<i>Aida</i> , <i>Lo Schiavo</i> and the Contested Memories of Abolition

Abstract In 1988, during the abolition centennial in Brazil, Verdi’s Aida and Carlos Gomes’s Lo schiavo were perceived and pitched as abolitionist operas thanks to events that unfolded at their stagings one hundred years earlier in Rio de Janeiro. Both operas stirred controversy by being recreated in productions intended to correct historical inaccuracies and unjust erasures, primarily in the context of African slavery, but with unexpected cultural and political repercussions. This article examines connections between operatic performances and social activism, discussing the role of opera singers in promoting an aesthetic of sensibility within the abolitionist movement of the 1880s, but also considering how the most controversial aspects of the nineteenth-century abolitionist movement resonate with issues debated in the 1988 productions.