Beyond Italian Opera. Manuel García in postcolonial Mexico City (1826-1828)

The thesis 'Beyond Italian opera. Manuel García in postcolonial Mexico City (1826-1828)' examines the operatic activities of the tenor and composer Manuel García in Mexico City between 1826 and 1828, and how they intersected with the Mexican nation-building project in the aftermath of independence from Spain. Building from the small body of previous academic work on the topic, my thesis aims to rethink these years as a short yet critical step in the cultural transition of Mexico into its postcolonial identity. Arriving at a period when Italian opera was widely viewed by the new Latin American elites as a powerful marker of civilisation against the perceived backwardness of the colonial state, García appeared to offer a chance for Mexico to emerge as a culturally modern nation in the new Atlantic geography of the post-Napoleonic world. As soon as his performances began, however, García’s music presented local audiences with an unexpected problem, in revealing new approaches to Italian opera which did not correspond with what Mexican audiences had come to know under that name during the cultural domination of the Bourbon empire. Drawing upon a wide array of primary sources, the thesis investigates how opposed understandings of operatic italianità collided in Mexico, leading to new ways of composing, performing and thinking about Italian opera. The first part of the thesis focuses on the encounter between García himself and the operatic world in Mexico (chapter 1), as well as the various misconceptions that preceded and shaped this encounter (chapter 2). The second part considers the impact that García’s performances and compositions had in Mexico City, from his first stagings of European works (chapter 3) to his initial attempts to adapt to his local audience (chapter 4 and 5), to his final bid for local success and his return to Paris (chapter 6). In particular, my thesis investigates García’s corpus of Mexican operas as part of a wider network of transatlantic exchanges and local interactions where political and cultural frameworks of the past (Spanish colonialism) and the present (Europe cultural imperialism) were continuously contested and renegotiated. This work therefore offers new perspectives for rethinking the composition and performance of Italian bel canto in Latin America in the early nineteenth century as a complex process that, by welcoming yet also challenging the cultural authority of Europe, helped to shape new American identities.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2022

Author dc:creator

• Milella, Francesco

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Walton, Benjamin

• Music
• Opera studies
• Latin American studies
• Manuel García
• Gioachino Rossini
• Mexico

Licence

• https://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/

Language dc:language

eng

DOI dc:identifier.doi

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.93641

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/346221