There is a truly unforgettable scene in Werner Herzog's masterpiece film Fitzcarraldo, when his main character Fitzgerald, impersonated by an outrageous Klaus Kinski, at the end makes his way on a heavily damaged ship to an opera house at an undefined location in the middle of the Brazilian jungle.
He stands on the upper deck, listening to Enrico Caruso singing Verdi's Ernani, whose voice fills the scene with a deeply sad, albeit romantic mood.
Kinski finally arrives at a kind of theatre building, where the film ends in a scene showing the despair of a mad genius.
The film's last shots were taken at the Manaus opera house, the Teatro Amazonas, which is an amazing building.
It is the world's most remote cultural venue, situated some 4,000 kilometres from Brazil's densely populated east coast, in the middle of the Amazon jungle, the green heart of the continent.
It is hard to imagine that the remote jungle metropolis of Manaus had once been the home of classical music lovers who did not shy away from building an opera house at such a location.
But the project was not only about music — it was about the metamorphosis of a forsaken place, plagued by mosquitoes, violence, exploitation, slavery and jungle fever, into an oasis of wealth and culture, triggered by the rubber boom of the late 19th century.
Manaus, until then a forgotten, unhealthy outpost inhabited by traders and bandits constantly fighting with the indigenous population living along the numerous river arms around the small town, suddenly stepped into the Belle epoque of rubber wealth, when vast resources of cautchouc were discovered and exploited by the so-called rubber barons — businessmen who made fortunes from the raw material then heavily in demand by growing industries in North America and Europe.
The rubber barons earned huge sums of money and built large colonial-style villas in the sleepy settlement of Manaus, which grew to a population of several thousand in a short time.
But they missed one thing in the sweltering tropics: genuine classical culture.
Around 1880, members of the Manaus administration, mainly consisting of the same rubber barons, made a proposal to build a theatre in the centre of the city that would be capable of performing operas. The idea of the Teatro Amazonas was born.
A few years later, the provincial governor agreed to approve a budget for the opera house, funded by taxes and other contributions of wealthy businessmen who wanted the booming Manaus to be acknowledged as a “great centre of civilisation''.
An Italian architect was hired to plan the building. He chose a kind of Neo-Renaissance-style for the exterior and had no limitations in the use of “exotic'' materials such as Carrara marble from Italy, French Louis XV-style furniture, English steel walls, Portuguese ceramic roof tiles and about 200 chandeliers made from Murano glass.
All the items were shipped thousands of kilometres up the Amazon, in an incredible logistic effort through hostile territory supervised by corrupt officials at numerous checkposts.
All in all it took 17 years until the theatre complex was finished with nearly 700 seats and electrical lighting powered by its own generator.
It finally saw its inauguration on New Year's Eve 1896. The first opera performance was staged in January 1897 with Amilcare Ponchicelli's La Gioconda.
Glorious performances
The rubber barons always wanted the greatest opera star of that time, Enrico Caruso, to perform in the Teatro Amazonas, and he indeed received several generous invitations.
But there is no evidence the famous singer ever went to Manaus.
After a short time of glorious performances the theatre started to face problems attracting opera celebrities and audiences due to a sudden downturn in the rubber business; cautchouc production in the Amazon decreased rapidly at the end of the 19th century after seeds were brought to the British colonies in South East Asia.
The centre of global rubber production suddenly moved to Malaysia and Indonesia, sunffing out Manaus's wealth.
Despite several restorations of the opera house, no opera was performed for more than 90 years.
Only after 2001 have there been some attempts to revive the glorious old times by the provincial administration.
A budget was set aside and Manaus is now hosting musicians and artistes mainly from Eastern Europe, who themselves were looking for new opportunities given the downturn in their native countries.
With its own philharmonic orchestra, an annual opera event and a film festival, Manaus seems to have re-invented the concept of a cultural metropolis in the middle of nowhere.
And it seems to be heard: Recently Prince Charles of the United Kingdom was guest at a reception in the Teatro Amazonas, hailing the sustainability of the venue and expressing his respect for the cultural aims of the jungle city.
But not all are convinced of Manaus's cultural mission in today's unstable economic times: Although Brazil's economy has been developing well because of its improved fundamentals, unionists and activists are suspicious of the idea of allocating several million dollars of the Amazon province's budget to hire expatriate artistes and musicians at high wages for performances that are attended by celebrities and important persons while more than half the indigenous population remains illiterate, suffers from lack of infrastructure and is forced to live in poverty.
