Capital city of Argentina. Sacred music was first used in the church of the Jesuit College about 1611 and at the cathedral, which was completed in 1622. In that year a primitive organ was installed at the Jesuit College church; the cathedral had a similar one. The missionary Jesuit priests taught music, and from the late 17th century their church had a rudimentary choir of black American slaves. The cathedral choir was supplemented by an orchestra of 14 players, and the earliest local compositions are those of the first known organist and maestro de capilla Juan Vizcaíno de Agüero (b Tucumán, Argentina, 1606); they date from 1628, the year of his arrival in Buenos Aires. He was succeeded at the cathedral by his pupil Juan de Cáceres y Ulloa and later by Francisco Vandemer (1756), Antonio Beles (1775–90), Bernabé de San Ginés (1775), Francisco del Pozo (1780), Mario Cabral (to 1785), Teodoro Guzmán (fl 1750–1820), Ambrosio Belarde (fl 1760–1815) and Tiburcio Ortega (1759–1839). The Portuguese musician Salinas de Lima played there in 1806 and the Italian Gaetano Lino Loforte in 1810. From 1785 to 1813 the organist was Bautista Goiburu, a noted teacher who guided local musical activity during this period. Music books of the period 1617–1809 are in the Universidad del Litoral, Santa Fé, the Museo Histórico, Córdoba, the Biblioteca Nacional, Buenos Aires, and the Archivo General de la Nación, Buenos Aires. The early colonial works clearly show Spanish influence, whereas the more elaborate settings of the mass written after 1800 attest to some Italian influence.
The first public theatre, the Teatro de Operas y Comedias, opened in 1757; its productions included puppet shows, tonadillas escénicas (musical intermezzos) and a few short plays. The Teatro de la Ranchería (1783) presented tonadillas, zarzuelas and later the major Italian operas of Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Mercadante and others. The period of the viceroyalty (1776–1810) was characterized by lively musical activity in the salons of the colonial mansions, where parts of tonadillas and zarzuelas were staged. Italian opera became overwhelmingly popular in the early 19th century and during the century led to the opening of many more theatres, including the Coliseo Provisional (1804, where the first complete opera heard in Buenos Aires, Rossini’s Il barbiere de Siviglia, was performed in 1825 – the Argentine national anthem being performed for the first time on the same occasion), the Teatro de la Victoria (1838), the Teatro del Buen Orden (1844) and the Teatro de la Federación (1845). The first Teatro Colón, built in front of the Plaza de Mayo, was inaugurated with La traviata with Sofia Vera Lorini and Enrico Tamberlik in 1857. It had 2500 seats but a short life as an opera house; the building became the Banco de la Nación Argentina in 1888. The leading opera season was transferred to the Teatro de la Opera (1872), which held the Buenos Aires premières of Verdi’s Don Carlo (1873) and Gomes’s Il Guarany (1874), and the world première of Pampa (1897) by the Argentine Arturo Berutti. Caruso sang there for the first time in Giordano’s Fedora in 1899; the theatre’s highpoint was in 1901 when he sang in Tosca with Hariclea Darclée, conducted by Toscanini. The new Teatro Colón, now Buenos Aires’s principal opera house (see illustration), opened in 1908 with Aida under Luigi Mancinelli. The house seats around 4000 (2500 at the time of its opening). The new Colón became the biggest and most prominent opera house in Latin America and one of the leading in the world. It has staged 58 premières of Argentine operas, among them Héctor Panizza’s Aurora (1908), Felipe Boero’s El matrero (1929), Juan José Castro’s Bodas de sangre (1956), Alberto Ginastera’s Don Rodrigo (1964) and Mario Perusso’s La voz del silencio (1969) and Escorial (1987). As well as the traditional repertory the Colón has given the South American premières of operas by such composers as Berg, Stravinsky, Janáček, Dallapiccola, Pizzetti, Schoenberg, Milhaud and Poulenc. A highpoint was the completed version of Manuel de Falla’s Atlántida sung in Catalan (1963); a rarity was the production in 1982 of the earliest surviving Spanish opera, Celos aun del aire matan (1660) by Juan Hidalgo. The Colón is also used for symphonic concerts, solo recitals and ballet seasons.
Concert life began likewise in the colonial salons, where the favourite form was the popular song with guitar accompaniment. Simple song genres of Spanish origin ranged from the salve (song of praise), saeta (hymn to the Virgin), alabanza (chant of praise) and rogativa (chant of supplication) to lovers’ songs and Christmas carols. The most notable salon was that of the composer and statesman Amancio Alcorta (c1850).
The musical life of the new capital was dominated by the composers Juan Bautista Alberdi and Amancio Alcorta, who wrote mainly chamber works for piano and some Romantic songs, and Juan Pedro Esnaola, who wrote works for voice and for piano and some chamber and orchestral music, also in the European Romantic idiom.
Throughout the 19th century philharmonic societies were founded to perform symphonic and chamber music; more than 20 remain, of which the most important are the Sociedad Filarmónica (1822), the Escuela de Música y Canto (1822), another Sociedad Filarmónica (1823) and the Sociedad de Mayo (1854). The repertory of chamber music alternated with symphony concerts and concertos performed by visiting foreign soloists; small instrumental concerts were given by local players, supplemented when necessary by players from elsewhere. The Orquesta Filarmónica of the Asociación del Profesorado Orquestal was founded in 1919; its first conductors were Ernesto Drangosh, Ferruccio Cattelani, Georges Zavlawsky and, in 1924, Ernest Ansermet. It performed the symphonic repertory, giving first performances in Buenos Aires of works by Stravinsky, Honegger, Falla, Malipiero, Debussy, Ravel and Prokofiev and by young Argentine composers. This association and others like it (the Asociación Wagneriana, 1912, the Amigos de la Música, 1946 and especially the Grupo Renovación, 1929) did much to promulgate new works and unfamiliar genres (e.g. lieder) as well as the standard repertory. The present orchestras are that of the Teatro Colón (1924), the Orquesta Radio El Mundo (1930), the Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional (1948), the Orquesta Filarmónica (1949) and the Orquesta Radio Nacional (1951), all of which have had native and foreign conductors. Smaller groups formed in the 1960s include the Camerata Bariloche (1966, founded by the violinist Alberto Lysy), the Ensemble Musical de Buenos Aires (1968, founded by Pedro Calderón) and the Orquesta de Cámara Juvenil (1970, founded by the composer, cellist and conductor Washington Castro). Other orchestras are the Sinfonieta Omega Seguros, founded and conducted by Gerardo Gandini; the Orquesta San Isidro Labrador, under Charlotte Stuijt; and the Orquesta de Mayo and the Orquesta Juvenil (founded 1995), both conducted by Mario Benzecry.
The concert-promoting organizations, the Asociación Amigos de la Música, Asociación Amigos del Arte, Asociación Argentina de Compositores, Asociación de Conciertos de Cámara, Asociación de Jóvenes Compositores de la Argentina and Asociación del Profesorado Orquestal, all organize annual concert seasons (from April to October) including solo recitals, chamber music cycles and symphony concerts. The Agrupación Nueva Música is directed by Francisco Kroepfl and Lucía Maranca. Many organizations (e.g. the Asociación Amigos de la Música) have their own concert halls; others use rooms in the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, the Museo de Artes Decorativas, the Biblioteca Nacional and the great hall of the Facultad de Derecho (school of law, cap. 1500), the hall of the Editorial Argentina de Musica, the Teatro Cómico (cap. 1200) and the Municipal S Martín which has three halls, Martín Coronado (2000), Lugones (1000) and Casacuberta (700).
The first public institution to provide music instruction was the Colegio Real de S Carlos, now the Colegio Nacional, founded by Juan José Vertiz (viceroy 1778–84); the influential Juan Bautista Goiburu was professor there. The Spanish priest José Antonio Picazarri founded the Escuela de Musica y Canto in 1822 and the Argentine composer Juan Pedro Esnaola was the first president of the Escuela de Música de la Provincia founded in 1875. The city also has a Conservatorio Municipal de Música and the Conservatorio Nacional de Música. The municipal radio broadcasts cultural programmes. The Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales at the Instituto Torcuato di Tella, founded in 1962 and directed by Ginastera, no longer exists. The Facultad de Artes y Ciencias Musicales of the Universidad Católica Argentina (UCA) was established in 1958 with Ginastera as dean. It has departments of composition, musicology and criticism, sacred music, music education, orchestral conducting and choral conducting. Roberto Caamaño was dean until his death in 1993; he was succeeded in 1994 by Marta Lambertini. The UCA also has a symphony orchestra and centres of electro-acoustic music (directed by Pablo Cetta), contemporary music (Gerardo Gandini) and early music (Clara Cortázar). In 1994 the UCA and the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes together established the Premio Nacional de Piano Roberto Caamaño. The Centro de Experimentación de Opera y Ballet (CEOB) was created by Gandini in 1994 as an experimental group, with regular performances in three small halls: the Centro Cultural Recoleta, an auditorium of the Teatro S Martín, and one of the secondary stages of the Teatro Colón. Each year one of the productions is selected to have its première on the principal stage of the Colón.
GroveO (R. Stevenson)
O. Schiuma: Música y músicos argentinos (Buenos Aires, 1943)
N. Slonimsky: Music of Latin America (New York, 1945, 3/1949/R)
O. Schiuma: Músicos argentinos contemporaneos (Buenos Aires, 1954)
V. Gesualdo: Historia de la música en la Argentina (Buenos Aires, 1961, 2/1978)
H. Dianda: Música en la Argentina de hoy (Buenos Aires, 1966)
R. Caamaño, ed.: La historia del Teatro Colón (1908–1968) (Buenos Aires, 1969)
R. Arizaga: Enciclopedia de la música argentina (Buenos Aires, 1971)
E. Valenti-Ferro: Las voces del Teatro Colón 1908–1982 (Buenos Aires, 1983)
SUSANA SALGADO