Hercules in Mato Grosso
Opera Hercules in Mato Grosso tells the story of Hercule Florence, the French-Brazilian painter and inventor who traveled with Baron Georg Heinrich von Langsdorff through the Brazilian rainforest in the late 1820s. The opera follows the journey of these two men as they venture into the jungle, where they are confronted by two anacondas. Seduced by these water goddesses, the feverish Langsdorff loses his mind, while Florence finds a renewed commitment to his art. From the detailed journals kept by Florence, we see that during the trip he completed the first experiments in fixing images with a camera obscura (a pinhole camera), coining the term photo-graphia (painting with light) in the process. Hercules in Mato Grosso tells the story of Hercule Florence, the French-Brazilian painter and inventor who traveled with Baron Georg Heinrich von Langsdorff through the Brazilian rainforest in the late 1820s. The opera follows the journey of these two men as they venture into the jungle, where they are confronted by two anacondas. Seduced by these water goddesses, the feverish Langsdorff loses his mind, while Florence finds a renewed commitment to his art. From the detailed journals kept by Florence, we see that during the trip he completed the first experiments in fixing images with a camera obscura (a pinhole camera), coining the term photo-graphia (painting with light) in the process.
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