(PDF) Global Currents, Musical Streams: European Opera in Colonial Southeast Asia

The advancement of the new transportation and communications technologies in the nineteenth century changed the landscape of the trade between Asia and Europe. Steam transportation, the telegraph, and the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 heightened the pace of material trade and labour migrations (including cultural workers), along with commercial transactions of cultural goods and performance cultures. These steamships that carried the raw products from East to theWest also carried musical instruments, musical scores, and opera and theatre companies from Europe to Asia. This article surveys primary archival sources and recent literature on the itinerant European opera companies that arrived in Southeast Asia in the nineteenth century and analyses the economic and sociological aspects of this phenomenon. This article also examines the local responses to the travelling theatre troupes which took residencies in the different Southeast Asian cities. Keywords

Global Currents, Musical Streams: European Opera in Colonial Southeast Asia Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 2017, Vol. 44(1) 54–74 ! The Author(s) 2017 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1748372717741440 journals.sagepub.com/home/nct meLê yamomo Abstract The advancement of the new transportation and communications technologies in the nineteenth century changed the landscape of the trade between Asia and Europe. Steam transportation, the telegraph, and the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 heightened the pace of material trade and labour migrations (including cultural workers), along with commercial transactions of cultural goods and performance cultures. These steamships that carried the raw products from East to the West also carried musical instruments, musical scores, and opera and theatre companies from Europe to Asia. This article surveys primary archival sources and recent literature on the itinerant European opera companies that arrived in Southeast Asia in the nineteenth century and analyses the economic and sociological aspects of this phenomenon. This article also examines the local responses to the travelling theatre troupes which took residencies in the different Southeast Asian cities. Keywords Opera, early globalisation, Southeast Asia Overture Since people [in Manila] are fond of jests, some gallants . . . took it into their heads to announce the imminent arrival of an Italian opera company, and in order to make their announcement credible, one of them became the supposed correspondent of an impresario in Italy. He published letters from Italy giving an imposing list of names of Corresponding author: meLê yamomo Email: m.j.yamomo@uva.nl European Opera in Colonial Southeast Asia 55 more or less famous artists; then he opened an ofﬁce for subscriptions payable in advance. The joke was kept up for several months with announcements of the troupe’s arrival being delayed because of the illness of performers who had to be disembarked en route; next, because the Red Sea had practically dried up, making navigation impossible; then again, because a giant balloon was being built in Egypt to transport the opera company. At last the subscribers, ﬁne fellows who had allowed themselves to be taken in, started muttering; the jesting correspondent then announced that on account of the FrancoPrussian War the troupe would not be able to come and that he was prepared to return the amounts already collected from the subscribers. Thus ended the subscription drive.1 Thus was the account of Belgian traveller J. de Man, who wrote a personal account of his voyage to the Philippines in 1874 in the self-published book Souvenirs d’un voyage aux ıˆles Philippines. De Man – whom Hispanic Philippines cultural historian Wenceslao Retana2 called ‘a writer in the shape of a superﬁcial and self-assured journalist’ – was recounting his journey as one of the ﬁrst European tourists who had travelled to Southeast Asia via the Suez Canal when it opened in 1869. However, already in 1865, a French opera company under the leadership of the impresario Alfred Maugard had already taken residency at the Teatro Prı́ncipe del Alfonso and ran a ﬁve-month opera season of seventeen productions in the repertoire.3 Maugard’s opera company, advertised as La compañı´a lı´rica francesa in the local newspapers, arrived in Manila from Singapore in transit from the Dutch East Indies where they resided for two years, running several opera seasons in the capital Batavia (now Jakarta) and the port city of Surabaya. The following year, Don Federico Stringer,4 impresario of Compañia de la Opera, took residence at the Teatro de Tondo. Between 1867 and 1868, another Italian opera company, headed by Giovanni Pompei, ran an opera season in Manila.5 It is perhaps the remnants of these operatic excitements in Manila which De Man recorded in his memoir. De Man’s humorous narrative serves as an epigraph of this section, not for its historically (inaccurate) account. Rather, it provides an insight towards a pervading understanding of opera’s implication with the globalising economy, which I will come back to below. Historical musicologist Michael McClellan,6 writing about the French opera in colonial Vietnam, observes that ‘[i]tinerant opera troupes crisscrossed Southeast Asia throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, performing in a variety of colonial centres like Shanghai, Manila, and Batavia. Unfortunately, little scholarly attention has been paid to these performers.’ While touring theatre and opera companies were ubiquitous in the cities along the nineteenth-century steamship route from Europe to Southeast Asia, this phenomenon is only recently being given scholarly attention in the ﬁelds of musicology and theatre history. The challenges facing the researcher of this topic could be attributed to two main reasons: one is material, and one is ideological. The ﬁrst impediment pertains to the location and state of the archival materials in the region. The archives in 56 Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 44(1) post-colonial Southeast Asia are often either in restricted state buildings or are scattered in previous colonisers’ libraries. In Manila, historical musicologist William Summers7 spent the last twenty years taking on the herculean task of gathering together scattered surviving documents, piecing together available materials that are spread in different university libraries and archives. This project is of extreme importance, particularly if we consider the history and current condition of the nineteenth-century archives in the Philippine capital. The destructive invasion of the Philippines by the USA in 1898 and the onslaught of the Second World War reduced many archives and libraries to rubble, wiping out centuries of records. Philippine historian and archivist Vincente Hernandez,8 in his survey of the Philippine library history, recounts historian Gregorio Zaide’s eyewitness account that described how [t]he outbreak of World War II in the Philippines in December 1941 tolled the death-knell of almost all the rich repositories of Filipiniana materials in the country. At war’s end, the Philippines became a desolate country of ruins, the extent of the devastation being equalled only by the extensively bombed city of Warsaw in Poland. Hernandez9 further explains that the Philippine National Library recovered only 36,600 volumes out of 733,000, whereas the University of the Philippines saved only three thousand out of its 147,000 volumes. Government libraries and scholarly collections in religious institutions were either destroyed or looted.10 The archives in Hanoi and Jakarta are restricted and require approval for use by government bureaucrats, which could take some months to be issued. After a few weeks of waiting time, I managed to access the colonial archives in Hanoi. As for the records pertaining to the Dutch Indies, I ended up working with the digitised collection at the Dutch Royal Library and Archive in the Hague, which have now been made public online. The materials in Singapore have also been digitised and are also easily accessible. However, the organising principle of not just the Singaporean national archive, but most postcolonial Southeast Asian national archives, is premised on nationalist ideologies. This overlaps with the second challenge in writing the translocal cultural historiography of nineteenth-century Southeast Asia in how it requires researchers to cross the archival and historiographical borders of the nations studied, while sifting through the historical records that are organised, controlled, and often restricted by the ideologies and teleologies of the nation states. Even the unitary naming of the Southeast Asian region itself did not happen until the middle of the twentieth century.11 Almost all of what are now modern nation states in the region were different colonies separated and segmented by the imperial powers. These rivalling colonial powers ensured strong cultural and intellectual links between their colonial territories and the imperial capital in Europe while striving to segregate the local affairs of the colony from their surrounding colonial powers. Southeast Asian scholars are often more cognizant of their European coloniser’s heritage than of their neighbouring countries. European Opera in Colonial Southeast Asia 57 Given these two challenges, therefore, the nineteenth-century migrant artists and entertainers as historical actors fall in between the cracks of the archival and ideological boundaries. Local archivists do not know how to organise their records since they often do not have a categorical place within the ﬁling system that reﬂects a national(ist) agenda. These historical ﬁgures are also often excluded in current modes of historiography which are often premised on the nation state – their records are overlooked by historians, or they are considered insigniﬁcant to local history. This happens two ways: ﬁrst, the migrant actor is omitted in the history of their nation of origin because the archive lacks records during their period of absence in the ‘home country’. Second, the migrant actor is ignored in their host country because their transience is deemed inconsequential to national(ist) teleology. By researching the translocal movements of historical artistic and cultural actors, what conclusions can we draw on the earlier trajectories of modernities that predated nationalism? What global cultural processes interlinked the cities within Southeast Asia and other regions, prior to the ubiquity of the nation states? In this paper, I investigate the emergence of travelling theatre companies and musicians in Southeast Asia during the age of empire and look at how this instigated a new stage in modernity with the globalisation of commercial, cultural practices. The focus of this paper is European opera and music-theatre companies taking residencies in the cities of Manila, Singapore, Hanoi, and Batavia (now Jakarta). The second section of the paper will brieﬂy discuss local music-theatre forms that capitalised on the same theatrical trade routes and networks, as well as those that emerged in response to the arrival of the European operas. While the length restriction of this paper cannot expound on these, further research on these topics is highly warranted. This paper will survey primary archival sources, as well as recent literature on the itinerant opera companies that arrived in Southeast Asia in the second half of the nineteenth century. The painstaking work by historical musicologists William Summers and Michael McClellan on colonial opera in Manila and Hanoi, respectively, provides details of the localised engagements of the travelling opera companies in these cities. Their observations will serve as important threads in reﬂecting on the interwoven histories of these translocal migrations of theatre and opera. The analysis provided in this article will focus more on the economic and sociological aspects of this phenomenon, rather than the aesthetic and cultural aspects. Act 1: Aboard the Steamship [F]or the Italian nation, the art of music is not only a source of glory, but also the primary cause of an enormous commerce, which has ramiﬁcations in the whole world. – Camillo Cavour12 In this proclamation, the Italian statesman responsible for unifying Italy into one nation state, Camillo Cavour, was not just referring to the fact that by the nineteenth century, every major city in Europe and the Americas had an Italian opera house. By the second half of the nineteenth century, Italian opera companies were 58 Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 44(1) at the heels of the trading ships crossing the other side of the Indian Ocean, following the trail of the globalising capitalist market. The humour behind De Man’s faulty recollection of opera in Manila relies on the logistical and economic involvedness in exporting opera to the other side of the world, which perhaps only a few decades earlier was considered an incredulity. There is also the notion of the windhandel (wind trade) – a source of criticism and jokes about the Dutch colonial enterprise in the East Indies,13 which has now transferred to the business of touring opera companies. In piecing together the Manila newspaper advertisements between 1865 and 1898, historical musicologist William Summers14 documented the residencies of fourteen Italian opera companies in Manila, which does not include zarzuelas, operettas, drama companies, and circus shows. These lyrical companies arriving in Manila were often already travelling in the different cities along the steamship route from Europe to Southeast Asia. With the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, the inﬂux of trade and cultural exchange between Europe and Southeast Asia grew exponentially. In the 1860s, before the opening of the Suez, about a thousand European and American ships were plying the East Asian waters. By 1879, the number of ships grew to eleven thousand. Benito Legarda Jr15 observes how this affected the economics in Manila stating that in the same period, trade rose from 50 to 400 million pesos. Steamships made it possible for the raw products from the colonies to reach Europe in one month. Conversely, European manufactured products – including the latest books from Europe, Western musical instruments, and music scores – arrived in the Southeast Asian ports. The same ships that carried these were boarded by opera, operetta, zarzuela, and drama companies from Europe. Thus, when global historian Michael Pearson16 describes the era after the opening of the Suez Canal where ‘all [are] overcome by steam ships and steam trains . . . and for the ﬁrst time production, as opposed to trade, is affected’, the business of the performing arts has been inevitably implicated in the global market. The British Empire controlled the major commercial and passenger shipping companies in the nineteenth century, establishing a systematic route of calling and re-coaling ports along its empire across the Indian Ocean: Liverpool, Gibraltar, Malta, Alexandria, Port Said, Suez, Aden, Muscat, India, Sri Lanka, Burma, Malaya, ending in Singapore. From Singapore, travellers could continue to different points in Southeast Asia, and also further to the far colonies towards Hong Kong, Shanghai, Australia, and New Zealand. This development marked the beginning of a modern translocal cultural practice in the touring theatre, opera, and lyric-dramatic companies travelling across continents. For the ﬁrst time in history, commercial professional theatre began to operate on a global scale. By the 1880s, with further developments in passenger ship operations, the ﬂow of passengers travelling between continents increased – and so did touring performing companies. Thus, it is no accident that these port cities would become the touring route of the itinerant opera companies from Europe who would then travel all the way to the antipodean territories. From Singapore, Italian, French, and English European Opera in Colonial Southeast Asia 59 theatre and opera companies would jump to nearby cities of Batavia, Saigon, Hong Kong, and Manila. During this time, Singapore was just a port of transit where the steamship line from Europe ended, and passengers transferred to local ships bound for other cities in Southeast and Northeast Asia, and to the Antipodes. Until the last decade of the nineteenth century, Singapore was not a destination for theatre residency. Nevertheless, touring theatre companies and musicians would often offer a night or two of performance engagement at the local town hall while waiting for their further journey to urban capitals. The same steamship transportation technology that was crossing the Paciﬁc also made it possible for the Irish impresario W. S. Leyster’s opera company to take residencies in Australia, New Zealand, and further to Southeast Asia in the 1870s.17 By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, this trade route had become a thoroughfare of different travelling performing troupes including circuses, minstrel shows, and different Asian traditional and contemporary theatre forms. While Chinese opera and modern Parsi theatre had already been circulating within Southeast Asia in the middle of the nineteenth century, the new global trade route also saw Asian performing troupes travelling to Europe and North America in the late nineteenth century. Some of these entertainment businesses later became dominated by Asian performers, musicians, and impresarios such as the Japanese circus troupes who competed with the touring troupes from Italy, England, and Russia. By the end of the nineteenth century, Manila musicians were ubiquitous in the entire Asian Paciﬁc where every Asian city would have had a Manila band.18 To be one of the pioneering opera companies to cross three continents, bringing a full operatic season of ﬁfteen to twenty productions was a logistical feat. Exporting opera productions was more complex than the trading of raw or manufactured products. Opera involves the concerted effort of a sizeable group of singers and production staff, as well as the delivery of costumes and constructed sets. Additionally, opera (unlike drama) also requires the organisation of a musical ensemble whose skills and quality are part and parcel of the high prices of tickets that were pre-sold prior to the arrival of these companies in the Southeast Asian cities. So while the business of touring an opera company must have been a potentially lucrative enterprise for an entire company to cross oceans and continents while relying mainly on ticket and season subscription sales, for the forerunning impresarios and operatic troupes, such ventures also entailed huge amounts of risk. To further understand the economics of travelling opera in Southeast Asia, we also need to understand the economisation of music and theatre happening concomitantly with the shifts in production, distribution, and consumption of goods, services, and ideas propelled by mechanisms of a globalising market. Opera is the most industrial of the live performing art forms. This is not surprising as its development coincided with the industrialisation of Europe. Industrialisation saw the development of big corporate organisations with the capacity to orchestrate various departments producing various parts that needed to be assembled as one operatic product. In this sense, opera houses in Europe are industrial factories 60 Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 44(1) of this extremely elaborate art form. Opera houses are the workplace of a complex web of departments ﬁlled with highly skilled labourers – from the carpenters and costume-makers to the singers, corps de ballet, orchestra, and choir – not to mention dedicated marketing and publicity departments that ensure the returns of the massive investments for each production. Thus, when the opera companies boarded the steamships and brought their industrial art form to the different continents, the global cultural industry also began.19 Indeed, the modernisation of the performing arts has been tied to the ticket economy, where a time and space-speciﬁc event (or events in the case of a subscription to an entire season) that is intended to provide an aesthetic experience is paid in advance. However, it is only the proliferation of quick and efﬁcient transportation and communication that allowed this form of cultural economics to develop on a transcontinental scale – when opera subscriptions could be sold in advance in another continent prior to the arrival of the production team involved. Two further paradigmatic shifts in the modes of operatic production can be observed as touring companies intertwined with the social processes of the colonial cities in Southeast Asia. First is the establishment of modern ﬁxed theatre structures in the colonial cities. While the concept of professional and commercial travelling theatre companies had been present in different cultures in Europe and Asia, the physical requirement of opera to have a ﬁxed theatre as a performance venue with technical speciﬁcations required for its performance was new in Southeast Asia. Until the nineteenth century, spaces for theatre and music were often the same venues used for religious or royal rituals and rites. In the 1800s, there had already been travelling amateur and indigenous professional performance troupes circulating in the regional networks of festivals and town festivities. Often with these travelling groups, their performance venues were temporal structures set up for the special events. With the arrival of opera in colonial Southeast Asia, there began the proliferation of ﬁxed-structure theatres. The importation of opera by the colonial states was made possible by setting up these modern structures that catered to the needs of the most extravagant of the European arts (although a counter-argument can be raised regarding whether the importation of opera was necessary to justify the establishment of these often expensive, grandiose architectural buildings). As mentioned above, the French imperialists made it their mission to build three opera houses in colonial Vietnam. In Manila, there already existed rudimentary theatres for the Spanish and Tagalog dramas and commedias.20 Opera companies taking residencies in the local theatres would also pay for the renovation of the theatres to suit the needs of their production. In the Dutch East Indies, the Bataviasche Schouwburg, which hosted dramatic performances by local amateur theatre groups, opened in 1821. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the port city of Surabaya grew to become the colony’s second biggest cosmopolitan city of commerce and an important theatre city in the territory. As Southeast Asian theatre historian Mathew Isaac Cohen21 pointed out, the Surabajasche Schouwburg, built in 1854, ‘hosted touring English music-hall European Opera in Colonial Southeast Asia 61 companies, Italian opera, French troupes performing opéra comique and opéra bóuffe, and Dutch ensembles enacting farces and melodramas’. If one would survey the local newspaper in the Dutch East Indies in the second half of the nineteenth century, one would ﬁnd an abundance of advertisements and reviews of performances of these performing troupes. The European opera companies often spent several months running full theatre seasons in these two cities. Most of these performing companies would have come from or would move on to other Southeast and Far-Eastern Asian cities to run local theatre seasons. In French Indochina, the extravagant colonial government, keen on its mission civilisation, built three opera houses. The Saigon Opera House was ﬁnished in 1897. The Haiphong Opera House was built in 1904 and opened in 1912. When the French moved their capital to Hanoi in 1887, the most elaborate opera house was built there in 1901, although it was not fully operational until 1911. Of all the imperial powers in the Southeast Asian region, it was France that made it the colonial state’s mission to build these opera houses and to ﬁnance their theatre seasons which involved contracting and importing opera companies from France.22 The second shift in the mode of production in the performing arts is seen in how opera instigated the professionalisation of performance production in its human resource and labour requirements. This applies to actors, singers, and musicians, as well as designers and painters such as the teloneros or scenery painters. This notion of professionalisation would vary in its deﬁnition from city to city in the colonies. However, for the purpose of this article, I emphasise the basic notion of professionalisation as the practice of contracting artists in a salaried position to perform, and with this, the attached notion of quality. This echoes, for example, the strict contractual requirements of Madame Debry, the contracted opera director of the French Resident Superior in Hanoi, to hire only professional singers from France for the 1894 opera season in Tonkin.23 Such a requirement, McClellan24 argues, ‘was undoubtedly intended to keep her from employing inferior singers who had been dropped from the ranks of the Saigon troupe or from itinerant opera companies travelling in Asia’. This stringent notion of professionalism in the French colonial government even excluded the local amateur French musicians in the colonial territory, and this blocked opportunities for the Annamites to participate. On the other hand, the case of opera in Manila provides a case study in how a synthesis of various global events integrated native Filipino musicians into the rising demand for professional musicians in this globalising performing arts industry. Travelling opera, zarzuela, drama, and circus companies arrived in Manila to ﬁnd several locally existing orchestras. These ensembles were often servicing the parochial needs of the local parishes, solemnising church events and religious festivities, as well as accompanying local theatrical performances. The establishment of the theatres and concert halls meant that music and the performing arts shifted towards an autonomous cultural practice independent from the ecclesiastical framework. The demand for professional musicians in commercial entertainment in Manila led to the establishment of a musicians’ union, the Union Artistico-Musical, in 1885.25 62 Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 44(1) In surveying various archival documents from different nineteenth-century Southeast Asian cities, two parallel frameworks become apparent regarding the economic and political value by which imperial powers viewed theatre and opera. The ﬁrst model is a subsidised system, but highly controlled by the colonial government (as was the case in French Vietnam) or by the monarch (in the case of Thailand). The second is the free market model practised in the cultural scene in Manila. In the case of the Dutch Indies, the initial interest in bringing opera in the colony was subsidised by the Hague, although this was eventually superseded by a less regulated system that relied on the ingenuity of the impresarios who took advantage of the rising local middle class in the colonial urban capitals. In the cultural landscape of colonial Southeast Asia, these economic models directly inﬂuenced the reception of European opera among the indigenous population. This connects with the topic of the following section. Act 2: Dissonance and Counterpoint Western modernity and its attendant technologies made it possible for European opera to arrive in Southeast Asia. Conversely, opera, I argue, became entangled with local discourses of cultural modernities in the region. In this section, I observe instances of the development of plural cultural modernities based on the different indigenous communities’ responses to the migration of European commercial entertainment in the Southeast Asian cities. Such responses also need to be understood within the two concurrent tendencies in the social practices of modernity. One direction of modernity is the social integration towards nation-building. The discourse of nationalism and modernity is best argued by sociologist and political scientist Liah Grenfeld26 in her proposition that nationalism is a prerequisite of modernity. Opera and nation-building were manifested in late nineteenth-century Manila when a local all-Filipino company was established in 1888, and later through the production of a Tagalog opera, Sangdugong Panaguinip, that demanded Philippine autonomy (as a protectorate) during the US occupation. Concomitantly, modernity also manifests itself through the global integration of economics and the blurring of cultural boundaries. This can be observed in the shift in historiography towards transnationalism in an attempt to explain manifestations of modernity. This paradigm brings to fore the need to historicise the entanglements of the economics, labour exchange, and cultural practices of the already interconnected cities and societies in Asia, Europe, America, Australia, and Africa before the 1950s. Peter Hitchcock27 underlines the fact that ‘it is only recently that cultural critique has begun to come to terms with the vital implications of culture’s movement as a measure of human interdependence on a world scale.’ However, I want to problematise here the term transnationalism. As a compound word, it is categorically hinged to the word nation, which conceptually extends to nation state being a requisite to global interaction. The usage of the term transnational becomes further problematic when applied to nineteenth-century Southeast Asia when the nation states that we know of in the region today did European Opera in Colonial Southeast Asia 63 not exist yet. I recommend, therefore, the use of translocality to describe the nonterritorial speciﬁcity of cultural modernity that sets the context of the migration of opera in nineteenth-century Southeast Asia. Within the intersection of these trajectories of modern globalisation, the migration of European opera instigated polyphonic – at times in dissonant counterpoint, at times enharmonic – articulations of modernities in the different cities in the region. The French imperialists in Vietnam implemented a performing arts policy that was substantially subsidised but highly regulated by the colonial state. The colonial government favoured primarily French opera and operetta repertoire and was only interested in speciﬁcally importing musicians and performers from France. In 1895, the second year that the organisation of an opera season was contracted by the Resident Superior of Tonkin to Mme Debry, her contract stipulated that she was to recruit performers directly from France.28 While there were talented amateur performers from local groups such as the Philharmonic Society, it appears that they were not allowed to perform with the visiting opera companies, which were accompanied by downsized orchestras of fourteen imported musicians.29 A school for professional music was also not organised until 1927 and ran only for three years.30 A complete dossier of the visiting opera and operetta company and its accompanying orchestra at the French colonial archive from the theatre season of 1924–25 provides insights on the repertoire of the contracted troupe and orchestra, as well as details of their contract.31 The repertoire of that theatre season comprised eleven productions: Opera Comique (Le Roy d’Ys, La Favorite, Rigoletto, Faust, Pelle´as et Me´lisande, La Navarraise et Cavalie`ra Rusticana, Le Jongleur de notre Dame, Marouf, Tarass Boubla, and La Fille de Far West) and Opérettes (La Veuve joyeuse, Reˆve de Valse, Phi Phi, La Chaste Suzanne, Les Travux d’Hercule, Le Sire de Vergy, Madame, Be´bel et Quinquin, Ciboueltte, and La Perle de Chicago). Under the direction of M. Breton Caubet, two separate troupes were contracted: one group of opera comique performers and another group for operette. Ten soloists were hired, four female and six male singers. There were two separate main sopranos and tenors assigned for the opera-comique and operetta. An additional twelve choristers were on the roster. Eight musicians were hired from France: the orchestral director, violin soloist, ﬁrst violinist, cellist, pianist, ﬂautist, oboist, and bassoonist. By this time, three local musicians were recruited in Hanoi. For the performers hired for the season, their contracts stipulated hierarchy in their salaries and privileges. For example, the contract of Mme Arnolds, the mezzo contra-alto, provided for second-class passage from Paris to Hanoi with provisions for 200 kg of luggage, whereas M. Berger, premiere operetta tenor and secondary operacomique tenor, travelled third class also with a 200 kg allowance. M. Moreu, the orchestra director also travelled second class but only had provisions for 50 kg of luggage, whereas M. Giroud, the violin soloist travelled in third class with 50 kg allowance. The bigger travel weight allowance would be the provision for the costumes and stage-props that the performers would bring for their roles. At the 64 Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 44(1) time, it was a common practice for opera singers to provide the costumes of the opera characters of their singing repertoire. For this engagement, Mme Arnolds was committed to twelve performances per month or a total of sixty performances for the entire ﬁve-month season with a salary of 250 piastres monthly. M. Berger was contracted for ﬁfteen performances per week (seventy-ﬁve for the entire season) with a salary of 300 piastres. The orchestra director and violin soloist who played on all season performances received 300 and 200 piastres, respectively. If we compare the singers’ and musicians’ salaries with the 5000 piastres that comprised the average annual income of French expatriates in Hanoi at the time,32 it can be construed that these are not necessarily high-end engagements. And as McClellan33 points out, the performers who were hired for the theatre seasons in colonial Vietnam were from provincial cities rather than from Paris. In McClellan’s account, opera did not take root among the Annamites (indigenous Vietnamese).34 He sees a disconnected relationship between the French colonisers and the local colonial subjects, and the negative attitude by the Annamites towards the Western art form. The power relationship involved in the production of the opera, as well as the lack of interest of the locals, did not bring about any fruitful engagement in the imported art form; thus the aesthetic, cultural, and social possibilities for the intersection of the colonial culture and the local fell short. As McClellan observed: This apathy toward the theatre belied its usefulness as a tool of cultural propaganda in particular, and betrayed widespread Vietnamese skepticism about the vaunted beneﬁts of colonization more generally. This is reﬂected in the name of the theater itself: In Vietnamese, it was commonly referred to as Nhà hát tây (Western Theater) as opposed to Nhà hát thành phô (Municipal Theater), thereby emphasizing its foreign status. In short, the introduction of opera to Tonkin revealed the futility of the mission civilisatrice itself and exposed the limitations of both assimilation and association.35 By the 1930s, French control of the political, economic, and cultural life in Hanoi and Saigon weakened as the anti-colonial and local Vietnamese nationalist movement fought for the country’s independence from the colonisers. In Thailand, a country that was never ofﬁcially subjugated under any European colonial inﬂuence, the interest in opera was greatly mediated by King Rama VI Vajiravudh. When Vajiravudh was ten, he travelled with his father King Rama V Chulalongkorn and other members of the royal family to Singapore. On 2 June 1890, they saw the performance of William Schwenck Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan’s The Mikado, staged by the visiting Stanley Opera Company at the Singapore Town Hall.36 Here we see how the global means of transportation allowed a touring operetta company, a travelling crown prince, and new circulating aesthetics to converge in a transit city in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Thai historical musicologist Poonpit Amattayakul37 argues that Vajiravudh’s exposure to this production sparked his interest in opera so much that during his studies in Europe, he saw several productions and participated in some European Opera in Colonial Southeast Asia 65 performances. Upon his return to Bangkok, he asked his English tutor Robert Laurie Morant to order a copy of the libretto of The Mikado which he attempted unsuccessfully to translate into Thai.38 In 1892, when he came to England for his studies, he immediately went to the Savoy Theatre to see The Mikado again.39 While on a ﬁve-day trip to Paris in 1898, the Crown Prince saw Charles François Gounod’s Faust, as well as Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca and La Boheme.40 During his travel in Germany, he also played in some performances and dressed as a woman playing female roles.41 Vajiravudh succeeded as the King of Thailand in 1910. During his reign, he invited the Italian conductor Alberto Nazzari to train a European band in Bangkok.42 As a culmination of the establishment of a Western orchestra in the kingdom, Vajiravudh produced Pietro Mascagni’s Il Cavalleria Rusticana as a Red Cross fund-raiser in 1918. In the same year, Vajiravudh appointed Phra Chenduriyang (also known by his Western name, Peter Viet) as the director of the Royal Western String Orchestra. In 1921, Viet conducted Ruggero Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci. This early interest in opera was cut short by the death of Vajiravudh in 1925. In 1986, a handwritten draft of an opera libretto by Vajiravudh entitled Chao Tak Sin () was discovered in Berlin, which he probably wrote during his studies in Europe.43 In these two cases, one observes how opera as a cultural enterprise was supported from the top down: the French imperial government in colonial Vietnam, and King Rama VI Vajiravudh in Thailand. In both cases, the elitist nature by which opera was introduced and maintained prevented it from ﬁnding local appreciation that would allow this cultural practice to interweave with the indigenous performing arts traditions. Act 3: Harmony and Syncretisation? When the directive for the building of a theatre in Batavia was given by the high colonial government of Dutch East Indies, no ﬁnancial support was provided. The entire enterprise was intended to be supported entirely by ticket sales.44 In its ﬁrst few decades in the early nineteenth century, the theatre ran intermittent performances by local and visiting Dutch and English amateur drama groups, as well as musical concerts. In November 1944, the ﬁrst opera company arrived – a French troupe from Bordeaux under the direction of a Mr J. Roberts, which offered a mixture of dramatic and lyrical productions. The group took residence at the Bataviasche Schouwburg and offered a subscription for a theatre season running several months beginning in December 1944. The company then travelled to Sumarang where they ran a similar theatre engagement.45 Until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, these visiting companies were so far in between that when the Dutch newspaper columnist and novelist Paul Adriaan Daum visited Batavia in 1885, he made a remark on the Bataviasche Schouwburg as ‘[a] beautiful building, but . . . nothing inside’.46 66 Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 44(1) In the 1860s, three opera companies toured the region, taking several monthslong residencies in the cities of Batavia, Medan, Manila, and Hong Kong. One of these was the French troupe headed by the impresario Alfred Maugard. William Summers’s47 excavation of extant Manila newspapers in the 1860s yields a meticulous report of the residency of Maugard’s opera company in Manila in 1865. Maugard’s company, which was called La Compañı´a Lirica Francesa (The French Lyrical Company) on newspaper advertisements in Manila, was referred to as Het Fransche Operagezelschap te Batavia (The French Opera Company of Batavia) during its residency in the Dutch East Indies.48 The company also performed for two nights during transit in Singapore in 1863 prior to departing for the Dutch territories for a two-year tour. Two more operas were performed again at the Singapore Town Hall in 1865 during the troupe’s transit from Batavia on the way to Manila. In Singapore, the company was referred to as the Batavia Opera Company. This non-standardised naming shows that during this nascent period of globalising performing arts industry, the notion of creating a global ‘brand’ was not yet in practice. Like the other touring opera companies of the time, Maugard’s company had most probably escaped the major French cities – which would already have their resident opera companies – to come to the colonial territories seeking luck and fortune. In these early stages of the itinerant opera business, the impresarios would be banking on the European expatriates as their ticket buyers. These enterprising peripatetic opera companies that would ﬁnd their way to Southeast Asia found raving audiences in Manila, Batavia, and Surabaya. Moreover, during this early stage, the arrival of these independent companies was sporadic such that when the French began its importation of French opera companies in Indochina, the Dutch colonial government tried to negotiate for these troupes to add residencies in Batavia into their itinerary. This was the case in 1888, which was reported in the Java Bode: The management of the Batavia Theatre announces that they are in negotiation about bringing in the French Opera and Operetta company which is subsidised by the French Colonial Government at 140,000 francs – presently performing in Saigon and with the view that this subsidised troupe is better than the not subsidised companies that have recently visited this place.49 The eight-month negotiations did not pan out well when the theatre management reported in September that the company had already arrived in Mauritius.50 They promised to continue to request the engagement of the opera group to come to the Dutch East Indies. One, however, could surmise that the French would demand exclusivity with their contracted companies, with ﬁxed arrangements for transportation from and back to Europe. For the troupe, compared to the ﬁnancial stability of a ﬁxed-salary contract by the French colonial government, the insecurity of ticket-based income may not be worth the risk. While the unregulated entertainment market in the Dutch East Indies and Manila may have initially attracted third-rate European companies seeking European Opera in Colonial Southeast Asia 67 audiences in the Far East, the openness of the playing ground also allowed for the local performers and impresarios to engage in this globalising industry. This was certainly the case with the Parsi Theatre in Bombay that would eventually inﬂuence the development of the Komedie Stamboel in Surabaya. Mathew Cohen51 traces the genealogy of the Komedie Stamboel (also known as Malay Opera) in Indonesia to the Parsi theatre from Bombay that came to Surabaya, and the commercialisation of the indigenous Wayang wong which adapted the ticket system and casting of professional performers (as opposed to the nobilities who were previously the only ones allowed to perform in the classical form). The Parsi theatre, as opposed to traditional theatre in India, was a purely commercial venture that employed the latest theatrical spectacular scenographies and whose repertoire drew from ‘Puranic materials, Sanskrit epics, Shakespeare, Middle Eastern romances and the Arabian Nights/European farce, local legend and history, or the latest adventure novel’.52 The music of the Parsi theatre was a mixture of classical and popular Indian music intermixed with ‘semi-European tunes’, which would have been an interweaving of melodies from the European operas also being performed by itinerant troupes in the Indian subcontinent. In the 1860s, the Parsi theatre companies already began to travel in Southeast Asia to Singapore, the Malay Straits, and the Dutch East Indies, which later generated local imitations of the theatrical form.53 In Surabaya, the ﬁrst attempt to translate the Parsi theatre repertoire to Malay using European songs and to employ ‘Indos’ (mixed native Indonesian and European) casts was done by a Chinese opera owner Yap Goan Thay.54 His theatre company was eventually bought out in 1894 by the Indo actor/musician/theatre manager August Mahieu, who established the popular and highly successful Komedie Stamboel.55 After its establishment, the company and its theatre form travelled all over the archipelago. Komedie Stamboel performances were always packed despite high ticket prices which were comparable to the European opera performances.56 The Komedie Stamboel’s original productions drew heavily from stories from the Arabian Nights and popular stories of the time. An Italian strings and woodwind quintet – which took residence in Surabaya in the 1890s and regularly performed in European and local public events, as well as accompanied visiting opera companies – was contracted by Mahieu to accompany the Komedie Stamboel.57 Later on, the troupe established its own orchestra of hybrid European and traditional Javanese instrumentations. It employed extravagant costumes and stage designs and often integrated popular comic dramaturgy from the popular comic operas and operettas that came to visit the Dutch colony. For example, Harry Stanley’s English Comic and Burlesque Opera Company, which had a long run in the Surabaya Schouwburg in 1891, left a strong cultural imprint on Komedie Stamboel’s use of stereotyped European operetta melodies in their burlesque performances that Mahieu picked up for the their productions. As an example of the different cultural entanglements of the travelling troupes in the Southeast Asian commercial theatre networks, Harry Stanley’s company is the same troupe that performed The Mikado that Chulalongkorn and Vajiravudh saw in Singapore. 68 Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 44(1) Cohen58 argues that Komedie Stamboel, being the ‘ﬁrst performing art to emerge in the [Dutch East] Indies with currency throughout the archipelago . . . had a signiﬁcant role in shaping what Hildred Geertz long ago described as Indonesia’s ‘‘metropolitan superculture’’, an ‘‘integrating system’’ connecting cities and towns into a single network.’ In the case of Manila and its 333 years of European contact, historical musicologist D. R. M Irving has traced how the city functioned as an important node in the early modern global networks (it being the gateway to Asia in the trans-Paciﬁc galleon trade) which allowed it to develop one of the most complex intercultural models of theatre and music globalisation. Irving59 has shown the sustained ‘enharmonic engagement’ between the Spanish colonisers and the locals that produced hybrid and syncretic musical genres, as well as performance styles that can be seen to contest and subvert colonial hegemony. The history of acculturation of Western cultural practices in Manila can be traced in two levels. First and foremost is religion, which was the primary justiﬁcation of the colonial enterprise. The Catholic Church, which served as the main patron of the initially religious music and performances, disseminated European culture. By the nineteenth century, indios who worked as church musicians and choir singers were able to convert their musical skills into cultural capital, which enabled them to raise their social status and to gain employment in the globalising commercial entertainment industry of the time. The second case was through the military, which maintained its own regimental bands. These bands were able to provide formal training as well as the ﬁrst professional music employment for the lowest class in the colonial society. It was through the free public performances of wind band arrangements of opera and zarzuela overtures and airs that such music was made available to the local masses. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Manila was also already teeming with indigenous theatre companies performing vernacular drama, komedya,60 and sainetes.61 With the arrival of travelling opera, operetta, and zarzuela troupes in Southeast Asia, not only did these companies discover an avid audience in Manila, but they also found more than ten local orchestras who were ready to accompany their performances. Similar to the Dutch East Indies, the Spanish colonial government did not offer subsidies nor did they interfere much with the theatre market, except for taxing the performances. The city government’s role was designated only to recording the tax collectable from performing arts companies, as well as settling disputes.62 The inﬂux of visiting and local performing troupes and the demand for local professional musicians led to the establishment of the locally organised musicians’ union in 1885, which helped regulate the salary scale and working conditions of the instrumentalists. In 1887, a local opera troupe was established by the composer and orchestra conductor Ladislao Bonus in Pandacan, a district of Manila. Wenceslao Retana63 describes it as a company composed of ‘tagalos de la mas pura cepa’ (Tagalogs of the purest stock). The company premiered with the production of Lucrezia Borgia in November of 1887, followed by Linda di Chamounix, Lucia di Lammermoor, La Traviata, and Fra Diavolo.64 It is through this all-indio65 opera company that European Opera in Colonial Southeast Asia 69 Manila received its Eurocentric nickname – the ‘Little Italy’ or Munting Milan (Little Milan) of the Far East.66 Bonus, who was often hired to conduct the orchestra, developed close relationships with the opera companies. Many of his students apprenticed with the visiting opera troupe. Later, local choristers and dancers were hired to perform with the visiting Italian and French companies. Within the opera circuit, Filipino opera singers completed the global exchange by coming to Europe and performing in the European opera houses. In 1899, Praxedes ‘Yeyeng’ Fernandez left for Spain and there enjoyed a successful career as a soprano for three years. Before returning to Manila, she also performed in Hong Kong and Macau. Another well-known soprano is Jovita Fuentes, who left for Milan in 1924 for further voice studies. After eight months of arduous training, she made her stage debut at the Piacenza. She later embarked on a string of music performances in Europe, essaying the roles of Liu Yu in Puccini’s Turandot, Mimi in Puccini’s La Boheme, Iris in Pietro Mascagni’s Iris, the title role of Salome (which composer Richard Strauss personally offered to her including the special role of Princess Yang Gui Fe in Li Tai Pe).67 During the change of colonial government – from Spain to the US – the ﬁrst Tagalog opera, Sandugong Panaguinip (Dreamed Alliance), was written by writer and lawyer Pedro Paterno and composed by Ladislao Bonus as a political statement for the autonomy of the new Philippine Republic. More than the grand opera form, it was the sarswela – the indigenised version of the Spanish zarzuela – which gained wide popularity throughout the Philippine archipelago at the turn of the twentieth century. This highly successful commercial music theatre form also became an important medium through which an anti-colonial Filipino identity was shaped through music and theatre.68 Coda Studying the global movement of people, and with them ideas and culture, as global historian Adam McKeown69 points out, gives ‘insight not only into the global reaches of an expanding industrial economy, but also into how this integrative economy grew concurrently with political and cultural forces that favored fragmentation into nations, races, and perceptions of distinct cultural regions’. The nineteenth-century advancement in transportation and communications technology brought cities across the continents closer than imagined before. These changes paved the way for early forms of global economics which in turn inﬂuenced cultural production both locally and translocally. The new social– economic conditions did not just amplify the exchange of material goods, but it also enabled complex ways through which music and theatrical practices could be traded. European opera singers and musicians, as well as the operatic performative and aesthetic modes of production, were transported to other regions as far as Southeast Asia, entangling it with the indigenous cultural landscapes. The various political landscapes of the cities in the region, in turn, shaped the local urban 70 Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 44(1) communities’ engagement with the visiting commercial European and Asian theatre companies, as well as the way and how local artists and cultural brokers responded to these aesthetic experiences. Opera in French Vietnam strengthened the imperial ambitions of the colonisers, while alienating the indigenous community from its cultural practice. The commercial circulation of itinerant theatre companies in the Dutch East Indies and in Spanish Philippines saw opera interweaving with impetuses of local theatrical expressions of urban experiences of modernity vis-à-vis nascent anti-colonial nationalisms. Notes 1. Jan de Man, Recollections of a Voyage to the Philippines, trans. E. Aguilar Cruz (Manila: National Historical Institute, 1984), p. 51. Original publication: Jan de Man, Souvenirs D’un Voyage Aux Iˆles Philippines, Par J. de Man (Anvers: impr. de Stockmans et Moerincx, 1872). 2. Wenceslao Emilio Retana, Noticias Histórico-Bibliográficas de El Teatro En Filipinas Desde Sus Origı´nes Hasta 1898 (Madrid: Librerı́a de V. Suárez, 1909), p. 84. 3. See William John Summers, ‘Forty-Eight Nights at the Opera: La Compañı́a Lirica Francesa in Manila in 1865’, in Anna Zayaruznaya, Bonnie J. Blackburn, and Stanley Boorman (eds), Qui Musicam in Se Habet Studies in Honor of Alejandro Enrique Planchart (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 315–46. 4. The only record of this company I found is on a litigation file against Don Federico Stringer by the actors of the Compañia de la Opera for breach of contract. See NAP: Spanish Manila (1841–97) Bundle 41/Card: 8357-8 (Binondo, 13 October 1868). 5. Ibid., p. 322. 6. Michael McClellan, ‘Performing Empire: Opera in Colonial Hanoi’, Journal of Musicological Research, 22:1–2 (2003), 144. 7. William Summers’ two decades of archival excavation, digitisation, and cataloguing of nineteenth-century newspapers in Manila will culminate in a forthcoming volume entitled William Summers, Repairing the Fractured Mirror: A Chronicle and Source Book Devoted to the Performing Arts in Manila, 1848–1898. As the title indicates, the book will serve as a source book of the vast local and global performing arts events in Manila in the last half-century of the Spanish empire. 8. Vicente S. (Vicente Stabile) Hernandez, ‘Trends in Philippine Library History’, Libraries & the Cultural Record, 36:2 (2001), 337. Originally cited from Gregorio F. Zaide and Sonia M. Zaide, Documentary Sources of Philippine History (Manila: National Book Store, 1990), l:v–vi. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid. 11. See John Sydenham Furnivall, Progress and Welfare in Southeast Asia: A Comparison of Colonial Policy and Practice (New York: Institute of Pacific Relations, 1941); John Sydenham Furnivall, Educational Progress in Southeast Asia (New York: Institute of Pacific Relations, 1943); Rupert Emerson, Lennox Mills, and Virginia Thompson, Government and Nationalism in Southeast Asia (New York: Institute of Pacific Relations, 1942); and the first attempt to write the history of the region in D. G. E. Hall, A History of South-East Asia (London: MacMillan, 1955). European Opera in Colonial Southeast Asia 71 12. Cited from William Johnson Galloway, The Operatic Problem (London: John Long, 1902), p. 25. 13. Anne Goldgar, Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age (Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 2. See also Dave Smant, Dutch Mirror of Folly, Windhandel 1720. http://sites.google.com/site/davesmant/monetary-economics/ famous-first-bubbles/windhandel-1720. 14. See William Summers, Repairing the Fractured Mirror: A Chronicle and Source Book Devoted to the Performing Arts in Manila, 1848–1898, Forthcoming. 15. Boletin de la Real Sociedad Economica de Amigos del Pais 3.4 (1 August 1884); Benito J Legarda, After the Galleons: Foreign Trade, Economic Change & Entrepreneurship in the Nineteenth Century Philippines, First Edition (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila U Press in cooperation with the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of WisconsinMadison, 2002), p. 113–4. 16. Michael Pearson, The Indian Ocean (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 24. 17. Harold Love, The Golden Age of Australian Opera: W. S. Lyster and His Companies, 1861–1880 (Paddington: Currency Press, 1981). 18. See meLê yamomo, ‘Brokering Sonic Modernities: Migrant Manila Musicians in the Asia Pacific, 1881–1948’, Popular Entertainment Studies 6:2 (2015), 22–37. 19. I use the term cultural industry here in its literal meaning – the wide-spread commercial production of cultural activities. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer coined the term culture industry in 1944 in the book Dialectic of Enlightenment to refer to the twentieth-century popular culture and media (radio, television, advertisement) as an industry that manufactures entertainment that manipulates the masses into passivity. Adorno’s critique of popular music and entertainment is polemical to the ‘high’ culture of European classical music, but this should be reconsidered as we consider the global popularity of opera as entertainment. 20. See Cristina Laconico Buenaventura, The Theater in Manila 1846–1946, Second Edition (Quezon City: C&E Publishing Inc., 2010), pp. 47–54. 21. Matthew Isaac Cohen, ‘On the Origin of the Komedie Stamboel Popular Culture, Colonial Society , and the Parsi Theatre Movement’, Asian Theatre Journal, 157 (2001), 325. 22. McClellan, ‘Performing Empire’. See also the records at The National Archives of Vietnam I (RST1). Series R (Sciences et Artes), subseries R62 (Fonds des Travaux de construction du Theater municipal de Hanoi; L’exploitation des théâtre municipal de Saigon, Hanoi et Haiphong). 23. Ibid., 144. 24. Ibid. 25. Union Artistico-Musical, ‘Reglamento De La Sociedad De Conciertos’, 1885. 26. See Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). 27. Peter Hitchcock, Imaginary States: Studies in Cultural Transnationalism (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003), p. 3. 28. McClellan, ‘Performing Empire’, 144. 29. Ibid., 162. 30. Ibid., 161. 31. The National Archives of Vietnam I – RST 44804-1. This dossier is the source of this entire paragraph. Records pertaining to the hiring of opera companies prior to the years 72 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 44(1) that are kept in this archive do not have the same amount of detailed documents as this one. Paul H. Kratoska, South East Asia, Colonial History: High Imperialism (1890s–1930s), vol. 3 (London and New York: Taylor & Francis, 2001), p. 340. McClellan, ‘Performing Empire’, 145. Annamite in this paper is the ethnonym for the antecedent of postcolonial Vietnamese and distinguished from the more general Indochina (which included present-day Cambodia and Laos). It has to be considered, however, that the term had derogatory meaning within the colonial context. Ibid., 165. Poonpit Amattayakul, , (Bangkok, 2011), p. 134. Also see Straits Times (Singapore, 3 June 1890), 1. Ibid., 135. Ibid., 134. Ibid. Ibid., 135. Ibid. See Adriana Lo Faro, La Marcia Dell’elefante Bianco: 1911, Da Torino a Bangkok (Turin: Ananke, 2006). Amattayakul, ‘ , p. 136. Marrik Bellen, ‘De Bataviase Schouwburg. Enkele Aspecten van Het Culturele Leven in Batavia/Jakarta’, Jambatan. Tijdschrift voor de geschiedenis van Indonesie¨, 2:7 (1989), 47. Javasche courant (Batavia/Jakarta, 12 June 1845). My translation from the original Dutch: ‘Een mooi gebouw, maar ... niets erin’. Cited from Bellen, ‘De Bataviase Schouwburg. Enkele Aspecten van Het Culturele Leven in Batavia/Jakarta’. See Summers, ‘Forty-Eight Nights at the Opera’. In the article, Summers provides several appendices on the names of the singers, the composition of the company’s repertoire, and the schedule of the performances. See newspaper advertisements in Java-bode: nieuws, handels- en advertentieblad voor Nederlandsch-Indie (Batavia), Bataviaasch handelsblad (Batavia), and De Oostpost: letterkundig, wetenschappelijk en commercieel nieuws- en advertentieblad (Surabaya) during its residency in the Dutch East Indies in the years 1863–64. My translation from the original Dutch: De directie van den Bataviasche Schouwburg maakt bekend dat zij in onderhandeling is over het doen herwaarts komen van het Fransche Opera- en Operetten Gezelschap, dat met eene subsidie van het Fransche Koloniale Gouvernement ad frs. 140000.— thans te Saigon speelt en met het oog op deze subsidie beter zijn kan dan de niet gesubsidieerde gezelschappen die in den laatsten tijd deze plaats bezocht hebben. Cited from Java-Bodie. Nieuws-, Handels- en Advertentieblad voor Nederlandsch-Indie (Batavia, 19 January 1888). 50. Java-Bodie. Nieuws-, Handels- en Advertentieblad voor Nederlandsch-Indie (Batavia, 9 September 1888). European Opera in Colonial Southeast Asia 73 51. Matthew Isaac Cohen, ‘On the Origin of the Komedie Stamboel: Popular Culture, Colonial Society, and the Parsi Theatre Movement,’ Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, 157:2 (2001), 321, 323–4. 52. Ibid., 316. 53. Ibid., 320. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid., 329. 56. Cohen, ‘On the Origin of the Komedie Stamboel Popular Culture’, 333. 57. Matthew Isaac Cohen, Komedie Stamboel: Popular Theater in Colonial Indonesia, 1891– 1903 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006), pp. 36–7. 58. Ibid., p. 3. 59. D. R. M. Irving, Colonial Counterpoint: Music in Early Modem Manila (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 60. The komedya is verse and martial art drama derived from the Spanish comedias, which has three general genres: the comedia a fantasia (comedy of fantasy, which tells stories of faraway kingdoms), comedia de santo (comedy of saints, which tells stories of the lives of Catholic saints), and the comedia de capa y espada (comedy of cape and dagger, which tells modern adventure stories). For further information regarding Philippine komedya, see Nicanor G. Tiongson, ‘The Philippine Komedya: History, Indigenization, Revitalization’, The Philippine Humanities Review, 11/12 (2010), 15–52; Nicanor G. Tiongson, Kasaysayan Ng Komedya Sa Pilipinas 1766–1982 (Manila: Integrated Research Center – De La Salle University, 1982). 61. Sainetes are short musical comedies popular in Spain and in its colonial territories in the eighteenth century. In the Philippines, indigenised versions of the sainetes were written by and staged by local troupes. 62. National Archive of the Philippines (NAP) SD-12425 – Series pertaining to Teatros y Musica. 63. Retana, Noticias Histórico-Bibliográficas de El Teatro En Filipinas Desde Sus Origı´nes Hasta 1898, pp. 155–6. 64. E. Arsenio Manuel, ‘Ladislao Bonus’, Dictionary of Philippine Biography, vol. 2 (Quezon City: Filipiniana Publications, 1970), p. 57. Also Manuel Artigas y Cuerva, Galena de Filipinos llustres, vol. 2. (1918), p. 58. 65. In Spanish Philippines, the natives of the islands who were also considered lowest in the colonial class and racial caste systems were called ‘indios’. Until 1898, the term Filipino was used only to refer to white Spaniards born in the Philippines. For more nuanced explanation of the Philippine Spanish colonial caste system see: Teodoro Agoncillo, History of the Filipino People (Quezon City: R.P. Garcia Publishing Co., 1977): 129–13; Irving, D. R. M., Colonial Counterpoint: Music in Early Modem Manila (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010): 32–35; Sobritchea, Carolyn, ‘‘The Philippine Peasantry of the Early Colonial Period.’’ Philippine Sociological Review 29.1 (1981): 17– 24; Wickberg, Edgar, ‘‘The Chinese Mestizo in Philippine History,’’ Journal of Southeast Asian History 5.1 (1964): 62–100. 66. A review of the performance of Linda de Chamonix which appeared in El Comercio on 1 December 1887 is probably the first time that Pandacan was compared to Milan in print. The nickname has stayed on and has even been used in the nationalist rhetoric as it appeared on 14 January 2013 in El Renacimiento (The organ of the nationalist party during the American occupation). 74 Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 44(1) 67. See Lilia Hernandez Chung, Jovita Fuentes: A Lifetime of Music (Quezon City: VeraReyes, Inc., 1978). http://www.ncca.gov.ph/about-ncca/org-awards/music/jovita_ fuentes.php. 68. See Nicanor G. Tiongson, ‘A Short History of the Philippine Sarsuwela (1879–2009)’, The Philippine Humanities Review, 11/12 (2010), 150–86; Doreen G. Fernandez, ‘Zarzuela to Sarswela: Indigenization and Transformation’, Philippine Studies, 41:3 (1993), 320–43. 69. Adam McKeown, ‘Global Migration, 1846–1970’, Journal of World History, 15:2 (2004), 156. meLê yamomo is an Assistant Professor of Theatre, Performance, and Sound Studies at the University of Amsterdam. meLê was a fellow at the ‘‘Interweaving Performance Cultures’’ Research Center (Berlin) and a postdoctoral researcher at the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) Kosseleck Project ‘‘Global Theatre Histories.’’ He is a recipient of the ‘‘Veni Innovation Grant’’ by the Dutch Organization for Scientiﬁc Research (NWO) for his project ‘‘Sonic Entanglements: Listening to Modernities in Southeast Asian Sound Recordings’’. He completed a PhD in Theatre Studies and Musicology from the LudwigMaximilians-Universität Munich. meLê is also a theatre director and composer.

RELATED PAPERS

RELATED TOPICS

Log In

Global Currents, Musical Streams: European Opera in Colonial Southeast Asia

Global Currents, Musical Streams: European Opera in Colonial Southeast Asia

Related Papers

RELATED PAPERS

RELATED TOPICS