Brazil on the World Stage: Carlos Gomes’s Colombo, the First Republic, and Brazil’s Cosmopolitan Desires

In 1892, in the shadow of the tumultuous fall of the Brazilian monarchy and the rise of the First Republic just three years earlier, composer Carlos Gomes premiered his new piece Colombo in Rio de Janeiro. Intended for the 1893 Columbian World Exposition in Chicago, Colombo hagiographically narrates the story of Christopher Columbus and his supposed heroic journey of discovery to the “New World”. However, the piece’s disastrous reception in Rio led to it being left out of the Exposition and in the shadows of the composer’s oeuvre. In this article, I examine the history of Gomes’s Colombo within the context of the nation-building project of Brazil’s First Republic. Interrogating the piece alongside the other forms of cultural production that represented Brazil at the Exposition, I argue that Colombo reveals the uncomfortable and tense mediations between the national and non-national, as necessitated by Brazil’s search for a place within the cosmopolitan modernity of the fin-de-siècle world order. The article traces the construction of an exported image of “Brazil” and the universal, cosmopolitan notion of “Brazilianness” that the composition represents and, in doing so, seeks to nuance the oppositions between periphery/metropole and nationalist/cosmopolitan on which the nineteenth-century nation-state was based.