Opera, painting and society in 19th-Century Bahia: the Barbosa de Araujo case study

Abstract

Until the beginning of the 20th-century in Brazilian musical history, the theatre (or in a more general sense, the stage) has been considered the proper place to publicly represent the hierarchical social structure and to teach people ways to deal with it. The three main socially established “stages” in 19th-century Bahia were the church, the theatre and the plazas (largo). The Bahian composer Damião Barbosa de Araújo (Itaparica, 1778–Salvador, 1856), the first non-ecclesiastical chapel-master (mestre-de-capela) of the Bahia Cathedral and the most important musician invited by the Regent Prince D. João (during his one-month stop in Bahia on his runaway from Lisbon to Rio the Janeiro) to be a part of his new Royal Chapel, is best-known for his religious music, although he also wrote arias and overtures, and, according to Manoel Querino (1907), one single “opera” called A intriga amorosa (The amorous intrigue) supposedly composed in 1808. The only known portrait of Damião Barbosa de Araújo, an oil painting, is currently lost; however, a facsimile reproduction is provided in Querino’s work, with no ascription of authorship. This paper focuses on the authorship, time and pre-compositional models of the painting (and the painter’s inspirational resources), as well as on the aforementioned “opera”, all of which are viewed as forms of publicly displaying Barbosa de Araujo’s relevance within that social hierarchy.