Artiaga, Maria José (Lisboa) – “ The reception of Verdi in 1870s Portuguese intellectual milieu ”
Maria José Artiaga is a doctoral reasearcher at CESEM (Centro ) and teaches at Escola Superior de Educação in Lisbon . Her current interests include music criticism and concert life in Portugal between 1870-1910.
Abstract
The decade of 1870 was in Portugal one of intense ideological debate. The main music reviewers of this period writing for the Press were intellectuals drawn from several fields, literature in particular. One of the main objectives of this generation was to fight against romanticism in the arts. For them, art should have a unique role: it should be militant and redeeming. In a period dominated by theories of decadence among Portuguese intellectuality, which permeated every field of study, the sciences, the arts and music, it was thought that the country could 'join again' Europe as a place of progress and also of Baudelaire, Proudhon and Taine, if arts would contribute to that big effort and have a social mission educating the people. The social critiques contained in the so-called 'drama of actuality' of French persuasion, were considered far from disturbing the prevailing social order. According to the music critics, the tiredness provoked by the 'fatal and cruel exclusivity' of the operas of Verdi, produced at the Royal Opera House since 1843, had contributed not only to the exhaustion of the Italian repertory, but above all to the rejection of the works of the composer and, to La Traviata in particular. These criticisms were proposed on the ground that objectivity, keen observation and depiction of behaviour, should constitute the main objective, both for literature and for the other arts, as the most important way to depict society in order that people could work within it positively. Contrary to the current of ideas that saw in La Traviata a model of realism, in Portugal , where the same theories dominated, the opera was rejected on the basis of deflecting attention away from that trend. It is within this climate of ideas, having romanticism and realism as background, that the reception of the opera of Verdi in the Portuguese Press will be introduced and discussed in this paper.