Contemporary Opera in Buenos Aires at the Turn of the Century

Authors

  • Violeta Nigro Giunta Centre de Recherches sur les Arts et le Langage-École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales

Keywords:

Contemporary Opera, Argentine Music, Music and Dictatorship, Music and Stage

Abstract

Between the 1990s and the present day, Buenos Aires became a city of high visibility for contemporary opera. On the one hand, through local staging of international operas, and on the other, through the commission and production of new works by Argentine composers. In this text we will consider, first of all, the overall “state of things” in the field of the opera in the second half of the twentieth century, to point out then some specificities of the genre in the city of Buenos Aires. Secondly, we will look at the first productions of international operas in the local context to see how these productions were adapted to the local milieu and what was their critical reception. We will especially consider the role of these works in rejuvenating and consolidating new audiences for contemporary music. Finally, we propose a comparative study of three operas whose librettos deal with historical and affective problems of the Chilean and Argentine dictatorships of the 1970s, to assess how different authors address the complex relationship between political violence, memory and musical forms, with the purpose of making visible the critical place that a genre like opera can have in the 21st century.

Author Biography

Violeta Nigro Giunta, Centre de Recherches sur les Arts et le Langage-École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales

Violeta Nigro Giunta es doctoranda del Centre de Recherches sur les Arts et le Langage-École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (CRAL-EHESS) de París, bajo la dirección de Esteban Buch. Su tesis estudia la escena musical de vanguardia en Buenos Aires desde 1983 hasta 2012. Ha presentado su investigación en conferencias de la Latin American Studies Association (LASA), la Asociación Regional de la International Musicological Society para América Latina y el Caribe (ARLAC-IMS) y el International Committee of Historical Sciences (ICHS). Co-organizó las conferencias Teatro Instrumental: Música y el Escenario en América Latina, 1954-2006 (Buenos Aires, 2018) y Sound and Music through the Prism of Sound Studies (París, 2019), entre otros eventos científicos. Ha publicado artículos en las revistas Critique y Marges y es autora de los capítulos “Juan Carlos Paz et son ‘action insecticide’ dans les journaux Crítica (1933) et Reconquista (1939)” (PUR, 2019), “¿Apropiarse de Europa con una tilde? La revista Lulú y las discusiones sobre identidad en la música en América Latina” (SEDEM, 2018) y “Defining Audible Democracy. New Music in Post-Dictatorship Argentina” (Ashgate, en prensa). Ha dictado cursos y seminarios en la EHESS y Sciences Po (París) y es codirectora de la revista Tranposition. Musique et Sciences Sociales.

Published

2020-03-17