Opera as a Moral Vehicle: Situating Bellini’s Norma in the Political Complexities of Mid-Nineteenth-Century Buenos Aires Vera Wolkowicz Universidad de Buenos Aires Email: verawolk@gmail.com AbstractOn 25 May 1849 Vincenzo Bellini’s opera Norma was premiered at the Teatro de la Victoria in Buenos Aires. It was performed four years before the downfall of Juan Manuel de Rosas, Governor of Buenos Aires for more than 20 years, in what it has been considered in Argentine historiography as a ‘terror regime’. The success of the opera combined with the political situation enables the understand- ing of Norma in political terms. A year prior to the premiere of the opera, the story of the elopement of a young, aristocratic, federal girl, Camila O’Gorman with the priest Uladislao Gutiérrez, had shocked local society. It was followed by another shocking event when, once the couple was found, Rosas decided to have them executed. I argue that the inadvertent similarity between the plot of Norma and the events in relation to Camila O’Gorman’s death led to possible interpretations of the opera per- formance as a justification of Rosas’s decision to execute Camila and her lover, whilst also providing a moral lesson to young aristocratic women. In this article, I therefore explore the plausible political over- tones hidden in the performance of Norma by comparing librettos and analysing the opera’s reception between 1849 and 1851 in the periodicals of the time. In this way, I cast light on a heretofore over- looked, but undeniably rich, period of operatic life in Buenos Aires. Introduction During Juan Manuel de Rosas’s two near-consecutive governments (1829–32 and 1835–52), Argentina (at that time called the Argentine Confederation) was politi- cally divided in two antagonizing factions: the federalists and the unitarians (in Spanish federales and unitarios). Rosas, a federalist, is best known to history for per- secuting and killing unitarians, effectively censoring any political opposition. 1 A para-police force called Sociedad Popular Restauradora (Popular Restoration Society), more commonly known as Mazorca, enforced Rosas’s policies on the streets. 2 Fear of retribution from the regime permeated all aspects of life in I would like to especially thank Alessandra Jones, Charlotte Bentley, Benjamin Walton and José Manuel Izquierdo König for their thoughtful readings and suggestions on previous drafts of this manuscript. 1 See John Lynch, Argentine Dictator: Juan Manuel de Rosas 1829–1852 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981), especially chapter 6, ‘The Terror’, 201–46. 2 The opponents of the regime created a play on words: mazorca (ear of corn) and más horca (more hangings). The members of this organization included ‘professional cut-throats and delinquents’. Lynch, Argentine Dictator, 215 and 218. Nineteenth-Century Music Review, page 1 of 23 © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press doi:10.1017/S1479409820000506 https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479409820000506 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 54.225.53.177, on 23 Nov 2021 at 20:00:03, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at