Paris were shipped to Manaus. It was set to be the jewel of the jungle city, a landmark emerging from the bowels of this isolating jungle, fed by the oceanic river. All these extravagances can really be perceived in the way the building tried to present itself internationally and locally, as the landmark of cultural progress in the Amazonas. The plinth makes the building a dominant presence, also indifferent towards all those racial and class tensions, surfacing the city around this period. It is as if it was specially conceived so it could stare, challenge, slay and defeat this jungle that constantly threats the city as a cultural metropolitan epicentre, reminding the latter of its savage past and impending return to where it was born…to myth, to madness. Another peculiarity of the Teatro Amazonas is every single ornamental detail, consciously mixing the natural opulence of the rioting jungle and the musical, tragically expressive European figures. Those characters, mostly composed by muses and satyrs, are dancing in totally unaware of a passive and shy jungle, only there to please the eye of the ‘exoticist’. This reminds me of the preliminary vision those first errant jungle-knights had over the Amazonas, Christianizing it, imposing a condescending catechesis over the distant landscape only known through second and third hand accounts. Now, in the XIX century, Culture has substituted Faith. However the same human attitude of arrogance surges, making the Teatro Amazonas a useless piece of non-architecture. The Architecture only reveals itself while music inhabits the scene, awakening the jungle, as an emotional counterpart, and appropriating all past slumbered dreams of despair into the musical score. Finally, a common voice can be heard… and what allows this to happen is the Architecture, not of the Teatro, but of the individual articulation; they all shared one; it had arrived with those ancient faithful conquistadors, lost in fever and despair. But, let me get back into the Opera. The Teatro was first set to come to life the 31 of December 1896. The entire city of Manaus was talking about the much-awaited inauguration of the lyrical season, performed by the Companhía Lírica specially hired and brought from Europe, in order to fill this Opera with the music that will allow, for no more than five hours at a time, those multiple lost and forgotten voices trapped in the jungle to perform side by side all those outbursts of out-scaled emotions – emitted by the opera act and the jungle presence - . The first great performance of an Opera was done on a Thursday night. The Teatro was displaying a great set of lights, illuminating the façade, make it all dramatically spectacular. The humid weather soaked fancy night outfits with dripping sweat, make it all wet and probably uncomfortable. Gentleman wearing their hats and suits traveling in carriages, which were constantly circulating up and down, congesting the entrance to the building and on the distance the average population, witnessing with wonder the tremendous display of ridiculous European sophistication, forced and feverishly sick. This night, Thursday, seventh of January 1897, the Teatro Amazonas staged its first Opera: Amilcare Ponchielli’s ‘La Gioconda’, with a libretto written by Arrigo Boito and based on a novel by super popular Victor Hugo. Here, lets imagine all this music unfolding, the acts presenting the plot; The Lion’s Mouth at first, set during Carnival celebrations, a state spy lustfully watches La Gioconda as she leads her blind mother across the Piazza. He, the one that overlooked, is then firmly rejected by the young woman; as a result in a fist of frustrating impotence he accuses her old mother, of witchery. Somehow, the accusation lays flat, yet a new set of love entanglements break in and out. Now the main action of the Opera lies
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