The Siren’s Song; or, When an Amazonian Iara Sang Opera (in Italian) on a Belle Époque Stage

On May 4, 1895, an unusual opera debuted at the Theatro da Paz in the Brazilian city of Belém. Based on the Amazonian myth of the Iara, a water nymph who lures men to their death with promises of eternal love and riches, Jara was composed by the local musician José Cândido da Gama Malcher, who adapted the libretto from a poem by the Italian explorer and ethnographer Ermanno Stradelli. Like most operas staged at the Theatro da Paz, it was sung in Italian and performed by a mostly Italian cast—though its protagonist appears to have been Russian and it was notable for its incorporation of words from the indigenous nheenghatu language.This essay approaches Jara and its original staging as emblematic of the Amazon’s integration into international commodity circuits during the rubber boom of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although her origins are disputed, it was around this time when the Iara was embraced among intellectuals and writers; during the same period, the wealth of the rubber boom helped fuel the importation of opera to the two economic capitals of Manaus and Belém. To begin, I trace the literary precursors to Gama Malcher’s opera, arguing that Iara’s status as an embodiment of the Amazonian aura hinges on an auditory illusion that makes her voice appear to sing out of a timeless indigenous past. The ingenuity of Jara, I go on to show, is to transform the myth into a dramatization of the power of the operatic voice. But opera is not only a vocal art, and in my discussion of the performance, I show how an attention to its theatrical elements reveals that like the figure of the Iara, opera is tied to the very mechanisms of international capital from which it promises an escape.