(b Rio de Janeiro, 17 Oct 1847; d Rio de Janeiro, 28 Feb 1935). Brazilian composer, pianist and conductor. She studied the piano in Rio de Janeiro with José de Sousa Lobo and the Portuguese pianist Napoleão dos Santos. However, her wealthy husband Jacinto Ribeiro do Amaral, whom she married in 1863, disapproved of her musical career and at the age of 20 she separated from him. She married again – her second husband was João Batista de Carvalho – and once more separated, in 1876; she found work as a piano teacher to help support her children. Her first success as a composer came with the publication in 1877 of the polka Atraente. She wrote music for several operettas; the first, A corte na roça (to a libretto by Francisco Sodré), was first performed at the Teatro Príncipe Imperial on 17 January 1885, gained her the name ‘the feminine Offenbach’. In 1885 she directed the theatre orchestra and the band of the military police, becoming the first woman to conduct an orchestra in Brazil. She was an enthusiastic supporter of the Brazilian movements for the end of slavery (1888) and the proclamation of the Republic (1889).
Gonzaga composed 77 stage works (1885–1933) to subjects dealing mostly with local, everyday events, and she collaborated with the most famous Brazilian playwrights of the time. The popularity of these works is evidenced by the three-act operetta Forrobodó (1912), which received 1500 performances. Her tango O Gaúcho, written for the play Zizinha maxixe (1895) and based on the folkdance corta-jaca, became one of her most famous pieces at the turn of the century. She travelled extensively between 1901 and 1910, performing in Spain, France, Italy, England and especially Portugal, where her operettas enjoyed unprecedented popularity. Her march Ô abre-alas (1899) became the prototype of the ‘carnival march’, a popular genre in the 1920s.
Over 300 of her works in dance and song forms were published, including waltzes, polkas, tangos, mazurkas, quadrilles, gavottes, habaneras, barcarolles, serenatas, maxixes, lundus, fados, modinhas, marchas and choros.
For discussion of her nationalizing of European dance forms see Brazil, §III, 1.
M. Lira: Chiquinha Gonzaga: grande compositora brasileira (Rio de Janeiro, 1939)
L.H. Corrêa de Azevedo: 150 anos de música no Brasil, 1800–1950 (Rio de Janeiro, 1956), 145–51
G. Béhague: Popular Musical Currents in the Art Music of the Early Nationalistic Period in Brazil, circa 1870–1920 (diss., Tulane U., LA, 1966), 133–6
Enciclopédia da música brasileira (São Paulo, 1977), i, 322–7 [incl. list of works], 448; ii, 745
V. Mariz: A canção brasileira (Rio de Janeiro, 3/1977), 195–9
E. Diniz: Chiquinha Gonzaga: uma história de vida (Rio de Janeiro, 1984) [incl. list of works]
A. Vasconcelos: Raízes da música brasileira (Rio de Janeiro, 1991), 263–89 [incl. list of works]
CRISTINA MAGALDI