The premiere of the first opera specifically commissioned for performance in the Americas was held in Peru on October 19, 1701. Tomas de TorrejtSn y Velasco, the director of music in Lima Cathedral, composed La purpura de la rosa (The blood of the rose) to honour the eighteenth birthday of Philip V of Spain and the first anniversary of his reign.1 The libretto, already regarded as a literary masterpiece in its own right, had been written in 1659 by the great poet and dramatist of the Spanish Golden Age, Pedro Calderttn de la Barca. Developing the story of Venus and Adonis from Ovid’s Metamorphoses 10.503-739, Calderttn had attributed the killing of Adonis by a wild boar to the machinations of the god Mars, who is jealous
Of Venus’ love for the mortal youth. A purple rose grows from the blood of the fatally wounded Adonis, and at the end of the drama Venus and Adonis are reunited in heaven by the personified figure of Love (Amor).
Calderdn’s libretto, with its numerous choral passages, was evidently suited to Torrejdn y Velasco: the proficiency of the Peruvian choristers who sang in Quechua, Latin, and Spanish had inspired other composers like Juan Perez Bocanegra and Juan de Araujo to hybridize European music with Andean as well as African influences. In transmitting a Greco-Roman myth to its viceregal audience, La purpura de la rosa thus involved not only Spain’s best-known poet and Peru’s leading composer, but very probably drew from the talents of indigenous singers and musicians as well. The production of this opera at the beginning of the eighteenth century may seem to provide impressive evidence of a classical tradition existing in at least one part of the vast area now known, however controversially, as ‘‘Latin America’’ (Pym 2000: 191; see also Bolanos and Verdesio 2002).
But is this evidence for a classical tradition in Peru so impressive? To what extent can Torrejon y Velasco’s endeavor really be considered American? The opera represents the tidy transplantation of European courtly culture and political values to the quintessentially colonial setting of the palace of Don Melchor Portocarro Lazo de la Vega, the Viceroy of Peru who commissioned it. And it is also important to heed a more general point: the occasional artistic adaptation of a Greek or Roman story, whether mythical or historical, should not necessarily be taken to indicate the existence of a ‘‘classical tradition’’ in any strong or meaningful sense. La piirpura de la rosa is more properly an example of ‘‘classical reception’ - and fairly indirect reception at that: it was the librettist Calderbn de la Barca and certainly not Ovid who provided the impetus for TorrejcSn y Velasco’s composition. Calderbn’s stature as a playwright in Spain and its dominions was roughly equivalent to that of Shakespeare in England, and we might compare popular responses to Venus and Adonis: for better or worse, that poem will always interest more people for being a text by Shakespeare than for the crucial influence of Ovid on its contents.
I have opened this discussion with the problematic example of La piirpura de la rosa because I suspect that its predominant constitution - of European myth, European poetry, and European music - exemplifies what many believe or imagine to be the character of the classical tradition in the Americas. It is assumed that Greco-Roman civilization is not an authentic element of Latin American culture, but a concern only for those artists or thinkers who hold some allegiance to the Old World or whose interests extend beyond the continent they inhabit.
What is more, much Latin American literature of the twentieth century would seem to support this incorrect assumption - or rather the cosmopolitan careers of the globetrotting authors themselves would seem to support it. For example, Elogio de la madrastra (Praise of the stepmother) by Mario Vargas Llosa, a Peruvian writer who has spent much of his life in France, specifically presents its erotic retelling of the Gyges story from Herodotus’ Histories as an ekphrasis of a Flemish painting, The Wife of Candaules, King of Lydia, by Jacob Jordaens. And while Gabriel Garcia Marquez in his 2002 memoir Vivirpara contarla (Living to tell the tale) acknowledges Sophocles as one of the two greatest influences on his writing in Colombia during the 1950s, the second author he names is William Faulkner, whom he read along with Hemingway, Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. The modernist poetry, essays, and fictions of Jorge Luis Borges are well known for their elegant incorporation of ideas and curiosities from classical antiquity, but the writer’s Argentine background probably had little to do with this aspect of his work: Borges attended the College Calvin in Geneva - where he added German, French, Latin, and Greek to his native Spanish and English - before moving to Italy and Spain in the 1920s. Again, the novelist Alejo Carpentier, who published widely on a number of Greek and Latin authors after his return to Cuba, had lived as an exile in Paris (Miranda Cancela 2003: 117-35). And Carlos Fuentes, who has incorporated Scipio’s conflict with Hannibal in Numantia in his 1993 novel El naranjo (The orange tree), was educated in the United States and Switzerland and served as Mexican ambassador to France.
But there have been many other individuals from earlier centuries, if not less well traveled then less well known outside Latin America, whose ideas and achievements were influenced directly by the legacy of Greece and Rome, to the extent that classical antiquity came to have a very conspicuous place in the continent’s history.
Two contrasting figures - both important protagonists in the political formation of their respective nations - merit specific discussion: the Byronic hero of Cuban independence, Jose Marti (1853-95), and the scholarly president of Colombia, Miguel Antonio Caro (1848-1909). Jose Marti began his prolific career as a poet and political essayist in the 1860s when he was still at school in Havana: his work for underground newspapers led to his exile to Spain at the age of only 17. Although he managed to return to Cuba on three occasions, Marti was compelled to spend most of his life abroad: he lived in Mexico and taught literature and philosophy at the University of Guatemala before eventually settling in New York, from which he campaigned relentlessly for his country’s independence. He died in combat after leading a brigade of revolutionaries from the US to Cuba in 1895. Martl’s legacy has been extraordinarily influential: one poem alone, Guantanamera, inspired the well-known popular song; his prose writing is much admired; his advocacy of a solidarity between the peoples of Hispanic America, the importance he attached to indigenous histories, and his opposition to racism and colonialism continue to inform progressive thinking (Marti 2002: 288-95). More recently, emphasis has also been laid on the importance of Hellenism or - to use the substantivized adjective Marti himself preferred, logriego (the [idea of what is] Greek) - for his revolutionary vision (Miranda Cancela 2003: 8).
In the 73 volumes of his collected writings, there are more than a thousand references to the Greco-Roman world. Jose Marti had a profound admiration for Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Hesiod, and especially Homer; he publicized Heinrich Schliemann’s excavations at Troy and Mycenae in the New York daily La America; and he made Spanish translations of some Anacreontic poems from the Greek Anthology. But, as the Cuban scholar Elina Miranda Cancela has also observed, it was neither scientific antiquarianism nor the Wildean aesthete’s search for beauty in a romanticized past that enthused Marti, but the potential of Greek culture to enhance understanding of the present and to shape the future (Miranda Cancela 2003: 29-45). Though he was not oblivious of ancient imperialism, Marti saw a clear parallel between the Greek struggle for freedom in his own time and the predicament of colonial Cuba. Jose Marti’s unselfconscious absorption of the classical tradition and his vision of its heroism are evident in a stanza from one of his best-known political poems, ‘‘Sueno con claustros de marmol’’:
I dream of marble cloisters where in silence divine the heroes, on foot, repose; at night, by the soul’s light,
I speak to them: at night!
They are in line, I pass between the lines: their hands of stone I kiss: there open eyes of stone: there move lips of stone: there shake beards of stone: they grasp the sword of stone: they weep: the sword vibrates in its case!
Mute, I kiss them on the hand.
(Marti 1891: poem 45, stanza 1, my trans.; see also Marti 2002: 282-5)
The circumstances, character, and aspirations of Miguel Antonio Caro could hardly be more different from those of Marti. Though Colombia continued to lack political stability, the country had secured independence from Spain in 1819, more than 20 years before Caro was born in Bogota. Caro attended a Jesuit school and became proficient in Latin: while he never had any formal higher education, the early interest he developed in language, philology, and literature endured for the rest of his life. His first volume of poetry came out in 1866, and, at the age of 18, he published a Latin grammar in collaboration with Rufino Jose Cuervo: Gramatica de la lengua latina (Bogota, 1867). A treatise on the use of the participle followed in 1870.
Caro began his public career by founding a conservative periodical, La tradiciona-lista, to attack the ideas of the radicales, liberal thinkers in Colombia who opposed interventionist government and who advocated federal republicanism and a separation of Church and State, along with secular education. In Caro’s view, their idealism was making the nation ungovernable: the federal system had devolved power to the dictatorial whims of autonomous territories, each of which had its own politics, exchequer, and army. Having sought an alliance with Rafael Nunez, the leader of the moderate liberal wing, Caro had a major involvement in the constitutional assembly in 1886. As vice-president when Nunez assumed the presidency of Colombia in 1892, Caro was able to become the architect of a series of centralizing reforms, known as the RegeneraciOn, which restricted individual liberties and strengthened accord between the government and the Catholic Church. On Nunez’s withdrawal from public life in 1894, Caro himself became president until 1898.
While Jose Marti has a place in history for his political activities rather than his humanistic devotion to classical culture, the reverse might apply to Miguel Antonio Caro. Even in Colombia, Caro is at least as much remembered for what he contributed to his country’s literary and pedagogical legacy as he is for his involvement in its political history. As well as holding two chairs in philosophy and founding a Catholic university in Bogota, he was National Librarian and President of the Academia Colombiana de la Lengua (Colombian Academy of the Language, an institution modeled on the Real Academia Espanola, the Spanish royal academy). Caro’s best known work is a Spanish verse translation of the complete works of Vergil, but he produced many other translations into Latin verse as well as Spanish, literary criticism, and poetry of his own (Rivas Sacconi 1993). It is tempting to imagine that the discipline of Latin verse composition and the codification of language and grammar held a special attraction for a man who sought to impose order on a society he considered to be tumbling into chaos. And Caro’s particular devotion to the Augustan poet Vergil seems all too appropriate for an ideologue whose program of Regeneracion has more than a glancing resemblance to the reformist legislation of the emperor Augustus himself.
Though Marti and Caro were contemporaries, it is not customary to compare them, because of the dissimilarity of their respective historical and political positions. The perspectives these two nineteenth-century Americans had on the Greco-Roman world, how they conceived of it and approached it, are correspondingly divergent: the adventurous radicalism of a Hellenist creatively driven by the grand vista of antiquity stands in virtual opposition to the conservativism of a philological Latinist with a Catholic education. That polarity may at first look as if it conforms to a frivolous opposition commonplace in classical studies today: between Greek, which is held to foster original thinkers who are concerned with bigger issues raised by the ‘‘predicament of culture,’’ and Latin, which is stereotyped as appealing to those who confine themselves to the exacting but very methodical techniques of textual criticism and historical commentary.
In fact, Marti’s and Caro’s different attitudes to antiquity point to a more serious tension - between innovation and tradition - which underlies every narrative about the later legacies of Greece and Rome. That tension goes well beyond the problem of how to explicate ancient authors: it is between those who regard antiquity, Greek or Roman, as a springboard for the present, universalizing its texts and artifacts as material to use or think with, and those who instead seek - or affect - to preserve an idea of the ancient past, transmitting its contents (or even imposing them) on to the age in which they live, irrespective of the concerns and preoccupations their present age may have. That tension between innovation and tradition has perhaps manifested itself in Latin America more acutely than anywhere else, and it came to the surface very rapidly, as soon as classical learning took root in the early 1500s. And that tension in American interpretations of Greco-Roman culture came to have more consequence and significance than many Europeans could have envisaged.
World History
