L’africaine’s Savage Pleasures: Operatic Listening and the Portuguese Historical Imagination

Abstract

Giacomo Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine was premiered in Lisbon in 1869, and remained part of the S. Carlos repertory until the 1890s. The work had a lasting and varied impact in the city's cultural and intellectual life. In the 1870s, it prompted a critical reinterpretation of the nation's foremost literary symbol, Luís de Camões’ Os Lusíadas (1572). In the 1880s, it served as a building block in Eça de Queirós’ literary invention and imaginative critique of bourgeois decadence in the celebrated novel Os Maias (1888). Finally, in 1896 L'Africaine was staged for the official celebration of Portuguese military victories in Mozambique and became a notorious instance of fin de siècle colonialist propaganda. For nearly thirty years, Lisbon listeners channeled operatic pleasure into cultural discourse, bringing their aesthetic experience to bear on different modes of self-imagining. The present essay investigates this transference from the operatic to the realm of the literary, the cultural and the political.