ABSTRACT
In the 1860s the Portuguese composers Francisco de Sá Noronha and Miguel Ângelo Pereira chose literary works by the romantic writers Almeida Garrett and Alexandre Herculano as the basis for their national operas. These novels recreated key moments of Portuguese or Peninsular history, extolling values and dramatising issues such as freedom, nationality, anti-clericalism and exoticism. This article proposes a reading of the reception of French grand opera in Portugal based on L’arco di Sant’Anna by Noronha (1867) and Eurico by Pereira (1870, revised 1874). In L’arco, the points of contact with grand opera result largely from the situations provided by the novel. Eurico, in turn, constitutes the moment when a Portuguese composer intentionally looked to grand opera, and reveals a special attention to local colour and the use of recurring motifs.
