Opera Returns to the Amazon : Manaus restores its 660-seat venue, a relic of its rubber-boom days

A grimy Third World city of 1.2 million people in the middle of the Amazon wilderness needs a shining symbol of civilization. And now Manaus has a splendidly restored belle epoque opera house.

The Teatro Amazonas reopened here last weekend after a $8-million dollar restoration that has brought back some of the extravagant brilliance of the city’s rubber-boom days at the turn of the century.

Thursday, the 660-seat opera house will crown its restored glory with Placido Domingo in a performance of Bizet’s “Carmen.”

According to local lore, the great tenor Enrico Caruso once sang at the Teatro Amazonas, but historians say that is only one of many false legends associated with the bygone heyday of the opera house.

Fernando Bicudo, the Brazilian impresario in charge of the current season, said Domingo will start a new and even better heyday for the Teatro Amazonas.

“I want legends to become reality here,” he told foreign reporters last weekend. “The first one is Placido.”

The Teatro Amazonas began reliving its legendary past with the reopening on March 17, but not without glitches.

At the appointed 8 p.m. curtain time, a long line of chauffeured cars was still discharging passengers in the arched porte-cochere.

A crowd gathered out front to watch the tuxedos and glittering evening dresses go in. Some in the crowd whistled and jeered at the finery, then began chanting, “The people want in.”

The reopening was for invited guests only, and ticket prices for future performances ranged from $30 to $250--well beyond the means of most Manaus residents.

Luis Andrade Neto, a high school teacher, did not take part in the demonstration, but he told a reporter: “The government should make sure the people have access.”

The evening’s program of music and ballet got under way more than a half hour late, and people were still straggling into their red felt seats at 9 p.m. A newspaper critic from Sao Paulo, sitting in a third-tier balcony box, deplored the distraction.

“The people here don’t have manners for listening to music,” he whispered in a pause between numbers. Chants from the crowd outside drifted into the hall.

The program included the overture from “The Slave,” a classical opera by Brazilian composer Carlos Gomes; an aria from the same opera, and a duet from Gomes’ “The Guarani.”

The Symphonic Orchestra of the National Theater of Brasilia played the opera pieces, but tape-recorded music was used for the ballet. Impresario Bicudo said the orchestra and choir required for the music would not fit into the opera house’s small stage area.

The ballet was “The Amazon Forest,” by Heitor Villa-Lobos, Brazil’s greatest classical composer. It is based on jungle legends, with dancers representing Indians, woodsmen, wood nymphs, birds and butterflies.

In the first scene, the music suddenly stopped, and after a lengthy delay, the ballet started over from the beginning. Bicudo said the tape player came unplugged when someone backstage tripped over its electric cord.

Meanwhile, outside the opera house, police with plexiglass shields and billy clubs pushed about 100 demonstrators away from the doors and into a nearby park.

“Down with repression,” the demonstrators chanted from the plaza. It was reported that 30 protesters were arrested.

In an intermission after the ballet, the audience took refreshments under crystal chandeliers in the marble-floored lobby and in the frescoed “Noble Salon” upstairs. Waiters served Scotch whiskey and French Champagne in the salon. In the lobby, there was Coca-Cola and guarana, a soft drink made from an Amazon fruit.

The governor of Amazonas was there, along with lesser officials from the state and national governments. Several foreign diplomats also came.

Brazil’s new president, Fernando Collor de Mello, had promised to attend but did not.

“Judging by what is going on with the economy I could see why he could not attend,” Bicudo said, referring to the emergency economic measures Collor announced the day before the opening.

Bicudo told Reuters news service that the opening of the theater was “a declaration of war to stop destruction of the Amazon rain forest. The way to stop that destruction is by creation.” He hopes the theater will attract more tourists and money to the region.

“From what I sense, Manaus is now part of the international cultural circuit,” declared Ipojuca Pontes, the national secretary of culture.

That was always the goal of the Teatro de Amazonas.

Rubber barons late in the 19th Century had the wealth to order their clothes from Paris, send their laundry out to Lisbon and ship in international opera companies. But the city’s three theaters were unworthy wooden structures.

“The people, the authorities and the intellectuals felt that it was humiliating,” said Ypiranga Monteiro, author of a three-volume history of Teatro Amazonas.

So the state government contracted the construction of a luxurious new opera house, bringing in much of the material from abroad: Italian marble for pedestals, French ironwork for ornate stairways and balcony rails, Alsatian tiles for a multicolor dome on top of the neoclassical structure.

The Teatro Amazonas was finished in 1896. It opened on Dec. 31 of that year with selection of arias by the Lyric Company of Italy, which stayed to perform Ponchielli’s opera “La Gioconda” a week later.

Other European opera companies came and went until 1907, when the Brazilian rubber boom faded out because of competition from cheaper rubber from Asia.

The city entered a long decline. Smaller musical groups and individual performers from Europe were gradually replaced by Brazilian programs.

In 1942, the Teatro Amazonas closed. Historian Monteiro said that the deteriorated structure was used as a storage depot for gasoline during a U.S.-organized push to increase natural rubber production for the war effort.

After World War II, the opera house was used for performances of popular music. It was closed in the mid-1980s.

Interestingly, in 1982 Warner Herzog released his movie “Fitzcarraldo,” in which Klaus Kinski starred as a character who dreams of bringing Caruso to the South American jungle. To finance his opera house, he sets out to tap a hidden forest of rubber trees, and in his obsession to find a route on the Amazon, he literally hauls his 320-ton boat over mountains. The film--and a companion documentary on the film making, “Burden of Dreams”--was shot in the Peruvian Amazon, and never got near Manaus.

In 1987, the ambitious restoration project began. Termite-eaten hardwoods, broken tiles and missing chandelier crystal were replaced. Furniture was reupholstered, ironwork derusted, structures repaired. The outside was painted a dusky rose color with cream trim. Eighty percent of the cost was paid by the state government.

Although Manaus is still a city of predominantly poor people, it has built a measure of business prosperity with a duty-free zone that was established here in 1967. Officials hope that businesses will contribute to maintaining the splendor of the Teatro Amazonas.

“I think businessmen will support it,” said Suheil Neves, an entrepreneur who attended last weekend’s reopening. “It is needed. We have nothing here in cultural terms.”