Symphonia Colonialis
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | Symphonia Colonialis |
| Country of production | Brazil , Germany |
| original language | Portuguese |
| Publishing year | 1991 |
| length | 60 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | Georg Brintrup |
| script | Georg Brintrup, Fábio De Araùjo |
| production | Swantje Ehrentreich Brintrup Filmproduktion HR SWF |
| music | Orquestra Ribeiro Bastos |
| camera | Luigi Verga Jorge Alvis |
| cut | Jorge Alvis |
| occupation | |
| |
Symphonia Colonialis is a German-Brazilian music and film essay by the German filmmaker Georg Brintrup from 1991.
action
A young musicologist visits the Brazilian Orquestra Ribeiro Bastos in the small town of São João del Rei in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais . The oldest still existing lay orchestra in Brazil, the majority of whose members are descendants of slaves, is in the middle of preparing for Holy Week. The director, José Maria Neves, leads the musicologist into the archive, where he comes across previously unexplored letters and records from the 18th century, a time when Brazil as a colony was still under the power of the Portuguese crown.
In it, members of an Italian opera company describe their encounter and collaboration with the composer Antônio Francisco da Cunha, a mulatto from São João del Rei. Because of his musical talent and the ability to compose, he was able to gain freedom from slavery even as a boy, according to the laws especially applicable in Minas Gerais. He perfected his talent in a mulatto brotherhood and, as a young man, became a very busy composer of Brazilian baroque music.
The letters also indicate that he was friends with a poet named Claudio Manuel Rezende, a fellow activist of the Inconfidencia Mineira independence movement, who granted him protection and was therefore also accused of being a member of this movement, which aimed at slavery abolish and free Brazil from exploitation by the motherland Portugal. The poet was captured and hanged. Antônio Francisco da Cunha escaped punishment. But the thought of still being a slave despite his release from slavery persisted. He retired and composed a famous Te Deum. For him music had become the only real way to his liberation.
background
This musical film essay gives an insight into the background of classical Brazilian music, which was only rediscovered for musicology in the 1940s by the German-Uruguayan music researcher Francisco Curt Lange (1903–1997). In the film, two storylines run parallel on different time levels:
- the musical activity of the historical Orquestra Ribeiro Bastos before and during Holy Week 1991 in São João del Rei;
- the representation of the fictional life picture of a mulatto named Antônio Francisco da Cunha - from slavery to the rise as a well-known composer of classical church music during the turn of the 18th to the 19th century.
The fictional image of Antônio Francisco da Cunha's life is created using various episodes from the biographies of the following Brazilian composers of Minas Gerais: João de Deus de Castro Lobo (1794–1832), José Joaquim Emerico Lobo de Mesquita (1746–1805), Ignácio Parreiras Neves ( 1730? -1794), Francisco Gomes da Rocha (1754? -1808), Marcos Coelho Neto (1763-1823), José Maurício Nunes Garcia (1767-1830) and Antônio dos Santos Cunha (1800-1822). Most of the historical scenes in the film were shot in the town of Tiradentes , not far from São João del Rei .
distribution
Symphonia Colonialis had in October 1991 at the XV. São Paulo International Film Festival premiered in Brazil. The first broadcast in Germany was on October 1, 1991 on SWF . The HR showed the film on August 30, 1992. He was last broadcast on Hessian Radio in March 1995th It was shown on May 25, 2010 at the “Festival del XVIII secolo” in Lecce (Italy).
Web links
- Symphonia Colonialis in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Presentation of the film
- Flávia Camargo Toni, Valquíria Maroti Carozze: Mário de Andrade, Francisco Curt Lange e Carleton Sprague Smith: as discotecas públicas, o conhecimento musical ea política cultural. In: Revista do Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros. 2013, No. 57, pp. 181-204, ISSN 0020-3874 . Retrieved May 31, 2017 (Portuguese).
Individual evidence
- ^ Curt Lange Archive: Biographical note on Francisco Curt Lange. Retrieved May 31, 2017.
- ↑ Fabiola Moreira Resende: A Orquestra Ribeiro Bastos de São João del-Rey - MG: prática e aprendizagem musical em uma tradição tricentenária. Belo Horizonte 2011. Also: Dissertation, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais. (PDF; 9 MB). Retrieved May 31, 2017 (Portuguese).
- ↑ “Música mineira é tema de filme” in Estado de Minas, Segunda Seção, from April 7, 1991
- ^ In Vida , São Paulo, sexta-feira, October 25, 1991, p. 16
- ↑ in Folha de S. Paulo , “guia da mostra”, quinta-feira, from October 17, 1991, Especial page 13
- ↑ in La Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno : “Musica e Schiavitù” (Music and Slavery) of October 25, 2010.