ABSTRACTS IMS Study Group IMS Study Group ABSTRACTS Italo-Ibero-American Relationships Anibal E. CETRANGOLO (Universidad de San Martin, Buenos Aires / Università Ca’Foscari, in the Musical Theatre Venice) “The nostalgic willow: Opera on the river” Tuesday, March 21, 14:00-17:00, H 416 This paper analyzes the penetration of lyric theatre along the rivers of South American countries. “Italian Opera in the Southern Cone. Transnational vs. National” Foreign communities - chiefly Italian ones - built opera houses on the shores of the navigable rivers of the region, above all the Paraná and the Uruguay. This kind of circulation had notable character- Session chair istics. Productions were often handled by a single impresario, which meant that the same lyrical Anibal E. CETRANGOLO (Universidad de San Martin, Buenos Aires / Università Ca’Foscari, Venice) product circulated across the borders of Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil. One can assume, then, that this huge area hosted an enormous audience that attended a unique opera season. In contrast to Session Abstract initial impressions, documentary evidence reveals that important international artists performed in The presence of opera in Latin America was not a passive phenomenon. A dichotomy was creat- these theatres. It is also evident that these theaters had a very different representative function in ed between the arrival of Italian lyric companies and the local response to these cultural migrations. comparison with opera houses in the capitals of the country. While the Colon Theater, the Solis, the This session of the RIIA examines these aspects, underlining both the transnational movement Municipal of Santiago and the Municipal of Rio, with stable orchestras and choruses, proudly rep- (marked by business dynamics), and the attempt by local groups to appropriate the lyric genre. The resented the country, provincial theaters - visited occasionally by troupes that remained briefly in the first part of the session explores the spectra of lyric circulation in provincial urban centers, where place - were instead a nostalgic link with a world situated very far away. migrants built lyric theaters that were visited by troupes which profited from the great navigable rivers (Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil) or travelled by railway (Argentina Chile). But operatic penetra- tion was varied not only in a geographical sense: opera covered also the complete social spectrum. Fernando BERÇOT, Clarissa BOMFIM, Maria FILIP, Bruno LIGORE, Michele MESCALCHIN, The second part of the session discusses the local reaction: young Latin-American states aimed to Giulia MURACE, and Ignacio WEBER (RIIA Theaters Group) employ opera in the construction of the nation attempting to create an operatic repertoire using “Operatic migrations on the River Parana” legends, the indigenous Uruguayan literature or the musical repertoire of northeastern Argentina. In these activities, visual aspects – scenography and costumes – were of great importance. The opera is a cultural object which claims to interdisciplinary and transnational study. The travel of lyric companies crosses frontiers and this fact methodologically banishes the tendency to Individual Abstracts consider the countries of the continent as isolated realities. Is unsustainable to reduce the analysis of I. Opera and Italians in South America the opera considering sound as the only factor forgetting other constituent components of the lyric scene as management, set design, machinery or choreography. This young team of RIIA coordinated Ditlev RINDOM (University of Cambridge, UK) by A. Cetrangolo RIIA is formed by persons from different countries and different areas of interest. “Listening to Verdi at Buenos Aires’s Fin-de-Siècle” The group studies the river theaters and has made a first scan in a specific case, the Teatro Aguiar of San Nicolás de los Arroyos, and aims to develop a protocol that could be applicable to other places. This paper focuses upon the South American premiere of Verdi’s Otello in Buenos Aires in June This object of study was born from the restoration of the curtain that Giuseppe Carmignani 1888, in order to address a broader set of issues centred upon the relationship between an increasing- painted for Rosario’s Opera House the Teatro El Círculo. This work is a copy of Parma theater cur- ly stable, commodified Italian operatic canon and the burgeoning Argentinian metropolis. The pre- tain showing that migration in opera involved other factors than musical ones. The group analyzes sentation of Verdi’s latest opera provided a golden opportunity for Buenos Aires to reinforce its po- other river presences which show operatic travel in Argentina and Brazil. The analysis of other occu- sition within a global operatic network, while also provoking intense local media interest due to the pants of those scenarios as the dancers, are considered with relevance. competition between two Italian impresarios first to present the opera. These juxtaposed produc- tions precipitated a complex legal dispute, as well as engendering a prolonged critical discussion of the opera and its various manifestations (or mediations) as performance. This paper examines the Otello episode in the context of wider discussions surrounding urban development and the operatic canon in fin-de-siècle Buenos Aires, focusing particularly upon ideas about the operatic future and the long-range implications of opera’s complex mediality. 10 11 IMS03-05.indd 10-11 2017/01/10 13:23 ABSTRACTS IMS Study Group IMS Study Group ABSTRACTS José Manuel IZQUIERDO (University of Cambridge, UK) Marita FORNARO BORDOLLI (Centro de Investigación en Artes Musicales y Escénicas/Escuela “Italian dominance in Chile’s musical and operatic life, 1890 – 1925: networks and families” Universitaria de Música Universidad de la República, Uruguay) “On exoticism and multiculturalism in Uruguayan opera” The two most influential centers of music in Chile between the 1890s and the 1920s where the Teatro Municipal, the opera house in Santiago, and the National Conservatoire. While later gener- This paper explores the presence of indigenous cultures, European immigrants and exotic cul- ations criticized the period for being “too Italianate”, centered on the performance on opera rather tures in the operas produced in Uruguay. After an overall picture, including a focus on an idealized than on local composition, rarely has this idea of Italian influence been scrutinized, or more specifi- Far East, we address the romantic representation of indigenous cultures of the Uruguayan territory cally defined. What was Italian in it? In this paper, which is a work in progress, I want to discuss how (after their extermination) in literature and opera. The analysis focuses on the opera Liropeya (1881; the networks of Italian influence generated in the period, and how they sustained an increasing in- premiered 1912) by León Ribeiro, based on the poem El Charrúa by Pedro Bermúdez; the represen- fluence not only locally, but in their relation with neighboring countries and Europe. The Teatro tation of The Other is characterized in the language of Italian romantic opera. Secondly, this opera Municipal was dominated in musical and administrative terms by the Padovani family, while the is compared with Marta Gruni by Jaurès Lamarque Pons (premiered 1967). This opera, composed Conservatoire by the composers Enrique Soro -whose father was Italian and studied in Milan- and after the homonymous sainete of the Uruguayan playwright Florencio Sánchez, is set in a conventil- Luigi Stefano Giarda, an Italian composer who wrote the opera for the festivities of the Centenary lo (communal housing) in Montevideo, inhabited by European immigrants and descendants of in 1910. This Italian group influenced local composition, Chilean singers and the selection of opera enslaved people. Its arias and recitatives are based on two manifestations of popular urban music: companies and repertoire during the entire political period. I will study how these two groups (of tango and Afro-Uruguayan candombe. We reflect upon the presence of these cultures in librettos the Conservatorio and the Teatro Municipal) worked together, and how the Italian families created and music, and it is linked to representations in popular music of the first half of the 20thcentury. networks to sustain and dominate local culture. The visit of Pietro Mascagni in 1911, and the increas- ing criticism by Chilean musicians of this Italian influence in the 1920s will be two important points to be discussed. Laura MALOSETTI COSTA (CONICET – IIPC-TAREA UNSAM Universidad de San Martin, Buenos Aires) “Tabaré, migration of an American tragedy” II. The local response Tabaré is a poem published in 1888 from the Uruguayan Juan Zorrilla de San Martin. The paper Sergio Marcelo DE LOS SANTOS (Universidad de la República, Uruguay) analyzes the mythical origins of the subject: a drama at Spanish conquest of the Rio de la Plata in the “Renewal and permanence of the opera in Uruguay” sixteenth century, and some aspects of his several – at least four - operatic reformulations. It studies the settings of scenographer Rodolfo Franco for the premiere of Alfredo Schiuma’s version at the Since the last century, the panorama of the opera in Uruguay has been studied from diverse Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires in 1925 and the long literary and iconographic tradition that the trag- points of view. The musicological perspective was complemented with the view of historians, sociol- edy of the early extermination of the