Isidora Zegers y José Zapiola: convergencias y diferencias en el advenimiento de la modernidad en la sociedad civil del Chile republicano (1810-1855)

Abstract

This paper focuses on the outputs of two important composers who resided in Chile between 1820 and 1855: Isidora Zegers y Montenegro (1807-1869) and José Zapiola Cortés (1802-1885). Isidora Zegers’s musical compositions were conceived for a salon ambience. Her works were written for the piano or for the voice with instrumental accompaniment. Isidora Zegers’s music was never performed in public during her lifetime, in spite of the key role she played during the first public concerts in Santiago towards the end of the 1820s, coinciding with the rise and fall of the first political systems of a liberal orientation in Chile. In contrast, the compositions of José Zapiola covered all the musical genres of his time, including salon music, i.e. military music, patriotic music, stage music and sacred music, and was widely performed in public during the 1830s and the first half of the 1840s, as well as after the 1850s. Undoubtedly, this dualism is a question of genre. Between 1820 and 1855, male activities were predominantly carried out in public, whereas women were confined to the privacy of their homes. However, this dualism can also be interpreted in terms of both Isidora Zegers’s and José Zapiola’s freedom to exert their creative subjectivity, in keeping with one of the key features of the rising cultural modernity in Chile between 1820 and 1855: the freeing of subjectivity.