O som e o soberano: uma história da depressão musical carioca pós-Abdicação (1831-1843) e de seus antecedentes / O som e o soberano: uma história da depressão musical carioca pós-Abdicação (1831-1843) e de seus antecedentes

AUTOR(ES)
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO

2006

RESUMO

In the years between 1808 and 1831, the city of Rio de Janeiro became one of the most active operatic centers in America. This had not been by chance. In the first decade of the 19th century, the São Carlos Theatre, in Lisbon, was still considered the best Italian opera house in Europe, outside Italy, and all the intense cultivation of the Italian lyric drama, developed since the reign of Dom João V, was, in part, transferred to the capital of the State of Brazil at that time, when the Portuguese royal family, together with members of the court, settled down there. Within a few years, besides important European composers and performers, Rio already had a great opera house which could be compared to the best ones in Europe, and during little more than those twenty years, nearly forty different opera titles were first performed there, not to mention hundreds of repetitions. In the same period, besides opera, it was also possible to listen to excellent sacred music in the Royal Chapel, called Imperial later on. According to Manuel de Araújo Porto Alegre, that kind of music "which enchanted foreigners in Rome was equally played with the same perfection during the Holy Week in Rio de Janeiro", a praise, in passing, supported by most of the Europeans who had the opportunity of listening to such a musical ensemble, as Debret, Freycinet, Graham, Caldcleugh and many others. Such an excellent cultivation of sacred music was due not only to the existence, there, of extraordinary native musicians, as José Maurício Nunes Garcia and Pedro Teixeira de Seixas, but also to the effort made by Dom João since his arrival, to fetch from Portugal several of the musicians who, during the reign of Dona Maria I, had formed "the fist Chapel of Europe, superior to that one in the State of Vatican", as the English traveller, William Beckford, had testified in 1787. On the other hand, it is a surprise to notice that, between September 1831 and January 1844, no complete opera had been first performed or even staged in Rio de Janeiro. Moreover, about two months after the abdication of Dom Pedro I, the regent government carried out the imperial budget of 1831- 1832 with extreme severity, practically extinguishing the Imperial Chapel Orchestra and reducing the number of musicians that had almost reached seventy, during the time of Dom Pedro I, to less than thirty. The reorganization of that orchestra would only occur on May 1843, in the second reign already. There is no doubt about the fact of that sudden and, at the same time, lasting musical depression of the years 1831-1843 has had a close relationship with the interregnum of 1831-1840. But no historical or musicological research has been accomplished so far, trying, among events of different nature - social, politic, economic -, to establish precisely which other causes had contributed to the extreme decline of opera and sacred music in the capital of the Empire in 1831. Likewise, it has never been explained why so many years, including some in the second reign, were necessary for Rio de Janeiro to have again a musical activity similar to that one before the departure of Dom Pedro I. Thinking of that - following the patterns of some important international researches that have slowly contributed to the edification of a more general history of the music - , well try not only to open a huge set of direct causes of such a destruction, but also to demonstrate that those most important musical activities in Rio de Janeiro - to produce Te Deum and opera - were since then - and since long before it could be imagined, still in the time of the Governors and Viceroys -, so as in Lisbon and other European capitals, closely connected to the symbolism of the image of the sovereign, to the status of the marvelous and sacred artifice of the royal power. And, from that, to propose that the chief cause of the decline of the two principal musical organisms of Rio de Janeiro, during the years 1831- 1843, had been the concomitant debility, after the departure of Dom Pedro I, of that old symbolic expression of monarchy, a ritual to maintain a royal power which became effective in the social activity of the court, custom recovered, in part, between 1840 and 1841, with the Majority and Coronation of Dom Pedro II, and finally completed with the imperial marriage, in 1843.

ASSUNTO(S)

rio de janeiro court society sociedade de corte monarchy music rio de janeiro poder político monarquia political power música

ACESSO AO ARTIGO

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