Concerto Barroco de Alejo Carpentier: tensões barrocas e fuga pela música

Abstract

This study aims at to provide a new look at one of the most prolific Latin American intellectuals of the twentieth century: the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier (1904-1980). It starts with the analysis of one of his last novels, Concerto Barroco (1974), considered by the author as the Summa Theologica of his career. It takes it as a place in which Carpentier allegorically represented many of his ideas thought during his life. In particular, the defense of a baroque that is, at the same time, American and universal, that looked for redefine America‘s relations with the rest of the world, in an inversion of the relationship between center and periphery. Alongside this discourse of the uniqueness baroque continent, Carpentier was admittedly a fervent propagandist of the Cuban Revolution (1959) and the government of Fidel Castro, a fact that generated much criticism of his figure and some tensions in his own speech, which reflected in his novels, including Concerto Barroco. My analysis centers in these tensions within the discourse of Carpentier, and in the novel itself. My hypothesis is that music was an escape route used by Carpentier as a strategy to ease tensions from his speeches that had repercussions in Concerto Barroco.