As filhas do pai de Maria Angu: um estudo sobre a dramaturgia-musical em quatro operetas de Arthur Azevedo – adaptações paródicas e forma nacional nos Oitocentos

Abstract

This thesis analyzes four Arthur Azevedo’s operettas: two parodic adaptations of French operettas – A Filha de Maria Angu and Abel, Helena, and two original creations, as acclimatization of the French form (which is becoming national) to the Brazilian theme – A Princesa dos Cajueiros and O Barão de Pituaçu, to understand how such a dramatic-musical genre contributed to the project of nationalization of Brazilian theater, although its role in this context is left out in the historiography of theater or in literature manuals, because of the prejudice of the intellectual elite and the canon to the forms of light theater. In addition to textual analysis, to understand the production processes of each of the pieces, we invented press records provided by Hemeroteca Digital that contained information about: socio-political and cultural scenarios, criticism, audience reception, production conditions, entrepreneurs, theatrical companies, the work of actors, the publishing of libretos and scores and the position of the playwright in front of the reception of his works, the critics and the theater market of Rio de Janeiro itself. In both spheres of production, either parodic adaptation or form nationalization, working together with composers such as Sá Noronha and Adolpho Lindner, we reflect on how the comedy writer acclimated the adapted operettas, re-elaborating them through the approximation of themes and local theme, as far as characters and plots are concerned, particularly marked by the local color and by elements of the picturesque nineteenth century of the comedy of manners, and how his operettas, taken as originals, fully nationalized in libretos and scores, followed the continuity line of the comedy of manners initiated by Martins Pena, to whom we turned to the understanding the structural comic elements and the way the theater of the nineteenth century was concerned with the representation of coeval theme as a subject for social criticism and laughter.