“Moreirismo in scena: popular criollismo and the argentine operatic world torwards the end of the 19th century”

Abstract

In this essay we’re going to analyze a musical work that emerged in a production context marked by the modernizing leap (Ludmer, 1999) at the end of the 19^th century: Pampa, by Arturo Beruti. Our hypothesis will state that this opera sought to insert itself into a series of cultural texts that took up “popular criollismo” (Prieto, 2006; Adamovsky, 2019), which had as their center the figure of Juan Moreira, the central character from the novel by Eduardo Gutiérrez. This work functioned as the beginning of a chain of representations of the criollo hero, which would come to the stage both in the circus and the theater as well as in the opera, the latter being a space of modern, liberal and European culture (Prieto, 2006). At a historical moment in which the elites revalued the criollo world, this opera decides to revolve around a character like Moreira’s, taking all his romantic potential. For this reason, we’re going to find ourselves in front of a cultural product that, forming part of a genre typical of high culture, will borrow elements from a characteristic work of popular culture, so that, in this sense, it is possible to identify a relationship of permeability.