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 For the record, the Brazilian operatic event of the year - the Teatro Amazonas' presentation in May 2005 of the complete Ring cycle by Wagner, which went on to become the near "miracle" in Manaus - could only have come off through the continuous effort and support of the local Amazonas State government.
With the administration's solid commitment to, and backing of, the entire classical enterprise (no doubt, a ghostly echo of opera days gone-by), scores of crazed Wagnerites from dozens of foreign lands, including Argentina, Australia, England, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, South Africa, and North America, as well as host nation Brazil, faced the long trek and arduous travel conditions - hand-in-hand with the twin discomforts of torrential rains and tropical heat and humidity - to hear the Ring operas performed in sequence by a proportionately international ensemble. The orchestra, known collectively as the Amazonas Philharmonic, was comprised mainly of musicians from Eastern Europe (Russia, Bulgaria and Belarus) and from native-Brazilian forces living overseas. By all reports, it exceeded every expectation and played at the highest possible plane demanded of Wagner's exacting scores. This elevated level of competence, however, was bought at a stiff price, and illustrates both what was right and what was wrong with musical education in Brazil today. In a sobering June 2004 article, "A Brazil Out of Tune," published by the SESC (Serviço Social do Comércio - Social Service of Commerce) organization, journalist Flávio Carrança examined the myriad challenges facing the performing arts there since the 1996 adoption of the revised Lei de Diretrizes e Bases da Educação Nacional (LDB, or Basic Educational Law), which, prior to that time, had already folded the teaching of music into overall artistic education, i.e. dance, theater, drama, and the visual arts. What this did for the pedagogical system was to place the responsibility for musical education squarely on the shoulders of teachers, "who may not have had specific training in music - an unfortunate reality of public education," claimed Mr. Carrança. The problem became a major concern for Brazilian maestro John Neschling, who, during the time of his 1997 reorganization of the Orquestra Sinfônica de São Paulo (Osesp), was hard-pressed to concede, "We have never had a tradition of musical education in Brazil, nor a solid school, particularly for strings. We were always limited to a few good teachers - many of them immigrants - who trained individual talents." Neschling further revealed that, "Instruction in music is not limited to learning the instrument, but includes an entire musical culture which must be transmitted and stimulated." This is precisely what was done with the Amazonas group back in 1977, when conductor Júlio Medaglia was still overseeing it. He was forced at that time into recruiting new members from abroad - coincidentally, from Eastern Europe, where, as luck would have it, Brazilian players were firmly entrenched. Medaglia was one of the first native musicians to have given credibility to the phenomenon he labeled the "multiplier effect," whereas, in exchange for services rendered foreign players would take promising local youngsters under their wing and, over the course of time, these same youngsters would themselves become teachers, thus multiplying the quality and number of musicians obtainable to scouting Brazilian symphonies. "You can see kids from the outskirts studying with musicians who were trained in St. Petersburg, which produces the best string players in the world," the conductor acknowledged. "Each one of the Russians who came here has about 20 students by now." Other deficiencies worth noting include the "lack of a good structure for musical instruction," viable graduate and post-graduate training, and (surprisingly) "not enough schools of music at the introductory level," at least according to Cláudio Cruz, Osesp's first violinist, and a noted symphony conductor (the Sinfônica de Ribeirão Preto, in São Paulo) on the side. "We are not able to fill orchestras with 90 percent Brazilian musicians," he lamented, "because when they finish undergraduate school, they are not ready." As distressing as this bit of news may have sounded, the multiplier effect has had some lasting benefits, most noticeably with young Elismael Lourenço dos Santos, a 20-year-old clarinetist from Northern Brazil, in the pit for the Ring premiere in Manaus and a recent graduate of its lauded training program. His personal testimonial represents the optimistic icing on the orchestral cake for the future of these types of learning ventures: "If it weren't for the government's program, there is no way I could have gotten this far, because my family is not rich and could never have afforded private instruction for me. "To have this opportunity to play not just Wagner but the Ring cycle is a real honor and a dream, one that is still a bit hard to believe." The Operatic "Gold" Standard It must have been hard, too, for the dwarf Alberich to give up his most prized possession, but at the end of four long nights of Teutonic music drama even the Nibelung's potent ring had found its fateful way back to the bottom of the Rhine. Perhaps, in this instance, the still-mighty Amazon River could serve as a modern Brazilian equivalent to Wagner's allegorical German stream and provide some form of symbolic restitution: for the real "gold" that was missing from the once-decrepit national opera may finally have been returned to its rightful owners, i.e. those talented and lucky souls hungry enough to have pursued their operatic dreams to their ultimate fulfillment. And who might these souls be? That's an excellent question. We might also wish to inquire about another, more fundamental issue at hand: what is the real future of opera in Brazil today? Along with the opera goes the health and well-being of classical music and high culture, in general, with (ultimately) the preservation and dissemination of their musical heritage as a possible, and doable, long-term goal as well. These are serious matters that have been probed about and poked at once before, but until now no real response has been forthcoming. We shall, however, deal with the first problem, namely that of potential rising stars on the Brazilian operatic horizon. Fortunately for us, there appears to be a modest surplus of skilled stage performers ready and able to take up the calling - a minor miracle in itself - with most of them strategically placed to take advantage of their pending international status. A few of them are already known quantities to Brazilian opera-goers: soprano Cláudia Riccitelli, mezzo-soprano Céline Imbert, tenor Fernando Portari, baritone Paulo Szot, bass-baritone Lício Bruno, bass Luiz Ottávio Faria, and conductor Roberto Minczuk. But the most promising (and unusual) find of them all, a 35-year-old male singer with the rather disarming name of Marconi Araújo, is a rare countertenor commodity indeed - a sensational operatic novelty, who hails from the Northeastern city of Olinda. Previously trained, at an early age, as a conductor and musical-choral director in his hometown, the University of Wyoming master's degree candidate was a surprise, first-place finisher in the prestigious Sixth Annual Bidu Sayão International Vocal Competition, held at the famed Teatro da Paz Opera House in Belém do Pará, in the spring of 2005. It was the first time a native singer of his extraordinary vocal abilities had ever been awarded such a fabulous prize inside Brazil - and in a voice category not especially well regarded there, to boot. Not only was the reward recognition long overdue, but was exceptionally hard-fought for the talented young artist every step of the way. "In Brazil, there is a negative pre-conception of countertenors," Marconi explained. "Many people believe it is not a real voice and it's difficult to find a teacher who will accept you. More than anything, I would like to change the operatic environment in my home country so other countertenors can have careers there." The very genuine, and unstated, difficulty present - insomuch as it might pain some heterosexual alpha males there to hear it - could be the rather lame and reprehensible notion in the country that real men should not be singing in such a "high-lying" vocal manner, which is contrary to the musical evidence put forth by such long-established stage-pros as Ney Matogrosso and Milton Nascimento, to whom falsetto and head-tone are a matter of course. Still, a universally respected (and acceptable) operatic role model, along the dignified lines of the celebrated David Daniels-variety, may do much to alter this prejudicial perception, as Marconi seems to feel it would. "I am hoping that this will help other countertenors succeed in Brazil," he confided. "This victory is changing the lyrical environment of our country. Maybe it will open the door to a new revolution." Carlos Gomes Reborn! This brings us to the next problem of documenting Brazil's cultural heritage, and, more significantly, the benefits to be reaped in rediscovering her glorious musical past. After several generations of derision and disregard, composer Carlos Gomes has belatedly bounced back from the edge of operatic oblivion and been thrust, once again, onto the center-stage. To what do we owe this renewed popularity and rebirth? Basically, to the path-breaking efforts of Fundação Nacional de Arte (known in Brazil as Funarte), a federal non-profit arts organization entrusted with, among other things, the methodical compiling, researching, filming and recording of the entire Gomes canon of procurable works. "Musically, he is wonderfully majestic and he is important for us," asserted Flávio Silva, Funarte's coordinator of music. "He is the first Brazilian composer who really made an international career for himself." A principal driving force behind the above endeavor, conductor and artistic director of the Amazonas Opera Festival, Luiz Fernando Malheiro, enthusiastically agreed: "Gomes...truly deserves to be revisited. He is very characteristic of the transition in Italian opera that was taking place before the turn of the century." This was quite a comeback for a composer previously left out of the musical loop, so to speak, by the Modernist movement's winds of change way back in the halcyon days of the 1930s during Brazil's nationalistic period - and by no less a musical authority than the country's own resident field expert at the time, Heitor Villa-Lobos. As a practical result of this unprecedented reevaluation, Funarte has been the favored recipient of a generous government grant - totaling roughly 450,000 reais or, at the current exchange rate, about US$ 220,000 - to recover and bring to light many of the Campineiro's previously lost or misplaced manuscripts, most indelibly his four-act 1863 opera Joana de Flandres, originally thought to have been destroyed in a theater fire in Rio a few years after it premiered, but found recently in the archives of the city's Museu Histórico Nacional (National Historic Museum). The phenomenal Gomes mini-resurgence has straightaway been felt across both cultural and geographic borders with the compact-disc debut, late last year (on the Dynamic label), of a live July 2004 performance of the complete Salvator Rosa, comprised mostly of non-Brazilians, and staged in the Italian city of Martina Franco. Starring the renowned Venetian basso, Francesco Ellero d'Artegna - himself a past winner of the Luciano Pavarotti International Voice Competition in Philadelphia - it featured the combined forces of the Bratislava Chamber Chorus and Orchestra Internazionale d'Italia, under the watchful eye of maestro Maurizio Benini. Politics, the Kiss of Death: A Rio-life Study So, with major international revivals by a once-neglected Brazilian master, and numerous new releases of his most outstanding creative works, along with an enthusiastic assemblage of young, native-born artists eager to sing, play and breath new life into many of them, can the Brazilian national opera now take a solid enough stand in the performing-arts world and lay claim to have finally arrived at a more positive (and productive) cultural impasse? Not if we know anything about her past political maneuverings, it won't. As a twice-wounded, twice-shy victim of Rio and São Paulo's Machiavellian posturing, the once-battered Brazilian maestro, John Neschling, was obliged to sound off, in a 2001 newspaper interview, that, "The entity that needs to provide the culture so sorely lacking (in Rio) has to be the state. Similarly, she will only have a truly great orchestra when her state and local governments convince themselves that a symphony is absolutely necessary for tourism, and for a city of the First World" - an optimistic viewpoint, at best. But the ever-present, double-edged sword that the ruthless game of politics has lately turned into has had an astonishingly negative impact on even the most respectable of arts institutions, in spite of the maestro's utopian ideals. Let us briefly consider, then, the following case study of the recent disharmony prevalent at the regally elegant edifice known as the Municipal Theater of Rio. Conductor Luiz Fernando Malheiro, who still runs the Teatro Amazonas in Manaus, had a brief but tension-filled tenure as music director of Rio de Janeiro's famed Beaux-Arts opera house, where he ran into a veritable stonewall of nonconformity due to a change in the theater's administration, sometime around April 2002, that swept into office both a leftist state governor, Workers' Party candidate Benedita da Silva, and a new boss of the opera board, Antonio Carlos Grassi - strictly a political appointment, according to Amy Radil, a radio and print journalist based in Brazil. With these shifts in artistic focus came the usual spurious rounds of accusations and reforms, including (but not limited to) budget cuts, cast substitutions, and threats of season cancellations, as well as endless and protracted grumbling about performers' exorbitant fees. "We'll never get beyond artistic mediocrity in our theaters," a frustrated Malheiro protested to Jornal do Brasil, "as long as they're subject to these abrupt changes." Responding to the charge, board president Grassi, who also happened to be the state culture secretary (and a former television, stage and screen actor), confidently declared that the "debate is political and ideological. I think the theater has to exist within the cultural context of the state," inadvertently quoting the now-portentous Neschling's favorite line; besides which, in Grassi's opinion, "The last government left an enormous debt. There was no money for the original program, which was ambitious, but very expensive." "We live in a country in which crises return from time to time," a member of the opera's orchestra was heard to complain, "and the arts are always the first ones to feel it." "It's ridiculous to make these changes for six months," carped another. "Then we have to wait for the elections and see who wins...to find out who the new masters of the theater will be." These overly-dramatic developments in Rio had all the customary earmarks of one of those sordid television soap operas Brazilian audiences are so egregiously addicted to - it was quite a remarkable coincidence. Upset at the way all parties mishandled this rather unseemly affair, particularly in the press, Malheiro upped and quit his post - so much for freedom of expression. The sudden showdown between the city's political and theatrical heavyweights had thrown Neschling's wishful cultural commentary into temporary disrepute. Who, then, should the ultimate purveyor of high culture in Brazil be: the city, the state, or the local opera board? Given the conflicting viewpoints this extremely volatile topic seemed to frequently inspire, there has yet to be proffered a single set of proposals, or a reasonably attractive solution to the mess, going forward. Meanwhile, back at the opera, Malheiro's brave new successor, conductor Silvio Barbato, summed up his own feelings regarding the distasteful situation there, dismissing the misunderstandings as "merely a clash of egos." Moreover, Barbato went out of his way to praise the "socially conscious imperatives of the current government," overlooking the glaring fact that it's the state that "still pays the lion's share of the (Municipal's) budget," to which his own future employment remained beholden to. With state and local governments providing the bulk of the funds to ensure their survival in the modern musical world, both the Teatro Municipal and Teatro Amazonas could breath a collective sigh of relief, as they will continue to be allowed to "prosper," artistically and culturally, as it were - with prosperity the relative term here, denoting a form of financial "stability" most foreign companies would be tickled pink to receive - as long as those self-same governments maintained their own financial stability (by any means, a tall order, as originally conceived). Bailing out Brazilian opera houses, however, is not the answer. But like everything else in the country even remotely related to its culture - soccer, Carnaval, samba, and the cinema - just keeping the political boat afloat is often all that's required...for now, anyway. As a final addendum to this convoluted storyline, about a year later, in early 2003, the Federal Ministry of Culture, headed-up by recently appointed pop-star Gilberto Gil, chose Antonio Carlos Grassi to become the next president of Fundação Nacional de Arte, or Funarte. According to that organization's farsighted mission statement, it was charged with the lofty task of "promoting, stimulating and supporting, throughout all the nation and abroad, the practice of developing and disseminating artistic and cultural activities, in the (primary) areas of theater, dance, opera, the plastic and graphic arts, photography, and popular and classical music," in addition to "documenting and informing, as well as providing the research into, these same areas...with a view towards the preservation of the country's cultural memory." With respect to the organization's actual budget, "the financial resources for Funarte will originate with the National Treasury, and are approved by the (Brazilian) Congress; (funds) are also provided for by the official Brazilian institutions, to include foreign or private investments..." This should be most reassuring to Mr. Grassi, after what he and maestro Malheiro went through at the Municipal. Perhaps one day he can meet up with the fiery conductor and share a laugh or two, over strong cups of black coffee; together, they can even try to let past bygones be bygones - unless, of course, the maestro's "cultural memory" has itself been all-too-well preserved. A naturalized American citizen born in Brazil, Joe Lopes was raised and educated in New York City, where he worked for many years in the financial sector. In 1996, he moved to Brazil with his wife and daughters. In 2001, he returned to the U.S. and now resides in North Carolina with his family. He is a lover of all types of music, especially opera and jazz, as well as an incurable fan of classic and contemporary films. You can email your comments to JosmarLopes@msn.com. Copyright © 2006 by Josmar F. Lopes
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