, gender, religious and sexual identities, lived in precarity, risking arrest and/or ‘infamy’ if they tried to leave their jobs or if they made fun of the wrong official. The author stays very close to his source material, though, so while his examples frequently bring up issues of discrimination on the basis of race and gender, he spends little space unpacking the fraught relationships between identity and theatrical performance.
In the final chapter, ‘Uses’, Budasz traces the shifting power dynamics and political situations at play during musical and theatrical performances at civic festivals, literary academies and opera houses. He shows that for wealthy individuals, spending money on civic festivals – either on production costs for the actual event or on printing costs for producing narratives about the festivals – was well worth the symbolic capital gained. In the second part of the chapter, he discusses the nationalistic project of academies such as the Academia Brasílica dos Renascidos and the Arcadia Colonia Ultramarina, both of which staged music theatre productions relating to Brazilian history. Next, he discusses opera's relationship to politics during the fraught era after the arrival of the Portuguese court in Brazil in 1808. While some works like Coutinho and Sousa Queirós's O juramento dos numes (1813) were used to praise a recent military victory, other operas were used to distract the population from the political upheavals of the 1820s. At times, Budasz hints at the possibility that theatre was also used to push back against the power held by the white, wealthy, straight, Christian males he describes. Civic festivals, he notes, ‘allowed men to dance in women's clothes and women to dance in men's clothes – as reported by outraged priests – while providing a venue for African slaves to openly perform with their instruments and costumes’ (302). Here and elsewhere, Budasz's book presents scholars with opportunities for new research into this repertory that thoroughly and critically examines the ‘uses’ of theatre by marginalized peoples.
For readers in Latin American and Iberian studies – and those working on eighteenth-century theatre music in Portuguese America more specifically – the value of this publication will be obvious. Budasz covers a vast array of sources in one book, painting a detailed picture of musical and theatrical life in Portuguese America from the sixteenth century to the early nineteenth. Notable, too, is Budasz's choice to publish the book in English, bringing much of this material into the anglophone domain for the first time and providing readers with a helpful glossary of Portuguese terms in one of his appendices. Moreover, the author is inclusive in his coverage of colonial Brazil, discussing theatrical life in smaller cities as well as in major urban centres. At the same time, a major strength of the book – its comprehensiveness – may be alienating to general eighteenth-century musicological readers who are interested in opera and/or transatlantic music scholarship. Budasz addresses so much source material from so many different periods, genres, venues and producers that at times it can be difficult to follow the threads of the argument. I would have appreciated more thorough introductions and conclusions – both to individual chapters and to the book as a whole.
Still, readers from various backgrounds will find much to enjoy here. The book is filled with informative tables, maps, musical examples and reproduced images of sources, venues and performers. At the end of the book, the author provides four appendices. The first catch-all appendix contains ‘Abbreviations, Spelling, Pitch System, Currency, Conversion Rates, Cost of Living, Glossary’, the second provides further musical examples from a Luso-Brazilian pasticcio, Demofonte (c1780), the third gives a chronology of musical and theatrical performances in Portuguese America from 1565 to 1807, and the fourth provides a chronology of musico-dramatic performances in Rio de Janeiro from 1808 to 1822. Nine further musical scores, relating to material in chapters 2, 3 and 6, can be found on the book's companion website. These sources, and the many others included throughout the book, make this study an important read for students of Brazilian opera as well as readers interested in learning about theatrical life in the Atlantic world.
