Latin America and the Transports of Opera: Fragments of a Transatlantic Discourse

Latin America and the Transports of Opera studies a series of episodes in the historical and textual convergence of a hallowed art form and a part of the world often regarded as peripheral. Perhaps unexpectedly, the archives of opera generate new arguments about several issues at the heart of the established discussion about Latin America: the allure of European cultural models; the ambivalence of exoticism; the claims of nationalism and cosmopolitanism; and, ultimately, the place of the region in the global circulation of the arts. Opera’s transports concern literal and imagined journeys as well as the emotions that its stories and sounds trigger as they travel back and forth between Europe―the United States, too―and Latin America.

Focusing mostly on librettos and other literary forms, this book analyzes Calderón de la Barca’s baroque play on the myth of Venus and Adonis, set to music by a Spanish composer at Lima’s viceregal court; Alejo Carpentier’s neobaroque novella on Vivaldi’s opera about Moctezuma; the entanglements of opera with class, gender, and ethnicity throughout Cuban history; music dramas about enslaved persons by Carlos Gomes and Hans Werner Henze, staged in Rio de Janeiro and Copenhagen; the uses of Latin American poetry and magical realism in works by John Adams and Daniel Catán; and a novel by Manuel Mujica Lainez set in Buenos Aires’s Teatro Colón, plus a chamber opera about Victoria Ocampo with a libretto by Beatriz Sarlo. Close readings of these texts underscore the import and meanings of opera in Latin American cultural history.

This book is the recipient of the 2024 Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Prize from Vanderbilt University Press for the best book in the area of art or medicine.