Variações dialéticas sobre o Concerto Barroco de Alejo Carpentier

Abstract

This essay aims to analyze Alejo Carpentier’s novel Concierto Barroco (1974) as a modernist experiment in which the Baroque functions simultaneously as an aesthetic form and as a historical problem specific to Latin America. The journey of the Mexican merchant and his servant Filomeno to the Venetian carnival reinscribes the Conquest of Mexico within the European economy of spectacle, where trauma is converted into an operatic plot neutralized by the conventional demand for the lieto fine. Giusti’s libretto for Vivaldi’s opera Motezuma is read as a symptom of the contradictions between the representation of historical violence and the
— likewise historical — conventions governing artistic representations of history. The essay also shows how the novel juxtaposes stage and audience, ironizes the mechanisms of verisimilitude, suspends chronological temporality, and turns the “false” cry into a trigger of historical
consciousness, displacing — surrealistically — the meaning of identities and representations. Finally, it returns to the nexus of opera, history, and power by comparing other operatic versions of the conquest (Graun, Spontini, Rihm) and foregrounding Carpentier’s original gesture: the introduction of an American subject who observes Europe as it represents him.