The operatic scene in the Fluminense Court: literary mediations

Marcelo Diego, Princeton University

"The world is a stage"1 is a literary topos almost as old as literature itself. In

Brazilian late nineteenth century, however, this stage would be identified by many
authors, among which Machado de Assis, more specially with the opera stage. This
identification is explicit in pages of completely diverse aspects of Machado's oeuvre:
one of them is the masterly chapter IX of Dom Casmurro (1900), when tenor Marcolini
exposes his version of Genesis, a gigantic opera composed by Satan upon a libretto by
God; the other one is a chronicle belonging to the "Histórias de trinta dias" series,
published in October 1th 18762 concerning the news about armed conflicts in the
Balkans that were depicted on the newspapers. An alleged friend of the authors claimed
that it was not a war but a Wagner opera upon Gortchakoff's libretto, and that "the
newspapers of our Court have mistakenly translated foreign news found on newspapers
from abroad".
In either one example or the other, either in the comparison with genesis, or with
war, it is tacit the understanding of opera as an artistic expression and a social
phenomenon. In the first case – artistic expression –, it is understood as a complex
language, planned and executed by multiple agents, with specific and coordinated roles,
a totalizing art (Wagner's Gesamtkunstwer, assembly of all arts), the greatest utterance
of human genious. In the second case – social phenomenon –, it is understood as a
vehicle of bourgeois society self-representation and its most privileged space of
sociability, spectacular mirror of modern Western civilization. Thus, understood as the
central knot of a web of performances that happens inside and outside the stage, opera
unfolds and spreads itself along audiences, cabins, foyers, salons, newspapers, coffees,
bookshops, books. If "genesis is an opera" and "war is an opera", also the novel is an
opera – and a great opera
Maybe as a consequence of its double nature, opera can be traced, in Machadian
fiction, in two levels: a deeper, structural one; and a superficial, contextual one. An
example of the first is Memorial de Aires dialogue with Tristan und Isolde, by Wagner,

1
"All the world's a stage" says the melancholic Jaques, in Shakespeare's As you like it, II, vii.
2
Published with the pseudonym of Manassés in Ilustração Brasileira. See, by Leonardo Francisco Soares,
"A guerra é uma ópera, e uma grande ópera", em Machado de Assis em linha 9, available at
<http://machadodeassis.net/download/numero09/num09artigo08.pdf>
and Fidelio, by Beethoven, that can be seen in references to names and plots, as well as
in arrangements of characters in duos or trios, about which Pedro Meira Monteiro has
made an ultimate reading.3 An example of the second is not properly a dialogue with
opera itself, but with the operatic murmur that takes place in A mão e a luva (1876),
author's second novel, where the lyric scene is presented as one of "the amusements of
the Court", aiding in setting a kind of mundane world, inhabited by frivolous characters.
Although having a shallow dialogue, in literary terms, with the operatic repertoire (it
doesn't belong to its hermeneutic code),4 this novel paints a rich tableau of the
circulation and assimilation of opera in the fluminense Court. Let's take a closer look.
Guiomar, a beautiful orphan, lives with her godmother, a baroness, and her
governess, Mrs. Oswald, in a wealthy house in Botafogo. The girl is courted by Estevão,
a mediocre lawyer given to romantic expansions, and by Jorge, a wealthy dandy, the
baroness' nephew. Between Scylla and Charybdis, she is saved by Luís Alves, a friend
of Estevão and a neighbor of the baroness, a "resolute and ambicious" man, in whom
she finds not a passion, but an affinity of purposes in life: "it was as if that glove had
been made for that hand". Chapter I action takes place in 1853, two years before the rest
of the narrative, and is all about the first outbreak of Estevão's passion for Guiomar,
when the girl was still a student in the school directed by the boy's aunt. Chapter II, in
which the events of the novel start (and they will continue up to more 17 chapters),
opens with a splendid description of leisure, activities and polemics, available to the
upper classes in the 1850's, in the capital of the Empire:
The Court amused itself, despite the recent damages of the cholera;
people were dancing, singing, strolling around, going to the theater.
The Casino opened its salons, as so did the Club and the Congress, all
three "Fluminense" in name and soul. Those were the Homeric times
of lyrical theather, the memorable decade of fights and rivalries, fresh
ones each season […]. Who doesn't remember – or who haven't heard
about the famous battles in the classical audience of the Acclamation
field, between the Casalonic legion and the Chartonist phalange, and
above all between this last one and the Lagruiste regiment? Those
were pitched battles, with fresh troops – and not so fresh too –,
received with flower, with lines, with crowns, and little snaps. One
night, the action between the Lagruiste field and the Chartonist field
was so violent, that it seemed to be a page of the Iliad. But this time,
the Venus of the situation got injured in the conflict; Charton was
snapped in the face. The fury, the delirium, the mess were incredible;
3
See, by Pedro Meira Monteiro, "Oui, mais il faut parier: fidelidade e dúvida no Memorial de Aires", in
Estudos Avançados 22 (64), 2008.
4
BARTHES, Roland. S/Z. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1992.
 applauses and hoots gave hands – and feet. The fight went to
newspaper. [...].5
The quotation is a real fresco of polished life, and portrays, upon an ideal landscape, the
"laboratory of new habitus" that was theater, epicenter of the "society of the spectacle in
the broader sense", as pointed by Christophe Charle.6
Theater's function as entertainment is made explicit right in the first sentence,
and its complete disengagement and levity is intensified by the mention to the "recent
damages of cholera". Then, throughout two chains of enumerations, the most
heterogeneous worlds are put together under the sign of entertainment, homogenizing
gravity and frivolity. The first chain designates the actions: "people were dancing,
singing, strolling around, going to the theater". The second chain designates the spaces:
"The Casino opened its salons, as so did the Club and the Congress, all three
'Fluminense' in name and soul", once they were called "Cassino Fluminense", "Club
Fluminense" and "Congresso Fluminense". What comes up in the highlight given to the
word "Fluminense", common to all the three names, is the name of "Lírico
Fluminense", the city's major opera stage at that time, referred as "the classical audience
at Acclamation field", since it was situated at Acclamation field (after, Republic square,
also known as Santana field).7
One the one hand, the vocabulary seen in the quotation is clearly military:
"fights and rivalries", "combats", "legion", "phalange", "pitched battles". On the other
hand, there is a reiterated and unreasonable comparison with the Trojan War: "Homeric
times", "pages of the Iliad", "the Venus of the situation". The effect is the deflation of
any possibility of pathos, getting almost ridiculous. Machado de Assis unfolds, there,
the theme already announced by Martins Pena in the title of his chronicle published in
Jornal do Commercio in 3rd May, 1847: "The theatrical parties or the follies of youth". 8
As stated, "the fight went to newspaper" – and one could argue that it went also to
novel.

5
The source for Machadian text is: <http://www.machadodeassis.net/hiperTx_romances/
obras/amaoealuva.htm>.
6
CHARLE, Christophe. A gênese da sociedade do espetáculo: teatro em Paris, Berlim, Londres e Viena.
São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2012. p. 20.
7
The edition of the Machadian novel used is the one coordinated by Marta de Senna, available at
<www.machadodeassis.net>. This edition offers notes in hypertext, from where the information about
the references were taken.
8
Cf. GIRON, Luís Antônio. Minoridade crítica: a ópera e o teatro nos folhetins da Corte. Rio de Janeiro;
São Paulo: Ediouro; Edusp, 2004.
 To finalize the reading of the fresco, its leading figures must be pointed: the
European traveling singers Anetta Casaloni, Anne Charton-Demeur and Emilia Lagrua,
all of them factually present in the city of Rio de Janeiro, between 1853 and 1854, all of
them mobilizing strong preferences. Also must be added to this cast Balbina Steffanone,
referred in Chapter XI, in a quotation that is a pendant of the other, in Chapter II, either
for the continuity of scenario or the new recruitment of the same characters, for the
recurrence of the same militarized vocabulary and laughable register or, yet, the self-
derisory gaze of the narrator to past experiences which he doesn't deny to have shared.
[…] a grave and solemn matter, the greatest question discussed in
Ouvidor street and in José Tomás House, [was] the influential, the
fuzzy question of knowing if Stephanoni would make her debut in
Ernani. This question, which might make the reader laugh, as others
similar puerilities will make his nephews laugh, this pretension to
which was opposed Lagrua, who insisted that Ernani was hers, this
pretension made souls and presses cries at that time, was proper to
leave alert our Estevão, who was a marshal with the smallest subjects
as a recruit with the greatest ones.
As a temporary conclusion, it is possible to see how A mão e a luva (in its
chapters II and XI) makes a functional use of the lyrical scene as a background, in what
was called before "contextual level". One of the explanations for the importance and
recurrence of opera in this level (in Machado de Assis as in his contemporaries, in
Brazil and abroad), might be the prominence given by the Romantic aesthetics to
musicality in general, considered to be the most subjective and abstract of the arts and,
for this reason, the one that most perfectly embodies the notion of "sublime". However,
in light of the reflection about the globalization of culture, it is also interesting to think
the opera, with all its complex artistic and social relations and its web of performances,
as becoming in the New World a privileged form of the "experience of being in the
center of the world".9

9
Cf. Roundtable on globalization. October 133, summer 2010. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2010.