History > Art music in the national period (1821present) > The 19th century
Throughout Latin America, 19th-century art music was dominated by opera and lighter musical theatre, songs, and piano music, as was a large part of the musical life of Europe. During the first half of the century, most countries made an effort to encourage artistic activity. National music institutions, conservatories, opera theatres, and concert halls were established. Consequently, symphonic and chamber music became part of the culture, as did virtuoso performers, especially pianists. By the last decades of the century, musical nationalism had developed, as it had in Europe; its main expression was through the use of genres that were associated with national folk and popular characteristics.
A large number of Latin American pianist-composers cultivated salon music genres and European-style Romantic piano music. The most popular salon music composer in Mexico was Juventino Rosas, an Otomí Indian and author of a set of waltzes, Sobre las olas (1891; On the Waves), that became famous worldwide. With Romantic pianist-composers such as Tomás León, Ernesto Elorduy, and Felipe Villanueva, the first vernacular elements appeared in Mexican music. The last two especially cultivated the danza (or contradanza) mexicana, which followed the model established by the Cuban composers Manuel Saumell and Ignacio Cervantes. The contradanza stressed for the first time the typical syncopated rhythmic patterns of Afro-Caribbean dance music. The same phenomenon occurred in Puerto Rico with the danza puertorriqueña, cultivated especially by Juan Morel Campos.
Grand opera and Romantic nationalism flourished in Argentina and Brazil. Although opera had been produced in Buenos Aires during the 18th century, Argentinian opera and piano music were not extensively performed until the last decades of the 19th century. Francisco Hargreaves, for example, wrote the Aires nacionales (c. 1880; National Songs), in which he stylized such typical folk genres as the gato, estilo, vidalita, and décima. Brazilian opera was dominated by Antonio Carlos Gomes, the most successful opera composer of the Americas in the 19th century. He won international fame with his opera Il Guarany (produced in Milan in 1870), which had a picturesque libretto portraying Indian heroes and incorporating stylized indigenous dances. The first Brazilian to write a piece directly inspired by folk music was the amateur musician Brasílio Itiberê da Cunha with his A sertaneja (1869; The Country Girl). Romantic nationalism in Brazil is best represented by Alberto Nepomuceno. In several of his piano pieces, his String Quartet No. 3 (1891; subtitled Brasileiro), and above all in his Série brasileira (1892), for orchestra, Nepomuceno incorporated traits of popular dance music and attempted to depict aspects of Brazilian life.
·Folk and popular music