In Search of the National: Nineteenth-Century Portuguese Composers and their First Approaches to Grand Opera

In the 1860’s, Portuguese composers Francisco de Sá Noronha and Miguel Ângelo Pereira chose works of the Romantic writers Almeida Garrett and Alexandre Herculano as the basis for their national operas. Their novels recreate key moments of Portuguese or Peninsular history, extolling values and dramatizing issues such as freedom, nationality, anticlericalism or exoticism. This article proposes a reading of the reception of grand opéra in Portugal based on O arco de Sant’Ana by Noronha (1867) and Eurico by Pereira (1870, revised 1874). In O arco, the points of contact with grand opéra result largely from the situations provided by the novel. Eurico, in turn, constitutes the moment when a Portuguese composer intentionally looked to grand opéra, and reveals a special attention to local colour and the use of recurring motifs.