Opera Before Nation: The New World Answers in Italian

Long before Dvořák advised Americans in 1893 to draw from African American and Indigenous sources in order to form a national music, composers across the Americas were already doing precisely that — not defensively, not programmatically, but organically. Opera, the most prestigious European genre of the nineteenth century, became one of the principal sites where the New World answered Europe in its own language.

The story does not begin in New York.

In 1711, in Mexico City, Manuel de Zumaya’s La Parténope was performed at the viceregal court — the earliest known opera composed in the Americas.[1] Its libretto followed the conventions of Italian opera seria: mythological intrigue, courtly love, heroic resolution. Mexico was not rejecting Europe; it was demonstrating fluency. The New World entered the operatic conversation speaking Italian.

Titlepage of libretto of Zumaya's opera 'Partenope', 1714

By the nineteenth century, that fluency had matured into something more ambitious. Antônio Carlos Gomes’s Il Guarany premiered at La Scala in 1870 to immediate acclaim.[2] The libretto was in Italian. The orchestration was grounded in the language of Verdi. But the subject was unmistakably Brazilian. Based on José de Alencar’s novel O Guarani, the opera centers on the love between Peri, a Guarani prince, and Cecília, the daughter of a Portuguese nobleman. The setting is sixteenth-century Brazil. The atmosphere is Romantic Indianist. The dramatic tension unfolds not in mythic Greece or medieval Europe but in tropical America.

Gomes placed an interracial love story at the center of Il Guarany in 1870. A Guarani prince and the daughter of a Portuguese nobleman. Not as scandal. Not as provocation. As destiny. As nation-building.

Teatro della Scala di Milano, March 19, 1870

Miscegenation — the mixing and intermarriage of people from different racial backgrounds — was not treated as a threat to civilization. It was presented as part of Brazil’s reality and future. Five years before the withdrawal of federal troops from the Reconstruction South in the United States (1875), at a moment when interracial marriage was illegal across much of the American republic, a Brazilian composer was standing at La Scala and offering Europe a New World narrative in which racial mixture was foundational.

Writing today from Charlottesville, I cannot help but feel the tension of that contrast. In the United States, miscegenation was criminalized until 1967, when Loving v. Virginia struck down anti-miscegenation laws.[3] The fear of racial mixing shaped law, culture, and violence. In Brazil — imperfect, contradictory, deeply unequal Brazil — racial mixture had long been acknowledged as structural, as constitutive.

Perhaps this is why I still struggle to understand American racism in its historical rigidity. The New World was never racially pure. It was always mixed. The question was never whether mixture would occur — it already had — but whether it would be denied or recognized.

In that sense, Il Guarany was not simply opera. It was a declaration, an emerging voice irrupting into the transatlantic conversation.

The same pattern appears elsewhere. In Cuba, long before Dvořák’s New York pronouncements, Afro-Caribbean rhythmic vitality had entered theatrical and operatic life. Manuel Saumell (1817–1870) and Ignacio Cervantes (1847–1905) incorporated contradanza and creole rhythmic patterns into art music idioms.[4] The habanera — that syncopated pulse that would travel to Bizet’s Carmen — emerged from Cuban soil.[5] Louis Moreau Gottschalk, the American pianist-composer celebrated for incorporating Caribbean rhythms into works such as Bamboula and La Nuit des Tropiques, absorbed these influences during his extended stays in Havana and the Caribbean.[6] By the time Dvořák called for an American school grounded in African American sources, Cuba had already been staging a creolized musical modernity.

In Argentina, Arturo Berutti (1858–1938) sought to fuse European operatic training with national themes, producing works such as Pampa (1897) and Taras Bulba (1895), while navigating the tension between provincial identity and international ambition.[7] These composers were not provincial imitators. They were provincial in the best sense: rooted, local, responsive to landscape and history. And yet they wrote in the lingua franca of European opera because that was the medium through which prestige circulated.

Opera in the Americas was not an echo. It was part of a conversation.

To reduce nineteenth-century musical nationalism to a northward narrative culminating in Dvořák’s American sojourn is to ignore a longer, deeper continental arc. The Americas were already translating political sovereignty into cultural voice. They were doing so in Italian, in Spanish, in Portuguese — but increasingly with local subjects, local rhythms, local tensions embedded within those imported forms.

What makes Il Guarany especially striking is that it stages Brazil before Europe without apology. The Italian language of the libretto does not erase its Brazilian core; it amplifies it. America responds to Europe in Europe’s own medium — and alters the terms of the exchange.

The New World did not wait to be instructed how to sound like itself. It was already listening to itself — and answering back.

Notes

[1] Manuel de Zumaya, La Parténope (Mexico City, 1711), widely regarded as the earliest opera composed in the Americas.

[2] Antônio Carlos Gomes, Il Guarany, premiered at Teatro alla Scala, Milan, 19 March 1870. See Maria Alice Volpe, “Remaking the Brazilian Myth of National Foundation: Il Guarany,” Latin American Music Review 23, no. 2 (2002): 179–194.

[3] Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967), U.S. Supreme Court decision invalidating laws prohibiting interracial marriage.

[4] Gerard Béhague, Music in Latin America: An Introduction (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1979), 122–135.

[5] Peter Manuel, Creolizing Contradance in the Caribbean (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009).

[6] S. Frederick Starr, Louis Moreau Gottschalk (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000).

[7] Vicente Gesualdo, Historia de la música en la Argentina (Buenos Aires: Beta, 1961), vol. 2.