Le Nouveau Monde à l’Opéra

Marc Lescarbot’s travel narrative, written while the opera in France and England is still in an embryonic form, describes a form of musical theatre danced, composed, and performed on the coast of the Gaspé Peninsula, which presents all the appearances of a proto-opera. The Amerindians provide the explorers of the New World with a new kind of artistic and emotional experience, which they in turn will offer to European composers, transmitting to them, in a highly romantic manner, a musical exoticism.