Carta de Esnaola. Música, discurso, y redes interpersonales en el Buenos Aires de 1837

Abstract

 A hitherto unknown letter from composer Juan P. Esnaola to writer Juan Thompson (1837), intended to deliver a newly-composed song, provides a rare glimpse of the aesthetic of the dean of all Argentine Classical composers. This article provides as complete an understanding of the document as possible. The text identifies the song as A una Rosa, discusses a possible dedicatee, and examines the piece in light of the letter. Also, the genealogy of Esnaola’s aesthetic ideas is traced back to the poets of the Pléiade in sixteenth-century France, in connection with the metaphor of the sisterhood of music and poetry. Musical practices of the period, as disclosed by the letter, are furthermore construed as part of social networks based upon reciprocity and created through the bourgeois sociability of the Buenos Aires salons.