Postcolonial Music Institutions and the Environment: The Teatro Amazonas in Manaus

When late-19th-century industrialism prompted a worldwide surge in demand for rubber, it transformed Manaus—a small city in the heart of the Amazon—into one of the most prosperous places in the world. Manaus’s wealth was built in the context of ruthless extraction from the environment and of indigenous labor. The rubber elite sought to immortalize their triumph over what they deemed untamed nature in an opera house, the Teatro Amazonas, inaugurated in 1896. In the recently proclaimed Brazilian Republic, the theater crystallized the semiotics of institutional power and an emerging postcolonial identity, negotiated in relation to the environment, on both the level of representation and that of physical reality. As a reification of cultural capital and symbol of European urbanity, the opera house served to delimit from nature and made its extraction possible.

Philipp Lojak is a composer and musicologist specializing in opera studies and global history. He is currently a PhD student in Music History at Yale University. His core interests include contemporary art music and the entanglements of aesthetics and capitalism. In 2025, he received the best scholarly paper award of the National Opera Association, as well as the best dissertation award for his master’s thesis on medievalism in George Benjamin’s Written on Skin and L’Amour de loin by Kaija Saariaho. Philipp Lojak holds an M.A. in musicology and dramaturgy from Folkwang University of the Arts (Essen, Germany), a B.A. in musicology and media culture studies from the University of Cologne, and a B.mus. in composition from Robert Schumann University (Düsseldorf). Additionally, he worked as a concert manager for Duisburg Philharmonic Orchestra and composed orchestral works and chamber music, published as scores and on CD.

Part of the Brazilian Studies Lecture Series.