Don Ramón Vega, enigmático rebelde de la ópera mexicana

Abstract

A fortuitous finding of the hand-written booklet of the opera El grito de Dolores (“the convening outcry of Dolores”) by Ramón Vega, Mexican composer of the XIX Century, which fell to the present author, led to a series of questions that, up till now, have not been fully answered by studies dedicated to the history of music in Mexico. The investigation developed towards placing the manuscript in the social and cultural context of the century of Mexican independence and the exhaustive research carried in diverse historical archives gave fruit in the discovery of a vast corpus of documentary sources presently ignored. The information which the analysis of these documents provided completed extant knowledge on the life of Ramón Vega, allowed straightening out some fallible ideas concerning his operatic production, and also facilitated building and sustaining the hypothesis that El grito de Dolores may qualify as the first opera representing the national school of Mexico.