UCLA

As key examples from Cuba, Brazil, and the United States show, ideology can play a significant role in how literature is adapted into dramatic musical works such as zarzuela or opera. The chosen literary texts and musical works in this inquiry differ greatly and come from distinct language traditions. Yet, each reveals parallel narrative anxieties about national origin and racial identity, and attempts to resolve those anxieties. Each example also shows how cultural products such as operas can be used to reshape and narrate the past for ideological purposes. Questions of adaptation--particularly those involving turning the literary genre into the dramatic--affect a work's presentation and life after the stage lights have dimmed.

The works in this study vary from the nineteenth-century "national" novels of Cuba (Cirilo Villaverde's Cecilia Valdés, 1882) and Brazil (José de Alencar's O guarani, 1857) to a play from the Harlem Renaissance (Langston Hughes's Emperor of Haiti, 1936) and their respective adaptations into zarzuela or opera in the 1930s. During this decade artists in the three nations revisited fundamental nineteenth-century texts and historical events, reworking them into musical theater works. In recent years, scholars have explored the foundational nature of nineteenth-century novels in the Americas, focusing on how narratives can create and refigure stories of national formation. Others have examined the development of opera or zarzuela, often concentrating on one nation per study. These investigations have illuminated questions of performance history, circulation of cultural forms, and exchanges between "high" and "mass" culture, among others. Yet, a lacunae exists in terms of understanding why composers and librettists chose these particular texts and how they transformed them from the literary to the dramatic genre by reworking characters, conveying stories through song and dance, and heeding or flouting operatic or zarzuelistic norms. This dissertation puts non-musical texts and dramatic musical works from three nations and language traditions into dialogue with one another within a comparative and diasporic frame. The interdisciplinary analysis demonstrates that performance proves to be as important as literature in forging community bonds and also as powerful a medium for reinventing the past for ideological purposes.