LUIS BOLAÑOS. — One of the most illustrious Franciscan missionaries of South America. Born in Marchena (Spain) in 1539, died in Buenos Aires on 11 Oct. 1629. Having become a Franciscan, he left for America in 1572, where he worked for fifty years for the conversion of the indigenous peoples of the La Plata region. Driven from his first field of apostolate, in the region of the Picer and Bauay rivers, because he defended the Indians against the colonizers, he moved to Paraguay, working especially in the province of Guayará, where from 1580 he began to gather the converts into separate villages, thus founding the first Reductions, several of which passed to the Jesuits when his confrere Alfonso di S. Bonaventura had moved there.
In 1864 he outlined with a few incisive traits the code, as he conceived it, of the work in music: “1) the complete obliteration of the formula; 2) the creation of the form; 3) the realization of the widest possible total and rhythmic development; 4) the supreme incarnation of the drama.” In this futurism that sought to break the bonds of convention in order to bring the human torment of the dramatic event to life on the stage, he saw the melodrama reconstituted in its primordial unity of music and poetry, not heard since the Greeks. Indeed, while Mefistofele (1868) is still called an “opera,” Nerone (1901) bears the title of “tragedy,” more consonant with the reformative criteria enunciated and realized by the author.
A fertile genius, in his pages there is a fervent religious inspiration, latent or manifest, which often bursts forth in accents of intense lyricism. Let us recall, for example, the choruses of angels and penitents, Margaret’s prayer in Mefistofele, the Ave Maria in the libretto of Otello set to Verdi’s music; the Pater, the Beatitudes, and other evangelical passages in Nerone, an opera in which the yearning of faith in the fervor of nascent Christianity is most palpable. Yet his religiosity does not seem to go beyond a romantic sentimentalism.