Boero, Felipe (1884–1958)

Felipe Boero (b. 1 May 1884; d. 9 August 1958), Argentine composer and teacher. Born in Buenos Aires, Boero studied with the composer Pablo Berutti until 1912, when, as a winner of the Premio Europa (Europe Prize) established by the Argentine Ministry of Culture, he traveled to France to study at the National Conservatory in Paris under Paul Vidal and Gabriel Fauré (1912–1914). Upon his return to Argentina he founded the National Music Society—later known as the Argentine Association of Composers—which was dedicated to the promotion of Argentine works. A high point in his pedagogic career came in 1934, when the National Council of Education commissioned Boero to create and direct a choral group of two thousand voices. In 1935 he became a member of the National Fine Arts Committee and was appointed music professor and choir director at both the Mariano Acosta Normal School for Teachers and the Manuel Belgrano Institute.

Boero's first opera, Tucumán, which premiered in 1918 at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, was the first opera on a Spanish libretto to be composed in the nationalist style; it won the Municipal Prize. Boero wrote seven more works for the stage: the opera-ballet Ariana y Dionysos (1916) and the operas Raquela (1918), Siripo (1924), El Matrero (1925), Zincalí (1933), plus two incidental works: Las bacantes (1925) and El inglés de los "güesos" (1938). El Matrero, premiered at the Colón in 1929 under the baton of Ettore Panizza, became the most performed, most popular Argentine opera of the first half of the twentieth century, and was recorded by RCA Victor. Boero composed several orchestral works, among them Suite de danzas argentinas (1920–1930), Madrugada en la pampa (1930), Suite argentina (1940), a Mass (1918) on Latin text, as well as works for vocal soloist and orchestra, for orchestra with choir, choral works, songs, many works for piano, and a collection of children's songs.

See alsoMusic: Art Music .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Rodolfo Arizaga, Enciclopedia de la música argentina (1971).

Gérard Béhague, Music in Latin America (1979); Composers of the Americas, vol. 15 (1969), pp. 29ff.; New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, vol. 2 (1980).

Additional Bibliography

Schwartz-Kates, Deborah. "Argentine Art Music and the Search for National Identity Mediated through a Symbolic Native Heritage: The 'Tradición Gauchesca' and Felip Boero's El matrero." Latin American Music Review 20:1 (Spring-Summer 1999): 1-29.

                                   Susana Salgado