Carlos Gomes' Il Guarany: the Frontiers of Miscegenation in nineteenth-century grand opera.

On 2 December 1870, Emperor Pedro II's forty-fifth birthday, the Rio de Janeiro premiere of Antonio Carlos Gomes' Il Guarany was hailed rapturously by an audience of the well-to-do and the aristocratic colonial elite. (1) In the opera, which is set in the mid-sixteenth century, the Portuguese colonial heroine, Cecilia, ends up happily ever after in the arms of a Guarani prince, Pery. By 1870 the black slave population still had eighteen more years to wait for the complete abolition of slavery. The Indians, de facto though not de jurae as disenfranchized as the blacks and since 1850 deprived of automatic rights to their ancestral lands, saw these territories increasingly encroached upon by fazendieros from the colonial elite, determined to prevent small claims by emigrants or anyone else who had the temerity to challenge their omnipotence. (2) Quite a contrast therefore existed between the Indian and black slave reality which supported that cosseted audience in its habitual luxury, and the sixteenth-century love story they enjoyed in the demarcated space of the opera theatre.

More than any of the other colonizing cultures in Latin America the Portuguese in Brazil had actively encouraged intermarriage between Portuguese male settlers and Indian women, initially to form alliances and cement the Portuguese presence in the sixteenth century. Later it became accepted practice for Portuguese men of all classes to marry or live with and father children by Indian or black slave women. Such was the interracial balance in Brazil until the discovery of gold at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and the subsequent influx of Portuguese to exploit and black slaves to work the mines, that the dominant language was not Portuguese but a lingua geral based on Tupi. Indeed, until the arrival, a century later, of Dom Joao VI and 1,500 courtiers fleeing the Napoleonic occupation of Portugal, in March 1808, Brazil was a society without the elaborate sense of social hierarchy long established in Europe. However, as a consequence of the transfer of the royal court major Brazilian cities quickly became architecturally 'Europeanized' and the colonial upper echelons gradually adopted, at least on the surface, European social mores which were far less racially tolerant. For the elite of such a society therefore, sixty years after such a transition, decked out in its ceremonial finery, to accept an operatic representation of reciprocated and successful love between a Portuguese fidalga and a Guarani, albeit a prince, was a leap of some magnitude.

The seeds for this were, perhaps involuntarily, sown thirteen years previously by the author of the innovative novel on which the opera Il Guarany was based, Jose Martiniano de Alencar. His O Guarani of 1857 was the first Brazilian frontier novel and, although hemmed in by many delicate caveats, it offered a representation of an idealized Indian figure which provided a major turning point for Brazilian high cultural life in the mid-nineteenth century: indianismo. Though it was the beginning of a national literature which sought to recover the indigenous inheritance, and though it was enlightened relative to the social and moral standards of its time, its stylistic and philosophical roots, as with most New World writing of the time, lay firmly in the Old World. Alencar acknowledged this in his essay, 'Como e porque sou romancista', when he cited as his models Dumas pere, Balzac, Cooper, Marryat, Scott, Arlincourt, Soulie, 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. (3) This is evident in the manner in which he depicts the Indian hero of the novel, Peri, a prince of the Goitaca Guarani, a Titan in terms of his athletic and fighting prowess, a sacrificial lamb in his disinterested and semi-superstitious devotion to his mistress, the Portuguese heiress, Cecilia.

Nonetheless, though Alencar couches Peri's interaction with nature and his service of his lady in the most romanticized language, in retrospect he was careful to draw firm distinctions between this noble but entirely fictitious savage and the debased remnants of Peri's tribe observable in everyday life in Brazil in the mid-nineteenth century. In his view, the Indians of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries had probably been unfairly disparaged by the church chroniclers of the period and part of his mission was to return to these historical Indians their innate nobility:

No Guarani o selvagem e um ideal, que o escritor intenta poetizar, despindo-o da crosta grosseira de que o envolveram os cronistas, e arrancando-o ao ridiculo que sobre ele projetam os restos embrutecidos da quase extinta raca. (4)

Interestingly, Alencar lays great emphasis on his poeticization of the Indian. It is what differentiates his frontier novels from those, particularly the North American novelist James Fenimore Cooper, which he finds far too engaged in realistic observation:

Cooper considera o indigena sob o ponto de vista social, e na descricao dos seus costumes foi realista; apresentou-o sob o aspecto vulgar. (5)

Certainly Cooper's punctilious, rather quaint prose and attention to frontiersman detail seems somewhat restrained when compared to Alencar's grandiose juxtaposition of noble savage amid nobler nature. The following description of Peri, having regained his natural terrain towards the end of the novel, could never be accused of taking o aspecto vulgar into acccount: (6)

No meio de homens civilizados, era um indio ignorante, nascido de uma raca barbara, a quem a civilizacao repelia e marcava o lugar de cativo. Embora, para Cecilia e D. Antonio fosse um amigo, era apenas um amigo escravo.

Aqui, porem, todas as distinco es desapareciam; o filho das matas, voltando ao seio da sua mae, recobrava a libertade; era o rei do deserto, o senhor das florestas, dominando pelo direito da forca e coragem. (7)

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. (8)

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, however, interracial romance does not fare at all well. 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 hands of an enemy Huron Indian and Uncas, gravely wounded after killing her murderer, is assisted to commit suicide himself out of 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 Christianized Indian mother, commits suicide rather than lose her virginity to the man she loves, Chactas, a young Indian from another tribe brought up and 'civilized', coincidentally, by her estranged father. (9)

Cooper and Chateaubriand, in particular, are the two novelists Alencar credits with having instigated the novel of the American frontier. (10) He asserts in the same breath, however, that the Brazilian frontier novel would have come into being even without them and, indeed, one of his innovations appears to have been a blurring of the tragic ending. In O Guarani, with these writers as models and an adherence to the contemporary view that categorized Indians as 'os restos embrutecidos da quase extinta raca', Alencar was careful to establish between his two major protagonists a mistress-servant relationship which modulates into one of friendship and equality when they are alone in the selva 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 cortesa; seus habitos e seus gostos prendiam-se mais as pompas singelas da natureza, do que as festas e as galas da arte e da civilizacao. (11)

Following the Christianist model of Chateaubriand's Atala, Dom Antonio, besieged by the Aimore and undermined by Loredano and his henchmen, entrusted his daughter to Peri only on condition that he convert to Christianity. All the same, and no matter how suggestive the subtext, Ceci and Peri never overtly cross the frontier from devoted friendship to love. Even at the very end, when they might be on the point of death, they speak of and to each other as brother and sister. She especially thinks of them as brother and sister in God; he still carries the memory of the Christian Virgin who cured his mother and whom Cecilia resembles to an uncanny degree. Thus, at the very end, in peril of death and removed from all trace of restrictive civilization, they still maintain their unlikely distance:

Peri estava de novo sentado junto de sua senhora quase inanimada: e, tomando-a nos bracos, disse-lhe com um acento de ventura suprema:

--Tu viveras! ...

Cecilia 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! ... la no ceu, no seio de Deus, junto daqueles que amamos! ...

O anjo espanejava-se para remontar ao berco.

--Sobre aquele azul que tu ves, continuou ela, Deus mora no seu trono, rodeado dos que o adoram. No s iremos la, Peri! Tu viveras com tu irma sempre ...!

Ela embebeu os olhos nos olhos de seu amigo, e languida reclinou a loura fronte. O halito ardente de Peri bafejou-lhe a face.

Fez-se no semblante da virgem um ninho de castos rubores e limpidos sorrisos: os labios abriram como as asas purpureas de um beijo soltando o voo.

A palmeira arrastada pela torrente impetuosa fugia ...

E sumiu-se no horizonte. (12)

As Chateaubriand does with Atala, Alencar stresses her virginity to the last. Cecilia speaks of herself as Peri's sister; he is her friend, she is a sua senhora. As she floats off in Peri's arms, with his hot breath on her face, in the palmtree top, Alencar describes her as a little boy with chaste blushes and limpid smiles, an angel flapping its wings to return to its cradle, thus desexualizing the relationship even as it threatens to ignite. Though their physical intimacy is greater than it has ever been, though he has become a Christian and she has learned some of his wilderness ways, Ceilia and Peri are now 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 wrestled tigers and faced down all sorts of human treachery, is, in his 'acento de ventura suprema', convinced that they will live; and here Alencar, the omniscient author, opts out. The palm tree is dragged off by the current and the ellipses after the word fugia offer the reader room for conjecture.

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 purpureas de um beijo soltando o voo' 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 the infantilization 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 but, on the contrary, it might equally be possible to read into it an implication of homoeroticism on Peri's part. In sum, this is a truly ambiguous, open ending, as if Alencar could not permit himself to allow these two demarcated 'friends' to become lovers as the trajectory of their common survival irresistibly suggests, and yet he could not kill them off completely either. Perhaps he had no choice in such a pioneering work. Cooper and Chateaubriand 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 several 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. (13) It might be as well to state at the outset that, in terms of dramatic coherence, the libretto in itself was not judged a success by Italian critics at the time, chief among them being the highly influential Giulio Ricordi, though most allowed, after the initial furore of rapture had died down, that musically the opera showed promise and maturity. (14)

The changes included the change of historical setting, the exclusion of Cecilia's mestiza half-sister, the altered nationality of the villains, the absence of racism in Don Antonio's attitide to Pery, Pery's language, the relationship between Pery and Cecilia, and the capture of Cecilia by the Aimore.

The change of historical setting

The Alencar novel is set in 1604: 'No ano da graca 1604, o lugar que acabamos de descrever estava deserto e inculto; a cidade do Rio de Janeiro tinha-se fundado havia menos de meio seculo, e a civilizacao nao tivera tempo de penetrar o interior'. (15) Between 1580 and 1640 Portugal, and therefore Brazil, was under Spanish dominion. Dom Antonio de Mariz, a Portuguese fazendeiro, lives in a frontier outpost which he governs and which he considers to be a part of free Portugal:

esse torao brasileiro, esse pedaco de sertao, nao era senao um fragmento de Portugal livre, de sua patria primitiva; ai so se reconhecia como rei ao duque de Braganca, legitimo herdeiro da coroa; e quando se corriam as cortinas do dossell da sala, as armas que se viam, eram as cinco quinas portuguesas, diante dos quais todas as frontes inclinavam. (16)

The opera is set in 1560 and the reasons for this are probably twofold. Firstly, given the limitations of libretti it would have been difficult to incorporate the issue of Portuguese independence into an opera ostensibly about Brazil, especially when it is not crucial to the plot. Secondly, a European, as opposed to a Latin American, audience, and this includes the Italian librettists, would have much more easily identified the sixteenth as the century of conquest and colonization of the New World. Therefore the new historical setting of 1560 is twenty years before the Portuguese throne succumbed to Philip II of Spain and thus evades any discussion of national allegiance, and only sixty years after the first Portuguese landed where the city of Porto Seguro now stands in Bahia, a time when Rio was very much in its infancy and the frontier nature of the world around Rio might be more intelligible to a European audience.

The exclusion of Cecilia's mestiza half-sister

In the novel Cecilia has a mestiza half-sister born to her father and an Indian woman. Isabel is dark where Cecilia is fair, painfully aware that her blood should prevent a gentleman such as Don Alvaro, whom she loves, ever loving her in return. She is sensual and passionate where Cecilia is otherworldly and seemingly untouched by love, not unlike the Blessed Virgin with whom she purposely is associated in Peri's mind. In Alencar's lexicography of racial characteristics Isabel is halfway between the ingenuous aloofness of Cecilia and the earthy, instinctive sexuality of the daughter of the chief of the Aimore sent to console Peri before his execution:

Havia nos olhos da menina tanta fogo, tanta lubricidade no seu sorriso; as ondulaco es morbidas do seu corpo traiam tantos desejos e tanta voluptuosidade, que o prisoniero compreendeu imediatamente qual era a missao dessa enviada da morte, dessa esposa do tumulo, destinada a embelezar os ultimos momentos da vida! (17)

While Peri easily resists the temptations offered by the Aimore chief's daughter, Dom Alvaro feels drawn to Isabel although, as Cecilia's acknowledged lover, his honour would be compromised if he gave in to his feelings and withdrew from his engagement. Consequently he tries to avoid Isabel, but it does no good:

Alvaro fugia e evitava Isabel; tinha medo desse amor ardente que o envolvia num olhar, dessa paixao profunda e resignada que se curvava a seus pes sorrindo melancolicamente. Sentia-se fraco para resistir, e entretanto o seu dever mandava que ele resistisse. (18)

Eventually, he and Isabel do admit their love for another but he is bound in honour not to break his word to Cecilia and her father. He is mortally wounded by the Aimore very soon after their climactic interview and she, in despair, prevails on Peri, whom she hates because he reminds her of her own Indian forebears, to lay Alvaro's body on her bed. She proceeds to suffocate herself by burning aromatic essences with the inanimate body of Alvaro beside her on the bed in a sad mockery of hymeneal consummation. Even so, Alencar is kind to her. Miraculously Alvaro revives for an instant, long enough to murmur her name and clasp her closer to him as they both die:

Seus labios se uniram outra vez num longo beijo, em que essas duas almas irmas, confundindo-se numa so, voaram ao ceu, e foram abrigar-se no seio do Criador. (19)

The melodramatic Isabel would have made a wonderful romantic opera heroine and her act of suttee by suffocation might have rivalled the great mad scenes, but to leave it in would also have been to distract attention from the central love story. Perhaps for this reason Gomes and his librettists chose to leave Cecilia motherless, without a female servant or a confidante, the only solo female voice in the entire texture of the opera, and to avoid completely the Isabel/Alvaro sub-plot. The excision of the Alvaro/Isabel romance must have been in the interests of concision but, in view of the way in which the Cecilia/Peri relationship is adapted in the opera, Isabel's scruples about her parentage would have been anomalous and confusing. It may also be that Cecilia is isolated as the only female in the wilderness to draw attention to the frontier nature of the society in which she finds herself and to add further emphasis to her relationship with Peri.

The altered nationality of the villains

The change in nationality and identity of the villains is probably a concession to Italian sensibilities. In the novel the Italian Carmelite monk, Frei Angelo di Luca, taking advantage of the secret of the existence of an enormous silver mine left in his care by a dying man, becomes O Senhor Loredano who, in the company of two Portuguese adventurers, Bento Simoes and Rui Soeiro, tries to trick Dom Antonio out of his land, under which the mine lies. In the opera, with no small touch of schadenfreude, O Senhor Loredano becomes the Spanish adventurer Gonzales, a Spanish villain being equally acceptable to Italian and Brazilian sensibilities, and is accompanied by Ruy Bento and Alonso, who are both Spanish as well. Gonzales retains none of Loredano's apostacy and identification with the devil, though he does, like the renegade Carmelite, aspire to the abduction and rape of Cecilia.

The absence of racism in Don Antonio's attitude to Pery

No matter how many acts of heroism Peri undertakes in the defence of Dom Antonio and his family, the master/slave relationship is always preserved between them: 'para Cecilia e D. Antonio fosse um amigo, era apenas um amigo escravo'. (20) In the opera, however, Pery is welcomed onto the stage on his first appearance by Don Antonio, who praises him for having saved his daughter's life when it was threatened by hostile Indians:

ANTONIO    (a Pery, che esita ad approssimarsi)
           T'appressa, amico.

GONZALES    (con ironia a Pery)
            Ma chi sei tu? Rispondi,
            Tu che a noi tutti admirazione infondi?

PERY    (lo guarda, indi con fierezza)
        Pery m'appella
        In sua favella
        L'eroico popolo
        Dei Guarani.
        Di rei figlio,
        Non v'ha periglio
        Che arretrar pavido
        Vegga Pery.

ANTONIO    Fratello e amico in faccia a ognum
           Ti chiama il vecchio idalgo.
           (lo abbraccia) (21)

The only trace of racism comes from the Spanish villain Gonzales when he asks Pery ironically why such a fuss should be made over him. Don Antonio's acceptance, on the other hand, could not be more complete. He embraces Pery as a brother and friend and invokes his position as a nobleman in doing so, thus recognizing Pery's own princely caste.

Pery's language

In the Alencar original Peri speaks an articulate kind of Tarzan language, where he is only able to employ the tu and vos forms. He always speaks of himself as Peri in the third person, and all his expressions are simple and childlike, no matter how complex the issue he is dealing with. By contrast, in the opera 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. Indeed, in common with Verdi's practice in La Forza del Destino, which has no obvious Spanish themes, Gomes does not introduce themes or melodic patterns from outside the European tradition of grand opera. (22) Furthermore, Pery's music is written for an heroic tenor, along the lines of Verdi's Don Alvaro or Meyerbeer's Vasco da Gama or, later still, Verdi's Otello, while his rival for Cecilia's hand, Don 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 and elevates him above Don Alvaro.

The relationship between Pery and Cecilia

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 I, 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 and there is no attempt to make distinctions on the grounds of race or background. The fact that Pery does not 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 had for a European or European-influenced audience. Once Pery has converted to Christianity he and Cecilia flee and her father blows up his ranch house and all the enemies in it, and the couple survives unequivocally to live happily ever after. After the explosion, when Don Antonio's house is destroyed, the stage directions indicate that the Aimore camp should be seen 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. Il Guarany is therefore essentially a love story. Though it is set against an exotic background, all issues of race and politics, society, class, religion or pecuniary motivation present in the novel have been overridden.

The capture of Cecilia by the Aimore

The episode of Peri's deliberate surrender to the Aimore cacique, in the hope that when they execute and then eat him he will succeed in poisoning the whole tribe with the curare he will ingest before his execution, and the visit of the cacique's daughter to console him with sex beforehand, is altered in the opera so that Cecilia is captured by the Aimore and Pery comes to free her but is himself inadvertently captured. The cacique then sends Cecilia to perform the sexual rites before Pery's execution, not without having himself admired her beauty, protected her from the demands of his tribe that, as a white woman, she should die, and suggested that she would subsequently become his queen. The plot advantages of a heroine in such obvious peril and the musical opportunity offered by her duet with the cacique are obvious. It also enabled the librettists to dispense with the cacique's daughter and condense the entire episode even if they neglected, later on, to suggest how Pery saved himself from certain death by his own poison.

As Cecilia and Pery are already declared and conventional lovers who can be relied upon to preserve the social niceties in the opera, sending her to comfort him with sex before his execution is merely a neat little twist in the tale, but the same episode would have been unthinkable in the novel, and it was this last plot alteration which most offended Alencar himself. He was present at the Rio premiere and was privately appalled. He informed the Visconde de Taunay that he particularly objected to the sending of Cecilia into the Aimore camp:

O Gomes fez do meio Guarani uma embrulhada sem nome, cheia de disparates, obrigando a pobrezinha da Ceci a cantar duetos com o cacique dos Aimores, que lhe oferece o trono da sua tribo, e fazendo Peri jatar-se de ser o leao das nossas matas. (23) Alencar had some professional right to comment on the adaptation, having himself written the libretto for a two-act comedy, A Noite de Sao Joao, which was set to music by Elias Alvares Lobo and premiered by no less than Carlos Gomes before he went to Italy, on 14 December 1860. (24) This was his concrete contribution to the Imperial Academia de Musica e Opera Nacional, a contribution to a scheme initiated by a group of radical musicians, composers and intellectuals at court, including Machado de Assis, to promote the production of at least one opera in Portuguese by a Brazilian composer each year. In 1857, when Alencar produced and published the first draught of A Noite de Sao Joao, the Imperial Academia had a repertoire of three Spanish zarzuelas in translation and one Italian opera. Nonetheless, in Cecilia's interview with the cacique, the latter's objection to Pery's boast of being'o leao das nossas matas' is probably a little harsh coming from an experienced librettist. This passage is, in fact, a necessary soliloquy in terms of operatic convention.

Act II begins with Pery lying in wait for Gonzales and his henchmen. He launches into a dramatic recitative in which he expostulates on 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. In Alencar's opinion this amounted to boasting, but the librettists had little choice. Don Alvaro, in Verdi's La Forza de Destino, offers a similar self-revelatory aria in the first scene of Act III and these are the conventions on which Gomes would have expected to model his work:

PERY    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 lascio.
        Vanto io pur superba cuna
        Se mio padre le sue frecce
        Nel morire mi lascio.
        Ma ti vidi, o vergin bella,
        E il leon della foresta
        Il tuo schiavo divento. (25)

In any case, this is hardly boasting--more operatic shorthand.

Perhaps in response to the runaway success of the opera and as a means of restoring some of the plot complexities and subtleties to the stage, Alencar consented to the development of a stage version of O Guarani which would follow the plot of the novel rather more closely while incorporating the most popular of the musical elements of the opera, including the ballet. (26) It was written by the journalists Visconti Coaraci and Pereira Silva and finally presented for the first time on 9 May 1874 to rapturous acclaim. An extant and quite extraordinary newspaper advertisement describes a series of scenes which appear to follow the plot of the novel more or less accurately, apart from the interjection of an 'enchanted palace' in Act III. I, where 'as huris e virgens formam graciosos grupos'. (27) There is no indication of which orchestral music is used though Act IV, involving 250 people, an enormous number in any theatre, appears to contain a great deal of ballet. (28) The 'Ave Maria' sung in the first act of the opera by Don Antonio, and the Adventurers' Chorus from Act II, 'Senza tetto, senza cuna', are incorporated in Acts II and III respectively of the stage adaptation. This in itself is telling. The 'Ave Maria' and the 'Senza tetto, senza cuna' are relatively untaxing vocally and could respectably be sung by actors with some singing ability. Cecilia and Pery's two duets, however, some of the most beautiful and arresting music in the whole opera, are not included, more than likely for the practical reason that actors, no matter how capable as singers, would not technically be able deliver this music. It also appears that the play ignores completely the love story developed in the opera and follows the novel's ambiguous line more closely. As one might imagine from Alencar's response to the opera, there is no mention of a visit by Cecilia to the cacique's camp. Instead, Ceci and Peri sail off in the top of a palm tree at the end after the destruction of Don Antonio's house, abracados, as in the novel:

   II[degrees] quadro e ultimo
      A Inundacao
O Rio Paquecer em ocasiao de enchente
 a sumir-se ao longe, iluminado pelo
      ARCO-IRIS
   (trabalho do Sr Huescar)
 PERIE CECILIA ABRACADOS
sao levados pela corrente atravessando a cena
  sobre o grelo de uma Palmeira. (29)

Though there was a long and litigious correspondence between Alencar and the authors and promoters of this new version, he appears to have limited his objections to legal matters. (30) The success of the play seems to have been due to the fact that, in tune with late nineteenth-century taste in theatre, it was much more spectacle than drama. The following less than complimentary assessment of the contemporary theatre-going audience and its discernment by Alencar himself sums up the issue:

Para certa gente o principal do teatro e o tambor, a corneta, os panos pintados, os fogos de Bengala, etc., e entre os acessorios, ultimo de todos, depois da caixa do ponto vem o drama, que fala a inteligencia. (31)

The relationship between Alencar and Coaraci was never satisfactory and the 1874 version was performed for the last time on 13 December that year. After the death of Alencar, Coaraci prevailed upon D. Georgiana de Alencar to allow him and his wife Corina to prepare a new adaptation of O Guarani for the theatre and it was performed in mid-1885 with D. Ana, Alencar's widow, herself present at the premiere. (32)

Alencar's objections to the major diCerences between the opera and the novel seem never to have been tackled regarding the unequivocal existence of love between Ceci and Pery and its survival despite the calamitous events of the opera. This may very well be because it did no more than make explicit what he had only dared to tease his readership with in 1857. However, the success of the interracial love affair is not only anomalous within a broad Brazilian cultural context, it is also practically unique in the panorama of European grand opera of the period.

As a late manifestation of grand opera conventions and particularly in its 'exotic' setting Gomes' Il Guarany is sandwiched between two other late grand operas: Meyerbeer's valedictory L'Africaine first performed, posthumously, on 28 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 24 December 1871 in the new Cairo Opera House. (33) Both of these operas depict interracial love, but in each case it is doomed.

In L'Africaine the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama is loved by Selika, an enslaved Indian princess whom he captures 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. Selika saves his life twice during the course of the opera, first when her companion Nelusko threatens to kill him while he sleeps in the Portuguese gaol, and secondly when, having managed to arrive, partly through Nelusko'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 Inez, a lady of the Portuguese court whose father opposes their marriage because da Gama is a mere adventurer of no family. While Selika saves his life, Inez secures his release from gaol by agreeing to marry the powerful and hot-headed nobleman, Don Pedro, whom her father has selected for her for dynastic reasons. Later, and after marriage to Inez, Don Pedro is killed by Nelusko's accomplices on board ship off Goa. All the men are killed save Vasco, and he and Inez and her ladies, who manage to struggle ashore, are sentenced to death after being discovered at Selika's court. Inez survives death, though all her ladies are killed by inhaling the fragrance of the manchineel tree, and confronts Selika in a climactic duet. In the course of a fraught encounter, Selika magnanimously recognizes that Vasco's love for her was mere gratitude, whereas his love for Inez is true, and consequently sets them free. Then, in despair, Selika, accompanied by Nelusko, who has always devotedly loved her, commits suicide under the deadly manchineel. The Portuguese conquistador then ends up with his aristocratic Portuguese love, who has shown no less loyalty or self-sacrifice than Selika, and the black Indian queen is left to inconsolable and terminal grief.

In Verdi's eponymous opera, Aida, a captive and enslaved black Ethiopian princess is loved by Radames, the captain of the Egyptian Royal Guard. She is chief slave to the Pharaoh's daughter Amneris who, in turn, is in love with Radames and becomes betrothed to him as his reward for winning a battle against the Ethiopians in the course of which Aida's father, the Ethiopian king, is, unbeknownst to the Egyptians, captured. Through a series of complicated plot twists Radames 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 Radames is sealed into an underground tomb to await his death and finds himself reunited with Aida who, in anticipation of his death sentence, had entered the tomb before it was sealed up. They await death in each other's arms.

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 Alvaro o la fuerza del sino (1835) with an interpolated scene from Schiller's Wallensteins Lager (1795), by the librettist Francesco Maria Piave. La Forza is set during the Peruvian struggle for independence from the Spanish Crown. Although there were sporadic Inca uprisings over the entire period of colonization, 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 10 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, who was born in gaol, was raised in the wilderness. (34)

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. Because of these factors the Marques de Calatrava, Leonora's father, has declared Don Alvaro unfit to marry one of her breeding and she, in response, has resolved 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 melee. 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 separated by other soldiers whereupon Alvaro decides to abandon 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 recognizes 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.

The apostate climax of the Rivas play was faithfully retained in the first version, but Verdi was uneasy with this ending both 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 plot, 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 in expiation of his sins and thus the final scene is one of Christian reconciliation rather than ultimate despair. (35) The new version was performed at La Scala 27 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 5 February 1887 at La Scala with a libretto by Verdi's habitual Shakespearean collaborator, the sometime composer, Arrigo Boito. As with La Forza, the doomed relationship was already set by the original Shakespeare play, and was faithfully followed by Boito and so well known as to require no further comment here.

Gomes's Il 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, 27 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, Americo, and Ilara, a Tamoio Indian slave on his father's fazenda. After trials and tribulations which involve her in a forced marriage to an Indian, Ibere, who owes his life to Americo and has promised to return the compliment in kind; an Indian rebellion of which Ibere becomes a ringleader; Americo's capture by Ibere's Indians; and Ibere's sacrifice of his own life to placate his bloodthirsty companions when he sees Americo and Ilara escaping from the camp under their very eyes, they live happily ever after in interracial union.

The conundrum therefore remains: that Gomes could produce an opera about miscegenation which ends happily ever after against a background in European opera of tragic endings to such beginnings; and somewhat against the grain of Alencar's coy and cautious rendering of the Cecilia/ Peri relationship--and this in a country where full emancipation of black slaves would not come for a further eighteen years, and where the Indians, described by Alencar himself as 'os restos embrutecidos da quase extinta raca', no longer had automatic rights to their ancestral lands, the floresta of which Peri is such an heroic and noble king. Indeed in his own subsequent Iracema (1865), the highly symbolic first affair between a Portuguese conquistador, Martim, and an Indian woman ends in tragedy when she dies shortly after childbirth, leaving behind the first mestizo, Moacir, meaning 'born of pain'.

There were indeed great changes in Brazilian society from 1850 onwards with the ending of the slave trade, but it appears that there was a vast difference between what, in 1857, the first Brazilian indianista novel was able tentatively to represent in a relationship between a heavily romanticized 'noble savage' and a desexualized, quasi-Marian, blonde Portuguese virgin (an event which had taken place over 250 years before), and what a rather cavalier libretto adaptation of that same storyline produced ten years later by a pair of Italian librettists working in Milan could depict. Naturally when Il Guarany was premiered in Rio, under the Portuguese title O Guarani, it was hailed as the national opera, the genesis of which art form in Brazil Alencar himself had advanced with his A Noite de Sao Joao ten years before. Perhaps a first, great, national opera should have a happy ending, be symbolic of the origins of Brazilian society and prophetic of a return to racial tolerance, as Iracema was in the birth of Moacir if not in the death of his mother. The second opera, given as O Escravo in Brazil, also offers a happy and successful union of conquistador and Indian blood, and this time the libretto is completely Brazilian in origin.

Perhaps more tellingly it is also true that grand opera was the most exotic of art forms, along with classical ballet which it often incorporated, and as such offered a demarcated space far from the real wilderness and semi-nakedness of most Indian tribes, in which the unthinkable could be sung by European singers dressed in the conventional nineteenth-century European mock-up of Indian dress, complete with bootees, tights, modesty-preserving tunics and trews and pseudo-Raphaelite hair. There would be nothing for an elite audience to fear in such a sanitized version of an otherwise contemptible and uncivilized reality.

Goldsmiths College

(1) Where characters from the novel O Guarani are referred to the Portuguese spelling has been used; where characters from the opera Il Guarany are mentioned, the Italian spelling is employed.

(2) See Jorge Caldeira, Viagem pela Histo ria do Brasil (Sao Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1997).

(3) Jose de Alencar, Como e porque sou romancista (Rio de Janeiro: Leuzinger & Filhos, 1893).

(4) Alencar, p. lxxxii. A major source of inspiration for Alencar's romance of the colonial period were the chronicles of the colonial era in the library of the Convent of Sao Bento, Olinda, which Alencar read in 1848. See Alencar, p. lxxiv.

(5) Alencar, p. lxxxii.

(6) The Leatherstocking Tales are a collection of five novels by Cooper published 1823-41 and featuring the frontiersman protagonist Natty Bumppo, better known as Hawkeye, among many aliases. The Last of the Mohicans (1826), is the second in the series and the one to which Alencar's remarks refer.

(7) Jose de Alencar, O Guarani (Sao Paulo: Atica, 1994), p. 280.

(8) The first book in this long series, Tarzan of the Apes, was published in 1914.

(9) Atala appeared in book form only in 1805. See Pierre Moreau, 'Preface', in Atala, Rene, Les Aventures du dernier Abencerrage (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), pp. 7-35 and 15-16.

(10) Alencar, O Guarani, p. lxxxii.

(11) Alencar, O Guarani, p. 288.

(12) Alencar, O Guarani, pp. 295-96.

(13) Giampiero Tintori, 'Gomes em Milao', in Antonio Carlos Gomes: Correspondencias italianas, ed. by Gaspare Nello Vetro (Rio de Janeiro: Catedra, 1982), pp. 29-39 and 34.

(14) Tintori.

(15) Alencar, O Guarani, p. 16.

(16) Alencar, O Guarani, p. 21.

(17) Alencar, O Guarani, p. 224.

(18) Alencar, O Guarani, p. 199.

(19) Alencar, O Guarani, p. 263.

(20) Alencar, O Guarani, p. 280.

(21) Il Guarany, Act i. Sony Classical CD S2K 66273, booklet, p. 52.

(22) See Marcello Conati, 'Formacao e afirmacao de Gomes no panorama da opera italiana. Notas e consideracoes', in Gaspare Nello Vetro, pp. 41-96 and 57.

(23) Visconde de Taunay, Reminiscencias (Rio de Janeiro: Alves, 1908), pp. 87-88, quoted in Joao Roberto Faria, Jose de Alencar e o teatro (Sao Paulo: Editora da Universidade de Sao Paulo, 1982), p. 138.

(24) Faria, 'Contribucao a Opera Nacional', pp. 111-17.

(25) Alencar, O Guarani, p. 80.

(26) There is no published text for either of the stage versions of O Guarani.

(27) Faria, 'A Questao Guarani', pp. 137-51 and 147-49.

(28) Faria points out that the theatre in which the piece was presented, the Teatro Lirico Fluminense, was rather large, p. 148.

(29) Faria, pp. 148-49.

(30) The entire correspondence quoted by Faria relating to the stage version of O Guarani bears this out.

(31) Quoted by Faria, p. 149.

(32) R. Magalhaes Junior, Jose de Alencar e sua epoca (Sao Paulo: LISA, 1970), p. 299.

(33) Musically Il Guarany owes much to the grand opera tradition. See Conati.

(34) 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 escape to live with 'los indios salvajes' until Alvaro is born. When they are imprisoned he is 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 Alvaro o la fuerza del sino, ed. by Alberto Sanchez (Madrid: Catedra, 1988), 11. 2212-217. In the opera libretto, in the absence of Don Alfonso, Alvaro reveals his own identity in a soliloquy while a soldier in Italy (III. I). For an account of relations between conquistadores and Incas in Peru see David Brading, The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots and the Liberal State 1492-1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 255-72.

(35) See Julian Budden, 'La Forza del Destino', The Operas of Verdi, 3 vols (London: Cassell, 1972-82), II (1978), 425-522.