Before the present monumental work, only Chile among South American nations could boast of a two-volume musical history. Both Eugenio Pereira Salas and the present author close their accounts at 1900. True, Gesualdo in the advertencia preliminar prefacing his first volume (593 pages, colophon dated February 21, 1961), foresaw a second volume in which he would carry forward his history from 1852 hasta nuestros días. However, when the second volume appeared later in the year (1085 pages, colophon dated December 10), he decided to join Pereira Salas in discreetly foregoing the polemical present century.
Certain other affinities bring the authors of these Chilean and Argentine histories into close relation. Both are cosmopolite polymaths with many years’ residence abroad and numerous erudite works outside music to their credit. Since neither author is chained to performance, composition, or music teaching and since neither has allowed his energies to be dissipated in musicological vendettas, their vision remains unclouded and all-embracing. Only an author of unusually irenic disposition could have won the signal praise already bestowed on Gesualdo’s work by the Burneys and Hawkinses of Latin American musicology. Some of these favorable judgments can be read at pages 7-8 of his volume II. Here, in addition to his own handsome portrait and glowing reviews from Buenos Aires Musical, La Prensa, La Nación, and El Hogar, Gesualdo intercalates favorable dictamina on volume I emitted by two of the most irreconcilable enemies in Latin American musicography (see Revista Musical Chilena, XVI/81-82, pp. 88-93).
In overall length, Argentina with 1678 pages would seem to leave Chile with 796 somewhat in the shade. However, Pereira Salas’s first volume was published so long ago as 1941. The intervening two decades have seen a vast flood of articles and books to swell Gesualdo’s corresponding bibliography. Thirty-five of the first fifty entries in Gesualdo’s 141-item bibliography to volume I (pages 577-581) were published, for instance, after 1941. Not the least of Gesualdo’s epoch-making services to Latin American musicology has been the assembling of bibliographies to both volumes that vastly overrun the reaches of conventional “musical literature.” More than two-thirds of the footnotes to chapters 2 and 3, by way of example, refer to books and periodicals that no American university library would catalogue under “ML” or “MT.” Each citation is of prime value to music history, nonetheless.
Proportionately, the period antedating independence occupies the same space in both Pereira Salas and Gesualdo—68 pages among 796 for Chile and 157 among 1678 for Argentina. Gesualdo fills the more than 1500 pages on Argentine music from independence to 1900 with annotated lists of what must be assuredly every singer, instrumentist, composer, impresario, and music vendor born in Argentina—or a visitor—within the space of eighty years. As a result, he gives 18 pages to the visit of the Louisiana-born Louis Moreau Gottschalk, whereas Gilbert Chase—a great Gottschalk admirer—gave Gottschalk’s entire career only 23 pages in the standard history of United States’ music (America’s Music, 1955, 733 pages). To such American entertainers as Washington Norton and Albert Phillips, members of Christy’s Minstrels not mentioned in Chase’s America’s Music, Gesualdo devotes panegyric paragraphs.
After all this extraordinary kindness to nineteenth-century American “cultural” emissaries in Argentina, Gesualdo’s two-volume work obviously deserves widest dissemination in the present-day United States. No lack of appreciation for the vastness of the task that he set himself nor of gratitude for the really Herculean labors that the two volumes represent is to be implied from the following general criticisms. There is much overlap, and duplications are rife. Even in the same chapter such a figure as Luis Joben will receive three pages (I, 110-112) only to appear again at 130 as if he were a newcomer. After these débuts, he returns again at II, 679 like a stranger in need of first introduction. The very text repeats itself. “En 1794 se ofreció para construir un órgano que fuera digno de la Catedral de Buenos Aires” at I, 110, and at II, 679 illustrates the kind of tautology that often bewilders the reader. Thanks for mention of Albert Phillips, Washington Norton, and others of Christy’s Minstrels at II, 260-264 tend to cool when substantially the same material crops up again at II, 875-876. Lists of compositions such as those of Juan Pedro Esnaola at I, 253 do not need even partial repetition at II, 682. After reading the complete list of Buenos Aires cathedral musicians in 1790 at I, 103, the reader questions the need of reprinting the identical roll at II, 679.
The unusual length of these profusely illustrated and documented tomes cannot be the sole explanation for the repetitions—many of which reveal disturbing contradictions. The same kind of contradiction in Zipoli’s death year, for instance at I, 58, and II, 678, reappears like unwanted Eris in so short an essay as his ten-page summary, “La música en Argentina,” for Revista Musical Chilena, XVI/81-82 [1962], pages 127 and 128. In the two-volume history, it is to be regretted that he so rarely cites the exact page of his sources. Nevertheless, confrontation with originals discloses an at times Handelian indebtedness to Erba and Urio.
In sum, Gesualdo guarantees himself front rank in Latin American musicology. His tomes will be mined by all subsequent researchers in pre-1900 Argentine musical history. The rich iconography alone justifies the cost of the two volumes. No student of Argentine urban social life can afford to ignore them. If the prodigal rate set in Gesualdo’s bulky writings to date continues, even so renowned and prolific a celebrant of Argentine cultural accomplishments as Ricardo Rojas may one day find that his opera omnia fill less shelf space.
Surely the most versatile vocalist in the history of Buenos Aires, Mariano Pablo Rosquellas sang in 1827 the title roles of Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Rossini’s Otello—after having introduced himself as the Count of Almaviva in the latter’s Il barbiere di Siviglia only two years earlier. A violinist who toured Chile and Peru, a composer who attempted opera, and a speculator who made and lost a fortune in Bolivian mines, Rosquellas eventually settled at Sucre, where he died in 1859. In his 1962 monograph, Gesualdo repeats much of what he wrote in his 1961 history, I, 281-315. The section on South American opera origins reiterates I, 92-101 (with such added refinements as the dates of Roque Ceruti). The convenience of having a précis of the lyric stage in the present more manageable form justifies the reprint. However, if the present tendency continues, everything that Gesualdo writes may be expected to reach light in at least three different publications. All hail to so sought-after a musical historian. He is also a prolific writer on the visual arts, and his “Painters of Indians in 19th-century America” will be published by Editorial Artes en América before this review.