‘Domitila’, love and abandonment at the birth of Brazil | Culture

Domitila It is a reading of the correspondence between two lovers. An asymmetrical reading, since the letters of Domitila de Castro Santo, Marchioness of Santos, to the Emperor Pedro I disappeared or were destroyed after her death; not the reverse, the letters that the Marchioness received and jealously guarded. This reading is carried out by the soprano who gives life to Domitila; it is, therefore, a reading in a single voice that has its origin in a publication of 1896 from which its composer, João Guilherme Ripper (1959), started.

The monodrama premiered in 2000 in Rio de Janeiro as a commission for the celebrations of the fifth centenary of the Discovery and has been, according to its author, perhaps the most performed of a production of eight operas, highlighting the performance that took place in Lisbon in 2022, on the occasion of the bicentennial of the independence of Brazil and which allowed the author to fully orchestrate the score. Its presence at the March Foundation is its premiere in Spain.

One of the notable aspects of this Domitila It is that of having succeeded in reducing the birth of a nation to a powerful metaphor, that enormous Brazil that so many courtiers feared would be born in pieces, as happened with a large part of Central America, and which forced the separation of the pair of lovers who give life to this story, the emperor and the marchioness. The merit of this production is greater for telling the story from a drastic reduction of artistic means, a singer and three instrumentalists, piano, clarinet and cello.

If this short-format opera, or monodrama, is excellent, it is due to a rare alchemy: that of suggesting a characteristically Brazilian trait, the loving passion between a king perhaps ill-suited to lead the independence of his country and a lover who, for seven years, would deal with the delicate condition of adulteress, the “other.” In short: passion in its purest form. It is not difficult to perceive that it is a much more suggestive story than the usual love affairs between kings and favorites of any place; it is almost part of the history of Brazil, a nation devoted to mixing and, to a certain extent, to the eros that fuses everything.

It is also a very pleasant surprise to find an excellent composer little known in our country. The music of Domitila It is based on a very attractive stylistic eclecticism, local popular airs go hand in hand with fragments of the European classical tradition, without turning up their noses at specific moments of certain experimentation. But the merit is not only in the ingredients, there is a very successful dramatic handling that leads the narrative until reaching a tense ending, the farewell of Domitila who obeys the emperor’s order to leave Rio de Janeiro to facilitate his new wedding with Amelia de Leuchtenberg, of royal blood.

The production presented at the March Foundation has another of its strong points in a powerful staging by Nicola Beller Carbone, who proposes a space surrounded by ropes that seem to symbolize both the complex relationships surrounding the couple and their own cage. Carbone plays very well with the musicians, excellent in their double role as instrumentalists and occasional actors, who dynamize the movements and the stage changes.

But the essential point of the production is the masterful performance of the Portuguese soprano Ana Quintans, who takes over the scene and gives a vibrant Domitila, theatrically versatile and extremely convincing vocally. Quintans has a magnificent vocal body, but she knows how to modulate it from veristic colors to smooth moments linked to an expert, like Quintans, in early music. A complete success for this soprano who still received enough applause to recognize the good work of the pianist and musical director Borja Mariño, the clarinetist Irene Martínez Navarro and the cellist Esteban Jiménez.