The study of singers' careers and voices in connection with the music that was written specifically for them, hardly more than a promising field three decades ago, is now a well-established area of musicological research. As John Rice summarized it in his influential article ‘Mozart and His Singers: The Case of Maria Marchetti Fantozzi, the First Vitellia’ (Opera Quarterly 11/4 (1995), 31–52), this approach is concerned with what the scores can tell us about the singers and how our knowledge of their lives and voices can help us better understand that music. After the appearance in 1974 of two pioneering studies of the singer Anton Raaff (1714–1797) by Daniel Heartz (‘Raaff's Last Aria: A Mozartian Idyll in the Spirit of Hasse’, Musical Quarterly 60/4 (1974), 517–543) and Pierluigi Petrobelli (‘The Italian Years of Anton Raaff’, Mozart-Jahrbuch 1973–1974, 233–273), it was only in the early 1990s that the field really started to take shape, with a rapid sequence of publications by Patricia Lewy Gidwitz, Thomas Bauman, Alessandra Campana and Federico Pirani – students and associates of Heartz and Petrobelli – followed by articles and editions by John Rice, Paul Corneilson and Dorothea Link. Of course throughout these years Philip Gossett was engaged in similar research, but in the context of the nineteenth century.
As Rice has pointed out, for many decades historical musicology has avoided the issue of how singers influenced composers, often regarding them more as irritants than collaborators in the compositional process. Furthermore, since this type of research emphasizes the role of singers, it suffers even more than other areas of musicology from the lack of biographical information and the scarcity of original scores, not to mention annotated ones. Even so, Rice was able to follow the career of Maria Marchetti Fantozzi through the roles she performed and the music that was dedicated to her, not only showing how her singing qualities defined some similar choices in the music of Tritto, Cherubini, Robuschi, Zingarelli and Mozart, but also helping to confirm some hypotheses on the conditions and the order in which Mozart composed La Clemenza di Tito.
The logical next step would be to use that approach to outline the vocal practices, techniques and – why not? – limitations of singers during an entire historical period. In his Castratos and Other Virtuosos: Vocal Practices in Rio de Janeiro and the Influence of the Court of Dom João VI Alberto Vieira Pacheco has faced exactly that challenge, basing his study of vocal music in Rio de Janeiro on the period from 1808 to 1822, in which the Portuguese court was established in Brazil, and from there ruled an empire spanning four continents. This transference, virtually turning colony into metropolis, was one of the unintended consequences of the Napoleonic wars. During these years Rio de Janeiro experienced an unprecedented influx of hundreds of singers, instrumentalists and composers from several European nations. If those musicians had to adapt to a remarkably different environment, their effect on local music was even more significant.
The main goal of the book is to show how performers are often a defining factor in the creation of a musical repertory – more specifically, in the stylistic change that took place in the music written by José Maurício Nunes Garcia and Marcos Portugal in Rio de Janeiro after 1808. Musicologists have acknowledged the transformative nature of this period ever since the beginnings of their discipline in Brazil, but this is the first time this phenomenon has been extensively and systematically analysed. Likewise, the method is by no means new, but it is indeed original when it comes to studies in colonial Brazilian music. In addition, an important difference between Pacheco and his North American and Italian predecessors is that, with very few exceptions, Pacheco deals with sacred music, traditionally regarded as less subjective than opera, and not as much connected with the careers of individual singers.
The first two chapters set the stage by describing the state of music in Portugal and Brazil around 1808. Chapter 1 focuses mostly on Italian influence, and in particular the role of Italian castratos in both the Royal Seminary and the operatic establishment in eighteenth-century Portugal. It is complemented by an assessment of the vocal-based model of music education then pervasive in Portugal. This ‘Portuguese Musical Panorama’ is followed in chapter 2 by a ‘Carioca Musical Panorama’ (carioca is the adjective meaning ‘native to Rio de Janeiro’) and different criteria permeate the narrative, now dealing with the urban transformation of Rio de Janeiro after the arrival of the Portuguese court, followed by thoughts on royal patronage of music and anecdotal information on music education and the São João theatre. The book would have gained in accuracy and depth had it incorporated recent research on music and society, music education and music theory in colonial Brazil, but so many issues have already been covered in these two chapters that there would hardly have been any space for further development. Nevertheless, removing some outdated pieces of information, such as the often cited yet never confirmed assertions about the hypothetical opera Le due gemelle by Nunes Garcia, would have helped.
What follows is the most interesting part of the book. After a short introduction chapter 3 takes on a succession of short biographies of singers who were active in Rio during this period. Pacheco has compiled a large amount of information, some of which is entirely new, and most of it used here for the first time in this type of research. Whenever possible the author draws his conclusions about the vocal qualities of specific singers from the analysis of music that was dedicated to them. Although he uses quantitative methods to establish the optimal range of each singer, most of his analyses focus on recurrent ornaments, turns of phrase, sustained notes and rhythmic-melodic shapes.
Among the sixty-four biographies, some are remarkable for the sheer amount of information they contain. The entries on the Italian singers Antonio Cicconi and Giuseppe Fasciotti, the Portuguese Antonio Pedro Gonçalves and the Brazilians João dos Reis Pereira and Joaquina Lapinha are also notable for the carefully chosen music examples, drawn from a large number of works dedicated to them by Marcos Portugal and José Maurício Nunes Garcia. Pacheco was able to determine some fundamental differences between the voices of castratos Cicconi and Fasciotti, both referred to as sopranos in contemporary records. The music dedicated to both Italians is demanding, featuring melismas, trills, short appoggiaturas and several opportunities for improvised cadenzas. However, Fasciotti seems to have operated better in the mezzo-soprano range, with a favourable chest register and a very good messa di voce, while Cicconi's optimal range was a third higher, with a head voice that was characteristically explored in high-pitched staccato passages. João dos Reis Pereira, arguably the most important Brazilian singer during the colonial period, had an incredibly versatile voice ranging from F to f1, or from bass to high baritone. That range is consistently explored in the works that Garcia and Portugal dedicated to him, to which the former added the notes g1 and a1 with the indication ‘falsetto’ in his 1826 Missa de Santa Cecilia. Since these two pitches do not appear in the bass line of Garcia's previous compositions – with or without falsetto – Pacheco conjectures that, rather than showing a decline in Pereira's technique, this trait reveals both Garcia's knowledge of his friend's vocal resources and his own compositional sophistication, by using the falsetto as a rhetorical device on the word ‘Altissimus’.
If ever a second edition is planned, the author might want to check what Lauro Ayestarán had to say back in 1953 about Pablo Rosquellas, Michele Vaccani and Giustina Piacentini, and the fate of the Tanni Company after its departure from Rio de Janeiro in his La música en el Uruguay (Montevideo: Sodre, 1953). More substantial information on the tenor, violinist and composer Gabriel Fernandes da Trindade is to be found in Paulo Castagna's 1996 paper ‘Gabriel Fernandes da Trindade: os duetos concertantes’, in Anais do II encontro de musicologia histórica, Juiz de Fora, 26 jul. 1996 (Juiz de Fora: Centro Cultural Pró-Música, 1997), 64–111, including a thematic index of his compositions, and in the updated biography by Marcelo Hazan (‘Gabriel Fernandes da Trindade: Vida e morte de um músico mineiro no Rio de Janeiro’, Revista Brasileira de Música 22 (2002), 25–39).
In chapter 4 Pacheco identifies traits and patterns that could help him define a collective style of singing in early nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro. He combines some of the findings of the previous chapter with the information contained in treatises that were available in Rio during that period. Given the fragmentary state of musical scores, especially of dramatic music, and the complexity of working with schools of singing and evaluating which treatises were used by whom, this chapter leaves some questions open for further inquiry. One question that remains intriguing is the degree to which falsetto singing was used, and in what contexts; furthermore, the author could helpfully have clarified some contradictory remarks on the issue of vocal styles and techniques that were associated with the Luso-Brazilian art song of the period. Chapter 5 brings a convincing comparison of Nunes Garcia's compositions written before the arrival of the Portuguese court with those written afterwards. Carefully chosen music examples illustrate the move to more challenging and prolix vocal writing, determined by the demands of newly arrived singers and the dramatically improved political status of his hometown.
Whether this stylistic change endured is beyond the scope of the book. As a matter of fact the migration of European musicians to Rio occurred at a time when the style of music associated with the rituals of the Portuguese court was passing out of fashion even in Portugal, where some composers, notably João Domingos Bomtempo, were already attuned to a different musical aesthetic, strongly influenced by recent French developments. In that light, those artists brought to Rio a movement that was stylistically backward, no matter how high their vocal standards were.
The underdeveloped last chapter works more as an appendix, as it lacks strong connections with the rest of the book. Even so, it does bring some useful and reasonable suggestions on the pronunciation of the language spoken in early nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro. Yet the performer should be reminded that these do not represent the ‘Brazilian’ Portuguese of that period, as the chapter implies, but only a regional variant. As happens all too often in the world of academic publishing in Brazil, the book suffers from less than perfect editing, which is evident in the misspellings and low-definition music examples and images. The editor opted to structure the book as a dissertation, with an endless succession of hierarchically numbered topics and subtopics, most of the time preventing a fluent reading. The bibliography is divided into sixteen categories arranged in alphabetical order, transforming any search into an excruciating operation.
In all, this resourceful book illustrates a recent trend to infuse historical musicology with empirical data, and the author surely does that in a persuasive way. Pacheco's research is invaluable, as it is able systematically to confirm, clarify or challenge a great deal of fragmentary and vague information on singing practices in Rio de Janeiro during the first three decades of the nineteenth century. A CD ROM with additional research material accompanies the book.
