音樂與政治－阿根廷音樂家阿爾博多•希納斯特拉(Alberto Ginastera)

Abstract

This article focuses on the history of music in Argentina, and more specifically on some aspects of the work and career of composer Alberto Ginastera (1916-1983). After a brief account of the origins of the Argentinean National Anthem, which was commissioned by the government in 1813 at the time of the Independence wars, the text addresses the emergence of Argentinean musical nationalism at the turn of the twentieth century. This was the ideological and aesthetical background of Ginastera's early career, which towered in his 1943 ballet Estancia. In the sixties, the composer favoured a cosmopolitan aesthetics well suited to John F. Kennedy's pan-American policies. His collaboration with novelist Manuel Mujica Lainez for his opera Bomarzo, premiered in Washington in 1967, is a good example of that second period. But the catholic right-wing dictatorship then in power in Argentina censored the Buenos Aires' premiere of this work, arguing that it deals with ”sex, violence, and hallucination”. This authoritarian decision caused a national scandal known as ”The Bomarzo Affair”. In the conclusion, the proposal is made to take this case as an example for a general discussion of the complex relationships between music and politics in other countries.