Teatro Amazonas

A moving portrait of an opera house in the middle of the rainforest.

The neo-classical building in the centre of the Amazon metropolis Manaus has room for more than 700 people and it was the second largest opera house after La Scala in Milan when it was inaugurated in 1896. The Teatro Amazonas was intended to delight the rubber barons in the newly emerging cosmopolitan city, the “Paris of the Tropics”, with music. To make the plan of an opulent opera house in the middle of the rainforest come true, it probably took a visionary obsession similar to that of Fitzcarraldo, the eccentric entrepreneur and opera lover in Werner Herzog's film of the same name (Save the date: Werner Herzog's 80th birthday on 5 September, 2022!).

Even today, the building bears witness to the cultural demonstration of power by a Western industrialist class that quickly became rich from rubber. They owed their prosperity to the industrial nations' hunger for the valuable raw material - and did not shy away from unscrupulous exploitation of the land and the indigenous population.
After the decline of the rubber industry shortly afterwards, the music in the house also falls silent. The memory fades, the house sinks into a thorny sleep. But the myth of the Amazon lives on…

Our latest documentary "Teatro Amazonas" is a moving portrait of an opera house that reflects the cultural human spaces of European modernity and is also a cinematic reflection.

Genre Documentary
Production year 2022
Duration 52'
Video format UHD SDR
Production Company EuroArts Music
TV Director Friedemann Hottenbacher
Production Company EuroArts Music