Musical Women and Identity-Building in Early Independent Mexico (1821-1854) Yael Bitrán Goren Thesis submitted for the degree of PhD Music Department, Royal Holloway, University of London 2012 1 Declaration of Authorship I, Yael Bitrán Goren, hereby declare that this thesis and the work presented in it is entirely my own. Where I have consulted the work of others, this is always clearly stated. Signed: ______________________ Date: 13 April 2012 Abstract This thesis investigates music in Mexico City, with an emphasis on women's relationship to Romanticism, education, consumption, domestic music-making and public performance. During the first decades after independence in 1821, Mexicans began the process of constructing an identity, which musically speaking meant an expansion of the secular musical world. Such construction involved the development of internal activity alongside a conditional receptivity to external influence in the form of the visits of Italian opera companies such as those of Manuel García and Max Maretzek, and travelling virtuosi such as pianist virtuoso Henri Herz, who brought new repertoire and performance practices to Mexican theatres and homes. As consumers and as musicians, women were at the centre of such developments. In Mexico, both European music and that of local musicians was disseminated by means of ladies’ journals and imported and locally-printed sheet music by foreign and Mexican composers, in order to supply a growing home market for amateurs. Abundant surviving repertoire for the home, the widespread availability of musical instruction as revealed through advertisements, and witness accounts of soirées and concerts in the theatre reveal a budding musical world that has hitherto been overlooked and which occurred during a period generally deemed of little importance in Mexican musical history. By investigating a key period in the social-cultural history of Mexican music, this thesis crafts a narrative of intersections between the musical life of Mexican women and the incipient construction of a musical-cultural identity. 3 Index of Contents Declaration....................................................................................... 2 Abstract............................................................................................ 3 Index of Contents............................................................................ 4 Acknowledgements......................................................................... 5 Introduction..................................................................................... 7 Chapter 1. ‘An excess of sensibility’. Constructing Women’s Identity in Romantic Mexico.......................................................... 27 Chapter 2. Albums for Young Mexican Women: Music, Dance and Iconography.................................................................. 60 Chapter 3. Women Musicians and their Teachers in Independent Mexico....................................................................... 111 Chapter 4. The Operatic World of the New Nation........................ 155 Chapter 5. Henri Herz: A European Virtuoso in Mexico (1849-1850)....................................................................... 208 Conclusion...................................................................................... 249 Bibliography................................................................................... 262 Table I. Composers and Arrangers................................................. 283 Table II. Musical Genres................................................................. 287 Table III. Album Josefa Zúñiga...................................................... 290 Table IV. Album Instructor Filarmónico, Vol. I………………… 295 Table V. Album Instructor Filarmónico, Vol. II……………….... 298 Appendix A. Henri Herz’s Concert Programs in Mexico City as Published by Mexican Newspapers…………………….. 300 Appendix B. Original Spanish Quotes…………………………. 307 4 Acknowledgments I thank my parents, Sofía and Daniel Bitrán, my brothers Arón and Álvaro, and their families, for their love, encouragement and support, and also my brother Saúl, for having brought me countless books and CDs from the US that were necessary for my research. I am very grateful to my supervisor Professor Katharine Ellis for her indefatigable, generous support and reassuring advice throughout the project, together with her willingness to overcome the challenges of long-distance supervisory work. The thesis benefited from the corrections and observations made by the committee members Dr Benjamin Walton and Dr Matthew Head, for which I am deeply thankful. I would further like to thank my musicologist colleagues in Mexico for their support in different ways and in diverse moments of this project: Aurelio Tello, Karl Bellinghausen, Jesús Herrera, Armando Gómez, Nelson Hurtado, Omar Morales Abril, José Luis Segura Maldonado, Lorena Díaz Núñez and Ricardo Miranda. I especially thank Eduardo Contreras Soto for the hours of company and conversation we have shared through these years. I would further like to thank my friends Anette Pier, Pilar Montes de Oca Sicilia, Claudia Montero, Juan Arturo Brennan, Álvaro Vázquez Mantecón, Gabriela Rivera, Blanca Avendaño, Marina Elías, Adriana Herrera and Mónica Sesma. My deepest thanks to Catherine Rendón for editing considerable parts of this thesis, translating part of the quotes and helping me with my conundrums with the English language; her generous help and friendship were invaluable. I would further like to thank my friends and colleagues John Koegel and John Lazos for their generosity and their support sending materials that they found for me in American and Canadian libraries and also for their constant disposition to embark upon an enriching academic dialogue. Thanks are due to Dr Lois Zamora for her support and careful and constructive reading of part of this work. The academic exchange with Dr Haiganus Preda-Schimek was enriching for both of us, and I thank her sharing her work with me. I thank Eugenia Roldán Vera and Javier Álvarez for having informed me about universities and PhD programs in England and having encouraged me to undertake this project. 5 I thank Dr Henry Stobart, my advisor, for his encouragement and support. I also thank Dr Julian Johnson and Dr Julie Brown and Directors of Graduate Studies of the Music Department in different moments of this thesis for having supported me with letters needed for my Mexican scholarship and in other ways. Professors Jim Samson and Tina K. Ramnarine provided valuable comments that enriched my original proposal. Nanette Elias, Faculty Administrator, was always helpful in sending across the ocean several letters and documents I needed in Mexico. While in England, living with my family, I was fortunate to meet wonderful people who made our stay there a great experience and who have remained friends throughout these years: Andrew and Helen Taylor, Ana Muñoz and Andrés Carvajal, Natalie Tsaldaraki and Panayotis Archontides, Thomas Hilder, Matthew Prittchard, Juliane Dorsch, Lena Hoppe, Andrea Bohlman, John Ling and Rachel Beckles-Willson. They too deserve my thanks. This thesis has been generously funded by the government of Mexico through the Study Abroad Program of The National Fund for the Culture and the Arts (FONCA) during three full years. For this, and the three months leave that the National Centre for Musical Research (Cenidim/INBA) granted me in the final writing months, I feel honoured and deeply thankful. For my children, León, Samuel and Clara this thesis is an integral part of their lives; I thank them for enduring the process and giving me reasons to carry on with this project. Georg Leidenberger, my husband, was the unremitting support in all areas of my life during its realization. His love for me and faith in my capacity to complete this thesis, along with an engaging impatience, were indispensable ingredients for this project to come to light. México D.F., April 2012 6 Introduction After independence in 1821, the Mexican upper classes embarked on the construction of political institutions, a constitution (issued in 1824), and definition of a national profile and identity. If by the end of the colonial times this exclusive and learned elite comprised ‘noblemen and aristocrats, high bureaucrats, clergymen, professionals, professors and students’,1 after independence the grouping expanded to include lawyers and intellectuals who founded ‘literary, scientific, and economic associations (whose publishers, readers and members overlapped)’.2 This thesis engages with their musical world, centring on Mexico City during the first independent decades after three centuries of Spanish dominion. Diverse ingredients constituted that world. A thriving community of amateur musicians, many of them women, was eager to play, to sing or to listen to the musical novelties coming from Europe, and to savour local compositions. Additionally, this musical community represented the majority of people attending concerts at the National Theatre. The men of the Mexican bourgeoisie liked music not only for musical reasons but also because performances facilitated interaction, during the intervals and also during the spectacles themselves. In addition, it was fashionable for the men of the elite to take prominent positions in the organisation of musical events. Theatre performances served as a laboratory to regulate standards in behaviour, including the reception of new repertoire and performance practices by