Canto da ocidental praia

The story of Canto da ocidental praia is a testimony to the political, cultural and social environment of the final period of the Estado Novo and the transition to democracy. It was commissioned by RTP in 1973, through conductor Manuel Ivo Cruz, to be filmed and broadcast on television. However, the project did not materialise, and it was João de Freitas Branco, director of the Teatro Nacional de São Carlos, who suggested its stage presentation. But this too did not happen, because PIDE seized the programmes at the printer’s, and the production invoked technical reasons to cancel the performance. In the composer’s words, the intervention of the political police turned out to be beneficial, because the accumulation of problems – lack of rehearsals and staging difficulties – foreshadowed a disastrous premiere.¹ The opera finally premiered on 10 June 1975, Camões Day, at the proposal of João Paes, then director of the Teatro Nacional de São Carlos, and despite several setbacks during rehearsals.²

Canto da Ocidental Praia is an opera in three acts, with a libretto by Victorino d’Almeida based on excerpts from Os Lusíadas and Camões’s lyric poetry. It also contains texts by some of the poets who influenced Camões’s work, such as Dante, Petrarch, Virgil and Garcilaso de la Vega, excerpts from plays by Jorge Ferreira de Vasconcelos, and also official documents from the period. Act I sets the opera’s theme, focusing on the “ideological contradictions” that characterised Camões, as explained by the composer on the microphone of Emissora Nacional at the time of the absolute premiere. The poet is portrayed as an isolated figure and, in the course of the opera, a critic of the ruling classes and society. As Mário Vieira de Carvalho states in his critical commentary on the opera, through Camões, Victorino d’Almeida denounces the “ideological superstructure of Portuguese fascism and colonialism” and shows how Camões – “so often invoked as a celebrant of Portuguese ‘imperialism’ – in fact stood against the ruling classes and their ideology, while being brutalised by them.”³ The second and third acts are biographical and follow episodes of Camões’s life chronologically. The opera ends with his death, followed by a final tableau in which a biography with altered facts is proclaimed. In Act II, when a 16th‑century text about the impact of the Inquisition on the period, and particularly on the publishing of books in Portugal, is evoked, a minute of silence is requested for the victims of censorship – a gesture strongly felt in 1975 that contributed to the opera’s political charge and its reception. The audience’s reaction was not unanimous, and on the recording preserved in the RTP Archives one can clearly hear both applause and acclaim as well as jeers.⁴ This detail was also noted and commented on in the review written by Mário Vieira de Carvalho, who interprets it as an aesthetic criterion.

Canto da ocidental praia had its absolute premiere at the Teatro Nacional de São Carlos and its performance was broadcast live by Emissora Nacional. For the presentation of the opera, a meeting with the press was held a few days before the premiere, promoted by some of the protagonists of its production. Further performances followed at the Coliseu dos Recreios (Lisbon) and at the Coliseu do Porto, the latter also broadcast live by RTP, of which an audiovisual recording survives. There was reportedly interest in presenting the opera in Barcelona.⁵