On Wednesday, the São Luiz Theater will host the premiere of the opera “Felizmente há luar” (Fortunately there is moonlight), commissioned by the Portuguese Philharmonic Orchestra (OFP) from composer Alexandre Delgado, grandson of General Humberto Delgado (1906-1965), for a subsequent national tour with more than 70 musicians.
After a preview at the Teatro Municipal da Guarda on May 1, the show designed to mark the 50th anniversary of April 25 will have two performances at the Sala Luis Miguel Cintra in Lisbon’s S. Luiz, this Thursday and Friday, and will then go on to six other stages between Faro and Braga until October.
“We wanted to mark the half-century of the Revolution and we threw down the gauntlet to Alexandre Delgado, who is a fabulous violinist and composer, and he proposed that we create an opera from the piece that Luís de Sttau Monteiro [1926-1993] wrote in 1961, only to see it censored and banned until 1974,” violinist and OFP co-founder Augusto Trindade told Lusa.
The music and libretto that the grandson of the general assassinated by the PIDE created for “Fortunately there is moonlight” are joined by around 50 instrumentalists from the orchestra, led by conductor Osvaldo Ferreira, and ten actors and lyric singers, directed by director Allex Aguillera, as well as the Proarte Choir, directed by Filipa Palhares.
The cast includes the voices of tenor Carlos Guilherme and soprano Sílvia Sequeira, the protagonists of what Augusto Trindade describes as “a very current story”, which should be particularly valued for two reasons: it was written when an allegory about a failed uprising, in a disguised call for revolution, “required much more courage than it does now”, and it was set to music by the descendant “of one of the great heroes of Portuguese history, which gives this opera a much greater symbolism and emotional charge”.
Alexandre Delgado says that his new work comes against a backdrop of rejected proposals. “When the late Joaquim Benite staged my opera ‘The Mad Queen’ in 2011, he wanted me to compose another one about my grandfather, but I told him I couldn’t because it was too personal. I was only five months pregnant when my mother heard that her father had been murdered,” recalls the musician.
In 2022, when Osvaldo Ferreira invited him to write an opera about April 25, Humberto Delgado’s grandson was also “on the back foot, this time because he didn’t find the theme very operatic and didn’t want to compose for an official commemoration”.
It was then that Alexandre Delgado remembered that Luís de Sttau Monteiro’s play “could make perfect sense” as “such an obvious metaphor for the Estado Novo, shaken by the 1958 elections, that even the obtuse Salazarist censors understood it” and, for this very reason, banned it on national soil until Democracy took hold.
“Felizmente há luar” (Fortunately there is moonlight) is considered a fundamental play of 20th century Portuguese theater for the way it figuratively portrays the resistance against the Estado Novo dictatorship and the cultural censorship in force during that period.
Luís de Sttau Monteiro was inspired by the conspiracy allegedly organized by Gomes Freire de Andrade against English domination in the first half of the 19th century, and from there drew a plot full of parallels with the Salazar dictatorship, exploring universal questions about freedom, power, courage and resistance.
Although written and published in 1961, the play only had its stage premiere in 1969, in Paris, and was not staged in Portugal until 1975, first by the TEB – Teatro Ensaio do Barreiro and, three years later, by the company of the Teatro Nacional D. Maria II.
