Conference Agenda

When Heitor Villa-Lobos was commissioned to compose a work for the 400^th anniversary of São Paulo city, he conducted extensive research on ethnographic and historical accounts of contact and assimilation. In the resulting symphony, the “Ameríndia,” the Indigenous peoples of Brazil are initially depicted as nomads, progressing from non-linguistic phonetic sounds to Indigenous languages. After undergoing a “miraculous conversion” or assimilation, they emerge fully “civilized” singing in Latin (the embodiment of Christianity) and finally Portuguese (signifying the birth of a Brazilian nation). This process of assimilation narrated in the Symphony has been an integral part of Brazilian history, from the work of the 19^th-century German scientists Spix and Martius (1831 and 1845) to current textbooks.

As I argue in this presentation, the resignification of languages in the symphony demands a critique of nationalistic narratives, particularly those based on genetic determinism and historicist models. My archival research demonstrates that the purported Indigenous languages used in the symphony were transformed into concepts, reinforcing stereotypes and othering of Indigenous peoples and ultimately glorifying settler colonialism.

We only need to consider Villa-Lobos’ appropriation of an indigenous identity, the “índio branco” (White Indian) or the “índio de casaca” (Indian in a tuxedo), which has framed discussions on his life and works. Granted, as a descendent of Europeans living in the city of Rio de Janeiro, Villa-Lobos was not an indigenous person. I am particularly concerned with our own field, with performers playing Villa-Lobos’s music in red face (Duo Villa-Lobos 2009), or scholars writing about Villa-Lobos based on erroneous conceptions of cannibalism (Averbach 2022). In my work I resist such labels because they have contributed to propagation of stereotypes and ultimately a dehumanization of Indigenous peoples. Recognizing, as Tuhiwai Smith (2021) does, that Western knowledge is “given the authority of truth” (76-77), especially in historical narratives, I challenge past and current approaches to scholarship and performance of Villa-Lobos and his music and suggest ways to deconstruct colonialist narratives in the discipline.

Choreographer Luigi Manzotti and composer Romualdo Marenco’s 1881 ballet, Excelsior, allegorized the battle of Light versus Obscurantism to advance or thwart humanity’s progress through scientific and technological innovations. It reinforced and celebrated the dominant European ideology of positivism and was performed in dozens of theatres across four continents in the 1880s and 90s. The work concluded in a dance of peace among all nations, but the technologies and innovations presented in Excelsior were closely connected to European imperial ambitions and aggression. The political valences of these technologies were unremarkable to the early press reception of Excelsior in Italy; rather journalists relayed the performance’s spectacular kaleidoscopic effects (Williams 2019). However, beyond Milan, commentators on the work explicitly identified racialized and imperialist frameworks: for example, the Parisian press was quick to situate Manzotti’s tableau of the Suez Canal within present-day political and economic challenges in Egypt.

In this paper, I analyze a collection of Parisian caricatures to highlight how race and colonialism inflected Excelsior’s positivist spectacle (Fanon 1952, Said 1979). These caricatures of the newly -opened Eden-Théâtre’s 1883 production piquantly present political critiques when read against the libretto, reviews, and contemporary French foreign policy. Several recent studies have highlighted the transformation of Excelsior’s message in different political and theatrical environments (Prokopovych 2008, Otto 2023, Ujvári 2024). Building on these, my transnational investigation (Körner and Kühl 2022) highlights not only the politicized Parisian perspective, but the absence of thinking about race and colonial power in Italian reception. Two Italian productions are brought in as foils to that of Paris; the Milanese premiere of 1881 at the Teatro alla Scala, and an 1899 Venetian performance at the Teatro la Fenice, which provoked its own set of newspaper caricatures lamenting the city’s failure to sufficiently modernize. In so doing, it confronts the often-overlooked racial valences in the culture of Liberal Italy (Re 2010, Welch 2016). This paper advances scholarship on the intersection of nineteenth-century dance, technology, and print culture (McCarren 2020, Järvinen 2020, Rowden 2020), and presents a re-contextualization of Excelsior's reception history through the juxtaposition of seemingly disparate political and theatrical milieus.

Around 1930, interest in Christopher Columbus surged in Central Europe. Alongside new biographies and a revitalised campaign to make Columbus a saint, a series of operas about Columbus premiered across Austria, Germany, and Czechoslovakia. In this paper, I argue that after the tumultuous 1920s, German and Austrian musicians reimagined Columbus’s voyages as both the highpoint and the beginning of the end of a late-medieval order that embodied unity and stability. Specifically, Columbus highlighted the paradoxical legacy of colonialism: On one hand, the Spanish Empire in the New World aligned with longing for the lost German and Austro-Hungarian empires, growing authoritarianism, and a growing Catholic internationalist movement. On the other, the so-called ‘discovery’ of the New World was also understood to have catalysed scientific advances, the Reformation, and by extension, European nationalism, laying the foundations of the unstable modern world. This mirrored ideas about the promise and threat of modern cultural products, like jazz, coming to Europe from the Americas.

I examine two operas, both with librettos by their composers. The first is Werner Egk’s 1933 radio opera, Columbus. Egk's portrayal emphasises Columbus’s voyages as a triumph of modern science over European and Indigenous American superstition, but is ultimately ambivalent about Columbus’s colonial legacy, drawing on elements of not only Communist anti-colonialism but also proto-fascist celebration of Columbus and Queen Isabella as visionary leaders. The music cites Spanish and Indigenous American music to portray the colonial conflict, but more importantly, Egk’s integration of jazz elements into his modernist musical language expresses the need to ‘conquer’ foreign elements. The second is Ernst Krenek’s 1933 opera Karl V about the eponymous Holy Roman Emperor whose reign represented the pinnacle of the global Catholic universalist ideal. Krenek examines how Karl V wrestled with the after-effects of Columbus’s voyages alongside the growing challenge of the Reformation. Krenek adopts the twelve-tone technique as a metaphorical representation of religious unity, but also to advocate a modern update of the medieval social order through the fascist socio-economic model of corporatism and the new role it creates for the artist in society.