People’s World sat down with our former staff writer and cultural editor Eric A. Gordon for a chat about his latest book.
C.J. Atkins (People’s World): Welcome back to our pages, Eric. I’m so glad to see you are still writing, still producing work.
Eric Gordon: Yes, I am, and I’m really glad to have lived long enough to see this book in print. It’s actually my 1969 master’s thesis originally submitted to the Department of Latin American Studies at Tulane University. It’s called Opera and Society: Rio de Janeiro, 1851-1852. But for publication now, I’ve added the subtitle “An Essay in Marxist Musicology” because that’s what it is, at least my attempt at it so many years ago when I was only 24 but already a student activist and budding scholar.
PW: I see your book is over 150 pages, including your preface and academic features like a bibliography and appendices. Why do you call this an “essay?”
Gordon: I meant that word in two senses—an extended piece of argument (for a class-based study of culture), and also as an attempt, which reflects my youthful search for a voice, an outlook, that I had not seen much of in the musicological studies I had seen. Curiously, years later, I had the opportunity to review a posthumously published collection of essays by Edward Said based on a course he taught at Columbia called exactly that: “Opera and Society.”
PW: I don’t mean to be critical or rude, but honestly, my first reaction to this publishing project was to imagine very few readers being immediately drawn in to learn more about this topic, especially considering the reduced time frame of two years in the musical life of the then-capital of Brazil now going on two centuries ago!
Gordon: Thanks for pointing that out! No, seriously, I gave a lot of thought to that, too. But in our age of self-publishing, there’s an opportunity to preserve and make available what I still consider a worthy piece of research that I don’t think has been duplicated or surpassed since. And whether or not you’re interested in Rio in the 1850s, I believe my methodology of examining this culture through class-conscious eyes could serve as a model for other writers.
PW: I can appreciate that.
Gordon: And as I’ve pursued an activist, scholarly, and journalistic life in the subsequent more than half a century, I look back on this early effort—this essay—with fondness as the road sign pointing to a fairly substantial literary achievement of which I feel I can be proud. Much of the work I devoted my time to in the decades to follow filled gaping holes in music and social history, as well as in Portuguese literature in English translation for the first time. In this master’s thesis, I cut my teeth at the start of a career as a researcher, expository writer, and translator from original sources.
PW: How did you land on this particular topic?
Gordon: Well, this is a bit of a story. Though I was pegged as a campus radical when I got to Tulane in 1966, still, I qualified for a departmental travel grant to Brazil during the summer (the Southern Hemisphere winter) of 1967, for the purpose of research for the master’s thesis, and off I went, with a stopover on the route south in Guyana to visit the Communist leaders Cheddi and Janet Jagan. I was sternly counseled, given that Brazil was, since 1964, steeped in a violent U.S.-sponsored military dictatorship, to keep my head low and avoid any involvement in demonstrations or meetings with leftists.
I followed that advice sedulously. All that I saw in the couple of months I was in Brazil was the occasional outburst of graffiti on a wall. I found myself a cheap little room in a one-story row of tiny apartments in Rio de Janeiro that only later did I realize housed a number of “working” women.
PW: And you chose Rio?
Gordon: Yes, because that’s where the most advanced opera culture had historically centered, and because that’s where Brazil’s most important archival holdings could be studied. I was already aware of the Brazilian opera composer Antônio Carlos Gomes (1836-96), and I was curious to learn where, in what kind of musical environment, such a man got his early education. I was well familiar with the musicological literature on Brazil.
As soon as I arrived, I headed over to the Arquivo Nacional, a vast repository of the nation’s documents, and introduced myself to their staff. One lady took a shine to me as someone who might brighten her day—and I think she must have been impressed by this young American student’s command of Portuguese, rather formal and academic, of course, not vernacular, as I’d never lived in a Portuguese-speaking country. She retreated back into the recesses of the archive, and came out shortly with a thick folder, maybe nine or ten inches high, and suggested this might be something of interest to me.
This pacotilha, or packet, contained the almost weekly handwritten reports directed to Dom Pedro II, the Emperor himself, by one João Antônio de Miranda, the opera theatre administrator, in which he discussed singers, repertory, the ballet company, the squabbles among the staff, wages, performances, earnings, dismissals, investors in the theatre, box-holders, and the burning down of one opera house and the speedy construction of a new “provisional” theatre. In short, a goldmine full of the nitty-gritty, day-by-day operations of an opera house, and just the kind of social history I was interested in, with ample references to race relations in this then-slaveholder society.
As I thumbed through Miranda’s reports—and who knows if the Emperor even read them?—I realized something quite profound. The papers I was holding, as a 22-year-old budding master’s degree student, had never been referenced by any researcher or musicologist. I knew the literature well and was confident that I had uncovered something truly unique and rare that no one, in all likelihood, had laid eyes on in over a century. I was enchanted by the joyful thrill of discovery as a historian.
PW: Wow, sounds like a rare find.
Gordon: It sure was! Plus which, during this formative time for opera in Brazil, the famous French mezzo-soprano Rosine Stoltz came to Brazil for a season. Why did she leave Paris for a distant tropical port raging with yellow fever? She was offered a very attractive contract! So, for serious students of her vastly influential career, this book treats her stay in Rio in detail never before available to the public.
PW: So, this was basically a tranche of primary sources?
Gordon: Exactly. Now, a master’s thesis is generally a summary overview of the secondary literature in a given field. A candidate is not expected to engage in original research with primary documents: That happens on the doctoral level. Yet that is what I was now holding in my hands, and my thesis immediately assumed shape—although it took me another two years to complete it. Partly because I was fighting the Vietnam War draft and protesting the war, was active with SDS, and was not formally enrolled as a student any longer after my year-and-a-half coursework ended. Also, the microfilm rolls of runs of Brazilian newspapers which I ordered from the Arquivo took much longer than promised to arrive.
My professors frankly shared with me that they had never seen a master’s thesis like mine before. Thorough, meticulously footnoted, demonstrating a command of the Portuguese language and competent translation skills, it showed a grasp of the historical period that they could only expect from a much farther advanced student. There was a brief exploration of getting the thesis published as a book in Brazil, which never came to fruition. I did get one scholarly article published out of it, however, concerning the construction of the new opera house in Rio, and that was a first in my academic career. I’ve seen that article cited in a few scholars’ subsequent work, but never the thesis as a whole.
PW: And now the world has access to it.
Gordon: I don’t even know what happened to the original of my thesis, because Hurricane Katrina did considerable damage to the university library. Fortunately, I was able to work from the carbon copy I had preserved. Anyway, I went on to a doctorate at Tulane with a dissertation on the anarchist movement in Brazil. As you know, copies of doctoral dissertations are made available to readers through a program at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and I have seen my study cited in a number of places. So, I never felt quite the urgency to publish that as I do about the master’s thesis.
PW: And then?
Gordon: Well, having proved to myself that I could do deep archival research and make some order and sense of what I found there, I went on to write a biography of radical composer Marc Blitzstein, help Earl Robinson (of “Joe Hill” fame) finish his autobiography, did tons of journalistic writing, and then used my Portuguese to translate 11 books so far, including the complete fictional work of Álvaro Cunhal, writing under the pen name Manuel Tiago, and possibly more to come.
PW: And it all started with Opera and Society.
Gordon: Right. I acknowledge where I came from and, for what it’s worth, share my early research with the world.
PW: And I guess we’re talking about a world before word processors and computers.
Gordon: Correct! I produced the thesis on an electric typewriter. What you see now in the published book as italics, for titles, for example, I originally underlined as there was no italic font on the keyboard. The thesis was a riot of long black lines. What I had in my possession was a carbon copy, which many readers today won’t even know what I’m talking about. Google it! The copy was considerably more faint and blurry than the original, so today’s text recognition app worked a little spottily, randomly confusing e’s and o’s and s’s. And in the original I had to hand-insert all the accent marks, which Portuguese has a lot of. It was quite the chore to edit the manuscript for modern publication, and to get the footnotes onto the bottom of each page.
PW: And you did all that yourself?
Gordon: The editing, yes, but the formatting for publication was frankly beyond my antiquated skillset. I’d like to acknowledge comrade Stefan Anderson for selflessly devoting many hours to that. I’m eternally grateful for that help.
PW: Anything else you’d like to add?
Gordon: Yes, actually, there’s something I’ve been thinking about all along now that the book is in print. I’ve mentioned how detailed Miranda’s reports were, and the documents he submitted with them. Among the charts I found in the archive, which I publish as part of the documentation, were lists of the members of the chorus and the dance company (as well as boxholders and investors). I keep imagining that the descendants of those workers in the theater might one day stumble upon the names of their great-great-ancestors and learn something they never knew about their own family histories. That would please me.
PW: A nice thought for posterity. Well, congratulations and, as always, a pleasure to talk with you again!
Gordon: Thanks for taking the time, C.J. An honor.
Order a copy of Opera and Society.
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