Jean Andrews

The libretto for Carl Heinrich Graun's 1755 opera, Montezuma, was written by Friedrich II of Prussia. Graun had been in Friedrich's service since 1735, having created an impression when his first Italian opera, Lo speccio della fedeltà, was performed at the then Crown Prince's wedding. After his coronation, in 1740, Friedrich named Graun Kapellmeister in Berlin and charged him with setting up a top flight Italian opera company there.[1] In these years, Italian opera became the dominant form in Germany, though there was some French influence, and a natural consequence of this was that Friedrich's libretto, originally written in French, the language in which he was most at ease when writing, was translated into Italian, by the court poet, Giampietro Tagliazucchi.

As regards the operatic conventions of the time, Montezuma is unusual for two reasons. Musically, Graun moved away from the traditional da capo aria, in which singers could often do what they wished (and not exactly what the composer envisaged) with ornamentation on the reprise, and towards the more concentrated form of the cavatina, which restricted singer autonomy and, simply by being usually shorter, retained greater dramatic and emotional intensity. More unusually, in an era when the vast majority of operatic subjects were still taken from classical antiquity, Friedrich elected a subject of almost contemporaneous relevance: the subjugation of Moctezuma II's Aztec Empire by the conquistador Hernán Cortez. This took place between the years 1519, when Cortez kidnapped the emperor and compelled him to accept the Spaniards as overlords in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán, and 1522 when Cortez's dominion was such that he was appointed Governor and Captain general of New Spain.[2] Montezuma died, stoned by his own people, in June 1520.

Twenty two years previously, Vivaldi had taken on the subject, in his lost opera Montezuma (1733), and there is some suggestion that Graun might have seen it while in Italy in 1740.[3] His librettist, for his part, as well as being the prevailing military strategist of his day and enlarging Prussia to twice its size during his reign, was also a dedicated flautist, composer (for the flute), writer of political and philosophical treatises (all in French) and, most significantly in this context, an enthusiastic correspondent, then patron, of Voltaire's. This correspondence famously lasted from 1736 to 1778, the year of Voltaire's death, and included Voltaire's ill-fated stay at Friedrich's court, from 1750 to 1753, during which he took umbrage at what he perceived as Friedrich's attempts to treat him as a glorified tutor, all of which ended in acrimony and brief imprisonment for Voltaire at the hands of his momentarily piqued admirer.[4] Friedrich's intellectual devotion to Voltaire, however, remained more or less constant. Thus he was influenced, not long after, in his choice of subject for Montezuma, by Voltaire's play, Alzire, ou les Amêricains, coincidentally written in 1736, the year their correspondence began. Any similarities in plot between Alzire and Montezuma, all the same, are rather more tenuous than might be expected.[5] Voltaire's play is substantially further removed from historical fact than Friedrich's libretto. It places Montezuma (Montèze) in Peru rather than Mexico and builds up to a reconciliation between a bloodthirsty and tyrannical governor of Peru, Don Gusman, and an Inca king of Potosí, Zamore, both of whom are suitors for the hand of Montèze's daughter, Alzire. The Inca mortally wounds the Spaniard and is condemned to death by Gusman who then, from his deathbed, forgives Zamore, returns Alzire to him as wife and commends both to the care of his charitable father, Don Alvarez who had been governor before him. Zamore, astounded by this example of Christian forgiveness, completes the action by converting to Christianity, as Alzire and Montèze had done before him. Montèze is a peripheral figure, displaced from his empire, converted to Christianity and a pawn in the Spanish machinations in Peru.

However, the mere facts of history never really mattered to Voltaire. Historical figures, geographical locations, cultural specifics became mere playthings used to build his meditations on the generality of human behaviour. As Roland Barthes famously observes:

Voltaire bâtonne et esquive à la fois. [...] On sait que cette simplicitê et ce bonheur furent achetês au prix d'une ablation de l'Histoire et d'une immobilisation du monde [...].[6]

[Voltaire hits out and dodges at the same time [...] One is aware that this simplicity and this happiness were bought at the cost of an excision of history and an immobilisation of the world...]

The happy ending of Alzire is typical of Voltaire's unifying, flattening world view, and probably diametrically opposed to the reality lived by a man such as Friedrich, for whom history, the making of history through politics, and the analysis of history through writing, constituted most of his life. However, he was still an Enlightenment monarch, so, though his sense of history and the fate of kings, in particular, was understandably heightened, his sense of place and cultural identity, as with any other educated European of his time, especially one who had not seen the Americas, was bounded by the limits of his experience and a philosophical outlook as yet quite blind to questions of cultural individuality. To return to Barthes:

[...] l'espace que Voltaire parcourt d'une marche forcenêe [...] n'est pas un espace d'explorateur, c'est un espace d'arpenteur, et ce que Voltaire emprunte à l'humanitê allogène des Chinois et des Persans, c'est une nouvelle limite, non une nouvelle substance; de nouveaux habitacles sont attribuês à l'essence humaine, elle prospère, de la Seine au Gange, et les romans de Voltaire sont moins des enquêtes que des tours de propriêtaire, que l'on oriente sans grand ordre parce qu'il s'agit toujours du même enclos, et que l'on interrompt capricieusement par des haltes incessantes où l'on discute, non de ce que l'on voit, mais mais de ce que l'on est.[7]

[... the space which Voltaire covers in a frenzied march [...] is not the space of an explorer, it is the space of a surveyor, and what Voltaire borrows from the allogenic humanity of the Chinese and the Persians, is a new limit, not a new substance; new dwelling places are attributed to human essence, which prospers, from the Seine to the Ganges, and Voltaire's novels are less enquiries than proprietor's circuits, which are oriented without any great sense of order since the same enclosure is always involved, and which are interrupted capriciously by incessant stops in which one discusses, not what one sees, but what one is.]

Although these observations refer specifically to Voltaire's representation of the Orient and more generally to the current of exoticism in eighteenth-century travel writing, the remarks about Persians and Chinese might equally apply to South America, which was, after all, fleetingly but comprehensively visited by Candide and Cacambo, whose travels encompassed an encounter with the Paraguayan Jesuits, then in defiance of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns, and visits to the mythical Eldorado and the Dutch colony of Surinam.[8]

Friederich's Montezuma, an emperor who loses his throne without a battle, tricked by the unscrupulous Cortez, is, precisely in this sense articulated by Barthes, a mechanism by which Friedrich may discuss 'ce que l'on est', and he proceeds to do so at some length. Unlike Voltaire, Friedrich, alive to the implications of Montezuma's defeat, sites him in his own empire at the most crucial and ignominious juncture in his reign. Where Voltaire's Alzire is even handed towards Spaniard and Indian, Friedrich takes Montezuma's side, but not because he has any particular affinity for the Aztec emperor or his culture. Montezuma becomes a test case for Friedrich who has himself never suffered the ignominy of defeat and occupation. Therefore, it matters more that Montezuma is a monarch with kingly responsibilities than that he is an Aztec from a distant and little understood culture.

There is a subsidiary love story, between Montezuma and his betrothed, Eupaforice, but as Friedrich, both by temperament and inclination was far more interested in the political questions encapsulated in his libretto, particularly in Montezuma's long recitatives on these matters, even by the standards of theatre and opera seria in his time, the love story is relegated to a much more secondary place than usual. Alzire, for example, is much more conventionally oriented around Alzire's love for Zamore and Gusman's desire for her, though great political and religious issues are at stake. In Montezuma, however, even at the point in Act III where he engages in a love duet with Eupaforice, the emperor is much more concerned with how he will be revenged while she sings of when they will finally be together.[9]

In Act 1, Montezuma introduces himself as an enlightened potentate, not dissimilar from Friedrich himself who had the most liberal of ideals but who ruled as an enlightened despot:

Non saprei curare il vanto	I should not care for the glory
Di grandezza passeggera,	of fleeting greatness,
Non vorrei del regno il freno,	I should not want control of the realm,
Se con man troppo severa	if with too harsh a hand
Lo dovessi governar.	it had to be ruled.
Cor di padre ho nel mio seno,	I have a father's heart in my breast,
Son miei figli i miei soggetti,	my subjects are my children,
Ed io lascio la fierezza,	and I leave pride,
Rea cagion di tristi effetti,	wicked cause of evil results,
Ai tiranni esercitar,	to tyrants to exercise,[10]

Later, in Act III, when he is captured and in chains in the Spanish-held quarter, he reflects not so much on his and his people's gullibility and his own part in their downfall, rather on the vicissitudes of fate and fortune which may deprive a king of his tenure in a day, as has indeed happened in the opera, and therefore on the dignity and stoicism with which a king ought to approach these misfortunes:

Qual orribil destino, oh dei, m'opprime!	What a grim fate, oh gods, weighs me down!
Felice oggi mi vide il sol nascente,	Happy the rising sun saw me today,
Oggi nel tramontare il sole istesso	at its setting today the same sun
Delle sventure mie vede l'eccesso.	sees the excess of my misfortunes.
[...]	[...]
Il Monarca del Messico in catene?	The Mexican monarch in chains?
Non pugnai, e son vinto!	I did not fight and I am defeated!
Non fui domato, e son di ceppi avvinto!	I was not tamed, yet I am bound in chains!
Oh, quanto è mai, fortuna, insensato il mortal	Oh how mad is mortal man to worship thee,
Per adorarti! Sperando I favor tuoi Fortune!	Hoping for thy favours,
Quanto è mai folle!	how foolish he is!
Se i monarchi più grandi sono il tuo gioco,	If the greatest kings are your plaything,
Chi può sver stabil bene in questa vita?	who can enjoy a stable good in this life?
Sensa pena abbandono una grandezza,	I leave my greatness without regret.
Sempre a lasciar quei bene,	To leave forever those possessions
Onde la dee privare un dì la morte,	of which one day death must deprive us,
Pronta esser deve un'alma grande e forte.	a generous, strong soul must be prepared.
[...]	[...]
Crudel straniero,	Cruel foreigner, fierce and pitiless monster,
Mostro speitato e fiero d'ogni vizio nutrito,	nurtured on every depravity,
I tuoi delitti; così trionferanno	will your crimes, then,
Dunque della virtù?	thus triumph over virtue?
Dunque vedrassi dal maggior scellerato	Shall we then, see honour, faith and innocence
Impunemente l'onor, la fede	crushed with impunity
L'innocenza oppressa?	by the greatest of villains?
Ma fin dove avivilisco il mio corragio?	But how do I debase my courage?
Con costanza si soffino que' mali	With fortitude let us bear those woes
Che evitar non sappiamo.	we cannot avoid.
[...]	[...]
E' la grandezza umana,	Human greatness is
Larva impossente e vana,	a vain and impotent phantom,
Che ha un vanto passager.	that enjoys a fleeting glory.
Cieca fortuna a noi	Blind fortune donates it to us
La dona e toglie poi,	and takes it from us later,
Tutto si perde al fin.	all is lost in the end.[11]

Questions of cultural or racial identity do not enter into Friedrich's portrayal of Montezuma, he is simply a template onto which the king of Prussia can cast, at extraordinary length, his own thoughts on kingship. These questions, of course, do very much impinge on the latter half of the nineteenth century, into which Il Guarany was born. For a quick summary of the intellectual sea-change which brought such considerations into sharp focus, back to Barthes:

Aussi, conformêment à la lêgende, l'anti-Voltaire, c'est bien Rousseau. En posant avec force l'idêe d'une corruption de l'homme par la sociêtê, Rousseau remettait l'Histoire en mouvement, êtablissait le principe d'un dêpassement permanent de l'histoire. Mais par là même, il faisait à la littêrature un cadeau empoisonnê. Dêsormais, sans cesse assoiffê et blessê d'une responsabilitê qu'il ne pourra plus ni complètement honorer, ni complètement êluder, l'intellectuel va se dêfinir par sa mauvaise conscience: Voltaire fut un êcrivain heureux, mais ce fut sans doute le dernier.[12]

[Also, conforming to the legend, the anti-Voltaire, is certainly Rousseau. In putting forward with force the idea of a corruption of man by society, Rousseau put history back in movement, established the principle of a permanent passing of history. But at the same time, he made of literature a poisoned gift. After all, incessantly parched and wounded by a responsibility which he could never either completely honour or completely avoid, the intellectual is going to become defined by his bad conscience: Voltaire was a happy writer, but he was without doubt the last.]

Antônio Carlos Gomes' Il Guarany, composed and premiered over a century later, comes from this opposite end of the spectrum, that of the Rousseauian noble savage at home in his race and culture specific environment, at a particular point in history. Like Montezuma, this opera too is somewhat out of the ordinary for its context, but in this case, the primary context is love not politics. Il Guarany is a grand opera which tells the story of a Guarani prince enslaved by a Portuguese landowner in sixteenth century Brazil who loves and is loved in return by his master's daughter. Against the grain of other grand operas dealing with such love stories, the happy couple, Indian and Portuguese, lives happily ever after.

A late manifestation of grand opera conventions, Gomes' Il Guarany finds itself sandwiched between two other late and equally exotic grand operas: Meyerbeer's valedictory L'Africaine, first given posthumously on 28th April 1865 in Paris and Verdi's Aida, famously commissioned by the Khedive of Egypt as part of the celebrations for the opening of the Suez Canal and first performed on 24th December 1871 in the new Cairo Opera House.[13] Both of these operas depict interracial love, but, unlike Il Guarany, in each case it is doomed.

In L' Africaine the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama is loved by Sêlika, an Indian princess, whom he captures, already enslaved, somewhere past the Cape of Good Hope on his first voyage, and takes back to the Portuguese court. When he pleads for finance for a second voyage he is thrown in gaol, largely because of Church opposition. Sêlika saves his life twice during the course of the opera, first when her companion Nêlusko threatens to kill him while he sleeps in the Portuguese gaol and secondly when, having managed to arrive, partly through Nêlusko's treachery, back in her own country (probably Goa) where she is quickly proclaimed queen, she claims him as her husband to avoid his execution under laws decreeing death to any foreigner found in her territory. However, Vasco also loves and is loved in return by Dona Inès, a lady of the Portuguese court whose father opposes their marriage because da Gama is a mere adventurer of no family. While Sêlika saves his life, Inès secures his release from gaol by agreeing to marry Don Pedro the powerful and hot-headed nobleman her father, for dynastic reasons, has selected for her. After marriage to Inès, Don Pedro is killed by Nêlusko's accomplices on ship off Goa. In fact all Portuguese men aboard ship are dispatched with Vasco being the only male survivor, and Inès and her ladies, who struggle ashore, are sentenced to death on discovery at Sêlika's court. Inès alone survives the prescribed death by inhalation of the fragrance of the deadly manchineel tree and confronts Sêlika with the evidence of the true love existing between herself and Vasco. In the course of a fraught encounter Sêlika magnanimously recognises that his love for her was only gratitude and sets Vasco and Inès free. Then, in her grief, she commits suicide by lying under the deadly manchineel, accompanied by Nêlusko, who has always devotedly loved her. While the Indian queen is left to inconsolable, and terminal, grief, the Portuguese conquistador, oblivious, ends up with his aristocratic Portuguese lady, who has, herself, shown no less loyalty or self-sacrifice than Sêlika.

In Verdi's eponymous opera, Aida, a captive and enslaved black Ethiopian princess is loved by Radamès, the captain of the Egyptian Royal Guard. She is chief slave to the Pharaoh's daughter Amneris who, in turn, is in love with Radamès and becomes betrothed to him as his reward for winning a battle against the Ethiopians, in the course of which, unbeknownst to the Egyptians, Aida's father, the Ethiopian king, is captured. Through a series of complicated plot twists Radamès is condemned to death for unwittingly leaking military secrets to Aida's father, and Aida, the instrument of that betrayal, supposedly flees. In the final scene Radamès is sealed into an underground tomb to await his death and finds himself reunited with Aida who, in anticipation of his death sentence, entered the tomb before he was sealed up in it. They await death in each other's arms, an ending which can hardly be termed happy.

In both of these grand operas, then, the interracial pairing is doomed: to joint death in Verdi's Ancient Egyptian spectacular, to renunciation by the non-European in favour of a 'truer', all-Portuguese coupling in Meyerbeer's fifteenth century Portuguese Discoveries epic. The other great interracial love story from that period which has survived the test of time as well as Aida is Verdi's La Forza del Destino, based mainly on an adaptation of the Duque de Rivas's Romantic melodrama Don Álvaro o la fuerza del sino (1835) with an interpolated scene from Schiller's Wallensteins Lager (1795), by the librettist Francesco Maria Piave. La Forza has for its backdrop the Peruvian struggle for independence from the Spanish Crown. Although there were sporadic Inca uprisings over the entire period of colonisation, the last in 1814, Peru only achieved independence in 1824, a year after Brazil. In the first version of the opera, premiered in St Petersburg on 10th November 1862, Donna Leonora de Vargas is in love with a mysterious but wealthy and valiant Don Alvaro, secretly the son of a Spanish Viceroy in Peru who married the last Inca princess and, in revolt against the Spanish Empire, attempted to claim the kingship of Peru in her name. He and his wife were captured and imprisoned for life, their child Don Alvaro, born in gaol, was raised in the wilderness.[14] Unable to reveal his true lineage once he entered Spanish society, he was nonetheless destined to carry the double stigma of being both an outsider of dubious origin and a mestizo or halfbreed. Because of these factors, the Marques de Calatrava, Leonora's father, declares Don Alvaro unfit to marry one of her caste and she resolves, in spite of her respect for her father, to elope with the man she loves. However fate, the awful forza, steps in. Alvaro kills the Marques by accident and he, in turn, curses his own daughter as he dies. Alvaro and Leonora flee, losing each other in the melêe. She, believing he has been killed by her father's men, finds sanctuary in the convent of the Angels in an isolated cave disguised as an anchorite monk. Alvaro, once recovered from the wound he suffers at the hands of the duke's men, enlists in the Spanish army in Italy and is discovered there by Leonora's brother who briefly becomes his good friend until it dawns on him who this man is. They attempt to fight a duel and are dispersed by other soldiers whereupon Alvaro leaves the world and, unwittingly, joins the same convent as Leonora. Her brother, Don Carlo, traces him there, provokes him to a second duel and is mortally wounded. As this duel takes place outside Leonora's cell, Alvaro summons the 'hermit' to aid the dying man, Carlo recognises his sister, presumes she and Alvaro have been living there in sin all along and stabs her to death. Alvaro then sees that it is Leonora and, in absolute despair, throws himself off a nearby cliff. This ending faithfully adhered to the trajectory of the Rivas play but Verdi was uneasy both with this ending as plot and with the music he had composed for the last act. He consequently withdrew the opera after the Rome premiere in 1863. In 1868 he was asked to produce a revised version and, with the librettist Ghizlanzoni finally altering the ending of Piave's libretto, he wrote an entire new final scene as well as making other changes. The crucial plot alteration involves Alvaro's acceptance that he must continue to live on in expiation of his sins and thus the final scene is one of Christian reconciliation rather than ultimate despair.[15] The new version was given at La Scala on the 27th February 1869, a year before Il Guarany.

Finally, the most famous of operatic as well as dramatic interracial marriages, that of Otello and Desdemona, was revealed to the public on the 5th February 1887 at La Scala with a libretto by Verdi's habitual Shakespearean collaborator, the sometime composer, Arrigo Boito. As with La Forza, the doom of the relationship was already set by the original Shakespeare play, it was faithfully followed by Boito and so well known as to require no further comment.

Gomes's Guarany is, therefore, the only mid-nineteenth century grand opera to enjoy great contemporary acclaim while offering a successful interracial relationship which was to survive the events of the opera itself. The only other piece to offer a similar outcome is Gomes's own, and far less well-received, Lo Schiavo, initially destined for the Teatro Communale in Bologna, but in fact premiered at the Teatro Imperial D. Pedro II in Rio de Janeiro on 27th September 1889 with the Portuguese title, O Escravo. It was based, by the Italian librettist Rodolfo Paravicini, on a short piece by the Brazilian playwright, the Visconde de Taunay. Set in Rio in 1567, it is the story of a young Portuguese nobleman, Amêrico, and Ilara, a Tamoio Indian slave on his father's fazenda or ranch. After trials and tribulations which involve her forced marriage to an Indian, Iberê, who owes his life to Amêrico and has promised to return the compliment in kind, an Indian rebellion of which Iberê becomes a ringleader, Amêrico's capture by Iberê's Indians, and Iberê's sacrifice of his own life to placate his bloodthirsty companions when he sees Amêrico and Ilara escaping from the camp under their very eyes, they live happily ever after in interracial union.

Of course, the fact that Gomes' two national operas, Il Guarany and Lo Schiavo are structured around interracial romantic triangles must be due in no small measure to the author of the novel on which the first opera was based, Josê Martiniano de Alencar. The positive representation of the Indian which he promulgated in the ground-breaking O Guarani in 1857, although hemmed in by many caveats, was a major turning point for Brazilian high cultural life in the mid-nineteenth century.

As a novelist, Alencar saw himself as influenced by Dumas père, Balzac, Cooper, Marryat, Scott, Arlincourt, Souliê, Sue, Chateubriand, Vigny, Lamartine and Hugo, a line of inheritance which points to an interest in the rousing adventure yarn but also to a strain of poetic intensity and exoticism.[16] Alencar's own view of Peri, the hero of the novel and a prince of the Goitacá Guarani, is couched in the most romanticised of language. In retrospect, he was careful, however, to draw distinctions between his noble but fictitious hero, the, in his view, debased Indians observable in everyday life in Brazil in the mid-nineteenth century, and the deprecatory terms in which the Indians were described in the, overwhelmingly Church-sponsored, chronicles of the colonial period:

No Guarani o selvagem ê um ideal, que o escritor intenta poetizar, despindo-o da crosta grosseira de que o envolveram os cronistas, e arrancando-o ao rídiculo que sobre ele projetam os restos embrutecidos da quase extinta raça.[17]

[In O Guarani the savage is an ideal, which the writer tries to poeticise, relieving him of the vulgar coating which the chroniclers wrapped him in, and pulling him away from the ridicule which the degraded remains of a quasi extinct race project on him.]

He draws a further distinction between the way in which he himself represents the 'noble' Indian and the manner in which he is depicted in the work of the North American frontier novelist, James Fenimore Cooper:

Cooper considera o indígena sob o ponto de vista social, e na descrição dos seus costumes foi realista; apresentou-o sob o aspecto vulgar.[18]

[Cooper considers the Indian from a social point of view, and in the description of his customs he was a realist; he presented him from a vulgar perspective.]

Certainly, Cooper's punctilious, rather quaint prose and attention to frontiersman detail seems somewhat restrained when compared to Alencar's often grandiose poeticisation of noble savage amid nobler nature, the following description of Peri having regained his natural terrain towards the end of the novel, for example[19]:

No meio de homens civilizados, era um índio ignorante, nascido de uma raça bárbara, a quem a civilização repelia e marcava o lugar de cativo. Embora, para Cecília e D. Antônio fosse um amigo, era apenas um amigo escravo.

Aqui, porêm, todas as distinções desapareciam; o filho das matas, voltando ao seio da sua mãe, recobrava a libertade; era o rei do deserto, o senhor das florestas, dominando pelo direito da força e coragem.[20]

[In the middle of civilised men, he was an ignorant Indian, born of a barbarous race, who was repelled by civilisation and marked as a captive by it. However, if for Cecilia and D. Antonio he was a friend, he was barely a slave friend.

Here, nonetheless, all the distinctions disappeared; the son of the wilderness, returning to his mother's breast, recovered his liberty; he was king of the desert, the lord of the jungle, dominating by right of strength and courage.]

In some ways, this description of Peri restored to freedom and his beloved selva has far more in common with Edgar Rice Burroughs' much later Tarzan novels.[21]

Even so, in the Tarzan novels, Tarzan and Jane live happily ever after, and Tarzan is actually the long-lost Lord Greystoke. In the novels of Alencar's role-models, interracial romance does not fare at all well. Cooper and Chateaubriand, in particular, are the two novelists Alencar credits with having instigated the novel of the American frontiers:

Se Chateaubriand e Cooper não houvessem existido, o romance americano havia de aparecer no Brasil no seu tempo.[22]

[If Cooper and Chateaubriand had not existed, the American novel would have appeared in Brazil in its own time.]

In Cooper's Last of the Mohicans (1826), the chaste love affair between Uncas, son of the last Mohican chief, and Cora, younger daughter of the British colonial General Munro, is doomed. She dies at the hand of an enemy Huron Indian, and Uncas, gravely wounded after killing her murderer, is assisted to commit suicide himself in grief. In Chateaubriand's equally abstemious Atala (1801), because of a vow her mother made that Atala would consecrate herself to God and surrender her virginity only at the peril of her mother's eternal soul, the eponymous heroine, daughter of a Spanish conquistador and a Christianised Indian mother, commits suicide rather than lose her virginity to the man she loves, Chactas, a young Indian from another tribe brought up and 'civilised', coincidentally, by her estranged father.[23]

With these writers as models and a contemporary view that categorised Indians as os restos embrutecidos da quase extinta raça, Alencar was careful to establish between his two major protagonists a mistress-servant relationship which later modulates into one of friendship when they are alone in the selva or the jungle and Cecilia has adapted with glee to the ways of the wild:

Ela pertencia, pois, mais ao deserto do que a cidade; era mais uma virgem brasileira do que uma menina cortesã; seus hábitos e seus gostos prendiam-se mais às pompas singelas da natureza, do que às festas e às galas da arte e da civilização.[24]

[She belonged, then, more to the desert than to the city; she was more a Brazilian virgin than a courtly maiden; her habits and her tastes were more adapted to the simple pomp of nature, than to the parties and galas of art and civilisation.]

However, no matter how suggestive the subtext, Ceci and Peri never cross the frontier between devoted friendship and love. Even at the very end, they speak of each other as brother and sister. Indeed, following the model of Chateaubriand's Atala, it is only on condition that Peri converts to Christianity that Cecília is confided to his care by her besieged father, D. Antônio, towards the end of the novel. At the very end, in peril of death and removed from all trace of civilisation, they still maintain their unlikely distance:

Peri estava de novo sentado junto de sua senhora quase inanimada: e, tomando-a nos braços, disse-lhe com um acento de ventura suprema:
- Tu viverás!...
Cecília abriu os olhos, e vendo seu amigo junto dela, ouvindo ainda suas palavras, sentiu o enlevo que deve ser o gozo de vida eterna.

- Sim? ...murmurou ela: viveremos!... lá no ceu, no seio de Deus, junto daqueles que amamos!...
O anjo espanejava-se para remontar ao berço.
- Sobre aquele azul que tu vês, continuou ela, Deus mora no seu trono, rodeado dos que o adoram. Nós iremos lá, Peri! Tu viverás com tu irmã sempre...!
Ela embebeu os olhos nos olhos de seu amigo, e lânguida reclinou a loura fronte.
O hálito ardente de Peri bafejou-lhe a face.
Fez-se no semblante da virgem um ninho de castos rubores e límpidos sorrisos: os labios abriram como as asas purpúreas de um beijo soltando o vôo.
A palmeira arrastada pela torrente impetuosa fugia...
E sumiu-se no horizonte.[25]

[Peri was once more seated next to his almost inanimate lady: and, taking her in his arms, he said to her in an accent of supreme fortitude:
'You will live! ...'
Cecilia opened her eyes, and seeing her friend beside her, hearing his words as well, she felt the exaltation which must be the joy of eternal life.
'Yes?' she murmured: 'we will live! ...there in the heavens, at the breast of God, near all those we love!...'
The angel was flapping her wings to get back to her cradle.
'In that blue you can see,' she continued, 'God lives on his throne, surrounded by those who adore him. We will go there, Peri. You will live with your sister forever...!'
Her eyes drank in the eyes of her friend, and languid she reclined her blonde forehead.
Peri's hot breath blew over her face.
he virgin looked like a little boy with chaste blushes and limpid smiles: her lips opened like the purple wings of a kiss taking flight.
The palm tree dragged along by the impetuous torrent fled...
And merged into the horizon.]

Cecília speaks of herself as Peri's sister, he is her friend, she is a sua senhora. As Chateaubriand does with Atala, Alencar stresses her virginity to the last. As she floats off in Peri's arms, under his hot breath, in the palm tree top, Alencar describes her as a little boy with chaste blushes and limpid smiles, the angel returning to its cradle, desexualising the relationship even as it threatens to ignite. At this point, though their physical intimacy is greater than it has ever been, and though he has become a Christian and Cecília has learned some of his wilderness ways, now they are further apart in aspiration than they have been at any point in the novel. She, fixed on o gozo de vida eterna, believes they are going to die and join all those she loves in heaven. He, on the other hand, a warrior in tune with his environment who has faced down tigers and all sorts of human enemies, is, in his acento de ventura suprema, convinced that they will live. It is here that Alencar opts out. The palm tree is dragged off by the impetus of the current and the ... after the word fugia offers the reader a space for conjecture.

Here, there is probably just enough suggestion in the mention of Peri's hot breath on her face, Ceci looking deeply into his eyes and her two lips opening like as asas purpúreas de um beijo soltando o vôo to intimate sexual consummation, in spite of her quasi inanimate state and fixation on dying, but the comparison of Ceci with a boy cherub longing to get back to the heaven from whence he came seems strongly to counteract this implication. If this is the point of sexual initiation then, of course, the infantilisation of the blonde Ceci might be taken as entirely compatible with the 'Angel in the House' representation of compliant and sexually unthreatening femininity in nineteenth-century fiction or, indeed, it might be possible to read in an implication of deviance on Peri's part. Whatever the possibilities, this is a truly ambiguous, open ending, as if Alencar could not permit himself to allow these two demarcated 'friends' explicitly to become lovers as the trajectory of their common survival irresistibly suggests, yet he could not kill them off completely either. Perhaps he had no choice in such a pioneering work. Cooper and Chateaubriand before him made far crueller decisions.

When it comes to the opera libretto, interestingly and quite apart from the inevitable scaling down of plot complexity and the exclusion of characters deemed irrelevant to the central plot which is attendant on adaptations of fiction for opera, there are crucial alterations which were not occasioned simply by the demands of brevity in the libretto prepared by Antonio Enrico Scalvini, an Italian librettist friend of Gomes, and Carlo D'Ormeville, then one of the most important theatrical agents in Italy.[26]

For present purposes, the most important of these concern Pery's use of language. In the Alencar original Peri speaks an articulate kind of Tarzan language, in which he is only able to employ the familiar tu and vos forms, in which he always speaks of himself as Peri in the third person, and in which all his expressions are simple and childlike, no matter how complex the issue he is dealing with. In the opera, in contrast, Pery speaks Italian with exactly the same level of fluency and eloquence as any other character and his music is not differentiated by any attempt at introducing Brazilianate melodies or themes into it. Indeed, in common with Verdi's La Forza del Destino which has no Spanish themes, Gomes makes no attempt to write themes or melodic patterns from outside the grand European tradition into the opera.[27] Pery's music is written for an heroic tenor, along the lines of Verdi's Don Alvaro or Meyerbeer's Vasco da Gama, and later still, Verdi's Otello, while Pery's rival for Cecilia's hand, Alvaro, is a lyric tenor. This, in itself, underlines Pery's status not just as romantic hero but also as a figure of truly heroic stature. It might also be worth remembering here that Montezuma is a role which was, in keeping with convention, written for a castrato contralto.

Pery's stature is emphasised by the two opportunities he is given in the libretto to define himself. As these are far less prolix than those afforded Friedrich's Montezuma, they are almost entirely autobiographical and emotional. On his first appearance, Pery is welcomed by his master, Don Antonio, who thanks him, as a friend, for saving his daughter's life:

ANTONIO	ANTONIO
(to Pery, who hesitates to approach)	(a Pery, che esita ad approssimarsi)
Come nearer, my friend.	T'appressa, amico.
[...]	[...]
PERY	PERY
(looking at him, then proudly)	(lo guarda, indi con fierezza)
The heroic people Of the Guaraní Call me Pery In their language. The son of kings, There is no danger Which will cause Pery To retreat in fear.	Pery m'appella in sua favella l'eroico popolo ei Guaranì. di rei figlio, non v'ha periglio che arretrar pavido vegga Pery.
ANTONIO	ANTONIO
The old Hidalgo calls you brother and friend before al lthose present.	Fratello e amico in faccia a ognum ti chiama il vecchio idalgo
(He embraces him)	(lo abbraccia.) [28]

Later, in Act II, Pery lies in wait for Gonzales, the Spanish adventurer and his henchmen, who believe there is a silver mine underneath Don Antonio's house. He launches into a dramatic recitative in which he expostulates his suspicion of these men and vows to defend his lady. This then modulates into an introspective but still vocally dramatic aria in which Pery reveals his background to the audience. Don Alvaro, in La Forza de Destino, offers a similar self-revelatory aria in the first scene of Act III and these are the conventions, far more restrictive than those observed by Friedrich, within which Gomes modelled his work:

PERY	PERY
I am of high birth, always midst danger, for the children of the sun called me son of good fortune, when my father left me his arrows before he died. I am of high birth, when my father left me his arrows before he died. But I saw you, lovely maiden, and the lion of the forest became your slave!	Vanto io pur superba cuna Sempre bella fra i perigli, Se figliuol della fortuna Mi chiamar del sole i figli, Se mio padre le sue frecce Nel morire mi lasciò. Vanto io pur superba cuna Se mio padre le sue frecce Nel morire mi lasciò. Ma ti vidi, o vergin bella, E il leon della foresta Il tuo schiavo diventò[29]

Don Antonio's embrace of Pery as gentleman and friend makes Pery's love for Cecilia, already established as the opera opens and revealed to the audience in the heady love duet in Act 1, likely to succeed, though hidden as yet from Don Antonio. Pery and Cecilia behave as any other pair of lovers in an opera from this period with no attempt made to make distinctions on the grounds of race or background. The fact that Pery doesn't sound any different linguistically or musically from anyone else in the opera, added to the fact that the role would invariably be taken by a European, goes a long way towards dispelling any strangeness the love-affair might have for a European audience. In the opera, Don Antonio's castle is attacked from inside by the Spanish adventurers and from outside by hostile Aimorè Indians. Don Antonio resolves to blow up his ranch house to confound them all but first sends his daughter away in the care of Pery, on condition that he first converts to Christianity. Once Pery has converted, they leave her father to blow up his ranch house, or castle as it is called in the libretto, and survive unequivocally to live happily ever after. After the explosion, when Don Antonio's ranch house is destroyed, the stage directions instruct that the hostile Aimorè camp should be visible from a distance with Cecilia and Pery on a hill. She falls to her knees when she hears the explosion and the newly-converted Pery points heavenwards. The curtain then falls on this tableau.

On the evidence of these two instances, the changes in focus in the representation of the Indian prince or potentate in European opera between 1755 and 1870 reflect the enormous cultural and intellectual shift which took European culture from Enlightenment to late Romanticism. Montezuma is a stoic, a rationalist, an enlightened despot based unashamedly on Friedrich of Prussia himself, set for a mezzo-soprano and almost certainly sung by a contralto castrato, the opera star par excellence of the day. There is no sense of time, place, cultural identity or indeed the catastrophic implications of the defeat for Aztec and allied cultures; nor, pre-Rousseau, could there be. It is a Mexican tale appropriated by a Prussian king, a Saxon composer and an Italian translator. Unlike Il Guarany and indeed Voltaire's Alzire, the politics of kingship takes precedence over the love story involving Montezuma and Eupaforice. Il Guarany, on the other hand, composed by a Brazilian, based on a ground-breaking Brazilian novel, with a libretto by two Italians who were friends of the composer, has a much greater claim to the Romantic quality of authenticity. This notwithstanding, and in spite of the status conferred by his heroic tenor tessitura, Pery, the prince of the Goitacá Guarani who emerges inevitably has far more in common with Chateaubriand's Renê or Chactas than with any actual Guarani noble. In an opera in which love takes precedence over any political considerations or questions of cultural identity, his successful love affair with a European coloniser's daughter gained immediate contemporary acceptance both in Europe and Brazil, because he, though apparently regaining his Rousseauian essence as 'king of the jungle' when he and Cecilia flee her father's ranch, paradoxically and willingly has already surrendered it by abandoning his ancestral beliefs to convert for love to Christianity.

It is for this reason that Il Guarany is, in the words of Barthes, so much more of a cadeau empoisonnê than all of Friedrich's well-meaning self-definition. In Voltaire's Alzire, for example, where cultural difference was not acknowledged, the Inca Zamore converts to Christianity out of true belief. Pery, on the other hand, abandons principle for the infinitely more subjective entity of love.

[1] The Oxford Dictionary of Opera, edited by John Warrack and Ewan (West Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 297-98.

[2] Ibid., p. 298, and see C.A. Burland, Montezuma (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1973), pp. 179-233.

[3] Ibid., Warrack and West eds, p. 747, and see Montezuma (highlights), conducted by Richard Bonynge, DECCA CD 448 977-2, Notes.

[4] See Letters of Voltaire and Frederick the Great, edited and translated by Richard Aldington (London: Routledge, 1927).

[5] Montezuma, Notes, op. cit.; Voltaire, François Marie Arouet de, Thêâtre de Voltaire, 2 vols (Paris: Librairie Garnier Frères, 1930), I, 177-221.

[6] Roland Barthes, Le Dernier des Écrivains Heureux, in Voltaire , Romans et Contes (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), pp. 9-17, pp. 14-15.

[7] Ibid., p. 17.

[8] Ibid., pp. 170-193.

[9] Montezuma, op. cit., p. 27.

[10] Ibid., pp. 22-23.

[11] Ibid., pp. 25-26.

[12] Barthes, op. cit., pp. 14-15.

[13] Musically Il Guarany owes much to the grand opera tradition. See Marcello Conati, 'Formacão e afirmação de Gomes no panorama da ópera italiana. Notas e considerações' in Antônio Carlos Gomes: Correspondências italianas, edited by Gaspare Nello Vetro (Rio de Janeiro: Cátedra, 1982), pp. 41-96.

[14] In the Rivas play, a younger brother of Leonora's, Don Alfonso, written out in the opera libretto, reveals Alvaro's secret. His father and mother escaped to live with 'los indios salvajes' until Alvaro was born. When they were imprisoned he was left to be raised by his mother's people, 'entre los indios creciste,/como fiera te educaste,/y viniste ya mancebo,/con oro y con favor grande/a buscar completo indulto/para tus traidores padres.' ( Don Álvaro o la fuerza del sino, edited by Alberto Sánchez (Madrid: Cátedra, 1988), ll. 2212-2217). The opera libretto, in the absence of Don Alfonso, has Alvaro reveal his own identity in soliloquy while a soldier in Italy:

Della natal sua terra il padre volle
spezzar l'estranio giogo, e coll'unirsi
all'ultima degl'Incas la corona
cingere confidò. Fu vana impresa!
in un carcere naqui; m'educava
il deserto; sol vivo perchê ignota
è mia regale estirpe! [Act 3, Scene 1]

In this version he was born in gaol and raised in the desert and only lives because his lineage is unknown in Spain. In fact the last Inca princess, Beatriz Ñusta, married Martín de Loyola, the nephew of the Jesuit founder, St Ignatius Loyola in 1558. While mestizo marriages and other unions between conquistadores and Inca royalty were accorded all the honours of aristocratic intercourse in the period immediately succeeding conquest in Peru, from the mid-sixteenth century, as administrators from Spain took the place of conquistadores in the seats of power, the mestizo products of these unions were relegated to second-class citizenship. See David Brading, The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots and the Liberal State 1492-1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 255-272.

[15] See Julian Budden, ' La Forza del Destino', The Operas of Verdi, 3 vols (London: Cassell, 1973-1981), II (1978), 425-522.

[16] Josê de Alencar, Como e porque sou romancista (Rio de Janeiro: Tip de G. Leuzinger & Filhos, 1893).

[17] Ibid., p. lxxxii. One of the major sources of inspiration for Alencar's romance of the colonial period were the chronicles of the colonial era in the library of the Convent of São Bento, Olinda, which he read in 1848. See ibid., p. lxxiv.

[18] Ibid., p. lxxxii.

[19] The Leatherstocking Tales are a collection of five novels by Cooper published between 1823 and 1841 and featuring the frontiersman Natty Bumppo, better known as Hawkeye among many aliases, as protagonist. The Last of the Mohicans published in 1826 is the second in the series and the one to which Alencar's remarks refer.

[20] Josê de Alencar, O Guarani (São Paulo: Editora Ática, 1994), p. 280.

[21] The first of this long series, Tarzan of the Apes, was published in 1914.

[22] Op. cit., p. lxxxii.

[23] Atala appeared in book form only in 1805. See Pierre Moreau, Prêface, in Atala, Renê, Les Aventures du dernier Abencerrage (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), pp. 7-35, pp. 15-16.

[24] Op. cit., p. 288.

[25] Op. cit., pp. 295-96.

[26] 'Gomes em Milão', Giampiero Tintori, in Gaspare Nello Vetro, op. cit., pp. 29-39, p. 34.

[27] See Marcello Conati, op. cit., p. 57.

[28] Il Guarany, Act I, Sony Classical CD S2K 66273, Booklet, p. 52.

[29] Ibid., p. 80.

All translations, except where taken from opera libretti, are my own.

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