What have Anna Pavlova, Pablo Casals, Placido Domingo, Ravi Shankar, Rudolf Nureyev and Marcel Marceau got in common?
All have, at one time or another, trodden the boards of the majestic Teatro Degollado, Guadalajara’s cultural centerpiece that later this year will mark 150 years since its “first” inauguration.
The above-named garlanded performers followed in the footsteps of soprano Angeles Peralta (“The Mexican Nightingale”), who sang the title role in Gaetano Donizertti’s “Lucia de Lammermoor” before an overflow audience at the theater’s opening gala on September 13, 1866.
Both Peralta and Jacobo Galvez, the theater’s architect, received a thunderous ovation, a local newspaper then reported.
For Galvez, however, building the edifice over the previous decade had been a personal struggle, as he found himself caught up in the bitter Reform War, the civil conflict between liberals and conservatives that split the nation in two.
Santos Degollado Sanchez, a former law professor who became governor of Jalisco, conceived the idea of building a monumental structure to house the city’s most important cultural events.
To choose the architect for his great theater, Degollado organized a contest, which was won by Galvez, a Tapatio with liberal leanings. Construction began in March 1856, with Degollado laying the cornerstone. The site chosen was the place where tradition says the city was founded on February 14, 1542.
In 1858, the liberal government fell and Galvez fled the city. Work was suspended but the architect – eventually granted political immunity by the conservatives – returned the following year to finish the most important project of his career.
When the conservatives controlled Guadalajara the theater bore its original name of Alarcon, in honor of the renowned Mexican dramatist Juan Ruiz de Alarcon y Mendoza. When the liberals held power it was called Degollado. The name changed four times, with Degollado finally prevailing, shortly after the building’s inauguration in 1866.
Construction of the theater’s famous boveda began in 1859. Gerardo Suarez, a disciple of Galvez’s, helped paint the impressive mural of a scene from Dante’s “Divine Comedy” that decorates the dome.
The liberals had retaken Guadalajara in 1861, the year that Degollado, who President Benito Juarez had appointed secretary of war and commanding general of the federal forces, died in battle.
Three years later, during the French intervention in Mexico, Emperor Maximilian joined with the conservatives to recapture the city. Galvez stopped work again, and did not agree to continue the project until 1866. By September of that year he had largely finished the interior but the exterior was far from complete. (A traveling scribe, John Lewis Geiger, wrote at the time: “The first time I saw the theater it looked like an old Roman ruin.”) Despite its incomplete exterior, Peralta, fresh from a triumphal reception in La Scala, Milan, was recruited for the opening concert amid much buzz in the city’s bourgeois circles.
In 1877, work on the building began again. By 1880 the column of the portico and the proscenium were completed. Artist Felipe Castro painted the murals “Time and Hours and The Fame” on the proscenium arch. Between 1880 and 1890, the stucco on the concert hall was completed and a golden color was added to the interior walls.
In 1880, the theater had a second inauguration with the representation of Spanish operetta. In the years that followed, sporadic improvements were made; the enormous chandelier that hangs in the concert hall was put in place in 1910, when a third “inauguration” was held.
Believe it or not, in June 1941 the theater had yet another inauguration, again with a repeat of “Lucia de Lammermoor,” this time sung by Evangelina Magana.
During the administration of Governor Augustin Yañez (1953-1959), Jalisco painter Roberto Montenegro was commissioned to create an allegorical mosaic of Apollo and the nine muses for the tympanum of the portico. Unfortunately, many observers thought the final result was not in stylistic harmony with the existing structure.
As the theater’s centennial approached, Governor Juan Gil Preciado decided it was time to order an overhaul to make the theater worthy of its role as the centerpiece of the city’s cultural life.
To do the remodeling he chose a renowned Jalisco architect, the late Ignacio Diaz Morales.
As often happens with a building worked on by many hands, Diaz found that there were several different styles within the facades. “My first task was to study how to find unity in the existing anarchy,” he said. “What I did was simply bring a little order to the anarchy.”
Diaz increased the number of columns of the portico so it was no longer “a sort of entrance to a gas station, where cars could pull in so people going to the theater wouldn’t get wet.” According to Diaz, Galvez’s architectural plans had disappeared. He thought the builders had not followed the original design because the exterior did not match the splendor of the interior conceived by Galvez and adorned by Suarez and Castro.
The “expert hand that did the dome and excellent concert hall was not the same one that made such clumsy mistakes on the exterior,” Diaz was quoted as saying at the time.
Under Diaz’s supervision, sculptor Benito Castaneda replaced the portico mosaic with the high relief marble structure we know today. It harmonizes with the cantera stone of the facade.
On September 13, 1966, the theater held a fifth “inauguration” to mark its centenary. Soprano Ernestina Garfias, tenor Placido Domingo and baritone Sherrill Milnes starred in – guess what – “Lucia de Lammermoor.”
In 1987, Diaz undertook another remodeling and restoration of the theater. This time he concentrated on the dressing rooms, the electrical installations and the structure for handling the scenery. Air conditioning was installed and the concert hall renovated. In May 2001, a chamber hall holding 200 people was added to the inside of the building.
Beneath Castaneda’s relief is a carved legend that calls to mind the turmoil in which the Teatro Degollado was born and points toward more tranquil times: “Que nunca llega el rumor de la discordia” (May the rumor of discord never be heard).