Music and Literature in Alejo Carpentier's Novel Baroque Concerto

Even after his original theory concerning the marvellous real became famous, once his novel El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of This World) was published in 1949, the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier continued to be preoccupied with certain aspects concerning different problems of magical realist discourse, relating it to the aesthetic domain of music and painting The novelist tries thus to prove that the Latin American identity is perfectly expressed by those works of art and by those exquisite artists capable to catch the true nature of "The New World". Therefore, in his novel Concierto barroco (Baroque Concerto, 1974) he imagines a miraculous musical encounter bringing together composers and interpreters from different epochs and cultural spaces, in order to utter the ultimate truth about the individuality of a continent rather unknown to "The Old World" of Europe, but perfectly able to compete with its old values and artistic achievements. (C) 2020 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.