Letter from Rio.

For centuries, Rio de Janeiro was the cultural capital of Brazil, and in 1909 the city's Beaux Arts beauty, the Theatro Municipal, became the new temple of Brazil's operagoing public. All the Municipal's building materials came from Europe, as did the productions and singers that appeared there. But the flow of wealth and commerce to Sao Paulo in recent decades has drawn its share of artistic talent as well, meaning that Rio sometimes had to take a backseat as the purveyor of "high culture." Under music director Luiz Fernando Malheiro for the past two years, though, the Municipal reclaimed some of its former luster. The theater offered polished, original productions that, one Sao Paulo newspaper grumbled, were putting its bigger, wealthier sibling to shame. The repertory was traditional, with an emphasis on Italian opera, but singers and orchestra alike were passionate and impeccable. Malheiro also booked prestigious international productions such as Werner Herzog's Tannhauser. But such extravaganzas are likely a thing of the past.

At the outset, this year's season (beginning in April and extending through November) appeared ambitious: four original productions, starting with Turandot, featuring Giovanna Casolla; followed by La Gioconda, with Eliane Coelho; La Cenerentola, with Vivica Genaux; and Carlos Gomes's Fosca, with Eva Marton. But theater employees voiced their concerns that the theater's direct management by Rio de Janeiro state government continually put their programming decisions at risk and made it impossible to plan years in advance, as do other opera houses of similar caliber. The president of the Theatro Municipal's board is also the state culture secretary, a political appointment made directly by the governor. Just a few months into his announced opera season, Rio politics brought Malheiro's plans crashing down.

A change of government in April brought in a new left-wing state governor, Benedita da Silva, and with her a new culture secretary and Municipal president, a former actor named Antonio Grassi. He immediately clashed with Malheiro. At the outset, Grassi promised to honor the Municipal's commitments, but soon he raised alarms that the theater's budget deficit was out of hand. He criticized programming decisions as well, saying the theater was overpaying singers and not collaborating enough with other venues. Malheiro proposed substituting Brazilian singers for international ones, to trim the budget, but he departed in a rage when he read in the newspapers that Grassi had unilaterally cancelled the rest of the opera season.

Overnight, all programming information disappeared from the Theatro Municipal's website, and Malheiro and Grassi exchanged a war of words in the press. "What I'm struck by is the fragility of an institution like the Municipal, that allows someone to come along and undo in two months the work of two years," Malheiro told the Rio de Janeiro newspaper Jornal do Brasil adding that the larger problem is the theater's lack of political independence. "We'll never get beyond artistic mediocrity in our theaters as long as they're subject to these abrupt changes," he said. Malheiro accused Grassi of being a boor who "doesn't understand" the Municipal and shouldn't be running it, while Grassi painted Malheiro as an elitist who wanted to run his own fiefdom. "The debate is political and ideological," Grassi said in a newspaper interview. "I think the theater has to exist within the cultural context in the state."

The Municipal replaced the anticipated performance of La Gioconda with a performance of Madama Butterfly, using a production belonging to the Theatro Municipal of Sao Paulo that had its premiere there in 1999. Soprano Coelho, scheduled to sing in La Gioconda, agreed to appear as Cio-Cio-San instead. Ticket prices were reduced, to demonstrate Grassi's intention of making the arts accessible to a greater portion of the public. However, the production appeared to prove Malheiro's prophecy that, in his absence, "Rio's going to become just an importer of Sao Paulo productions."

Silvio Barbato, who was appointed as the theater's artistic ...