“Concierto barroco” by Alejo Carpentier. Music and literature
Even after his well-known theory concerning the marvelous real (included in the preface of the first edition of his novel The Kingdom of This World, published in 1949), the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier continued to be preoccupied with certain aspects related to different problems of magic realist discourse, relating it to the aesthetic domain of music and painting. The novelist tries to prove that the Latin American identity is perfectly expressed by those works of art and by those artists capable to catch the true nature of “The New World”. Therefore, in his novel Concierto barroco (1974) he imagines a miraculous musical encounter that brings together musicians from different epochs and cultural spaces, in order to utter the ultimate truth about the individuality of a continent rather unknown to “The Old World”, but perfectly able to compete with its old values and artistic achievements.
Keywords: literature, music, marvelous real, magic realist discourse, Latin American novel
1. Habla Alejo Carpentier, în Recopilación de textos sobre Alejo Carpentier, Havana, 1977, p. 49.
2. Ibid., p. 50.
3. Dan Munteanu, Prefaţă, în Alejo Carpentier, Recursul la metodă. Concert baroc, Bucureşti, Editura Minerva, 1988, p. XXVIII.
4. Ádám András Kürthy, „Algunos apuntes sobre El acoso y Concierto barroco de Alejo Carpentier”, în Lejana. Revista crítica de narrativa breve, no. 6 /2013, p. 15.
5. Dan Munteanu, Prefaţă, în Alejo Carpentier, Recursul la metodă, Concert baroc, ed. cit., p. XXX.
6. Klaus Müller-Bergh, „Sentido y color de Concierto barroco”, în Revista Iberoamericana, Vol. XLI, Num. 92-93 (julio-diciembre de 1975), p. 499.
7. Mai cu seamă la cele prezente în descrierile pe care Miguel de Cervantes le face Barcelonei, în capitolul LXI din partea a doua a romanului Don Quijote (Cf. Klaus Muller-Bergh, op. cit., p. 498).
8. Carlos Paz Barahona, „Juego, simbolo y fiesta en Concierto barroco de Alejo Carpentier. Una mirada desde música”, în Filologia y Linguistica, XXI 1, 71-78, 2005, p. 72.
9. Mercedes González Kreysa, „Concierto barroco”, una transmutacion plastico-musical en torno a la identidad latinoamericana. Tesis de grado Magister Literarum en Literatura Latinoamericana, Universidad de Costa Rica, San José, 1998.
