Noble Savage/Indigène sauvage: Staging First Nations in Early Canadian opera

• Published in: Nineteenth-Century Music Review
• Main Author: Ingraham, Mary I.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Cambridge University Press (CUP) 2014
• Subjects: Music; Canada; First Nations
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1479409814000378; https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S1479409814000378

This research engages the ways composers and librettists in early Canada constructed the roles of First Nations Peoples in two staged dramatic musical works: Clappé and Dixon's Canada's Welcome from 1879 and Vézina, Villandray and Fleur's Le fétiche from 1912. My exploration begins from a desire to cultivate an historiography of First Nations musical archetypes that extends beyond viewing representations as stereotypes to explore how they are used intertextually to reflect social and political realities in early Canada. The extent of play with indigenous traditions in each of these works belies their creators’ intentions to underscore contemporary beliefs in the civilizing power of colonization. And while Clappé and Dixon's work might now be interesting primarily as upper class entertainment, Vézina, Villandray and Fleur's exemplifies the evolution of Canadian culture through a more complex use of intertextual relationships. In Canada's Welcome, Clappé reserves his most nuanced musical representations for the European immigrants on stage; Vézina performs similar homogenizing musical acts but contrasts the French in grand operatic expression and the Iroquois with more extensive use of stereotypical markers to create distinctions within his Western art music setting. The most overt expressions of Otherness in these works are therefore largely carried by the texts, mediated through their encoding of the tropes of the fairness and acceptance of a tolerant civilization.