Biblioteca de la Guitarra y Cuerda Pulsada

The practice of setting dramatic texts entirely to music was not usual in Brazil before the nineteenth-century.Throughout the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries,musical theater consisted mostly of Spanish comedias by Calderón de la Barca, Agustín Moreto and others.Even local playwrights wrote in Spanish,such as Manoel Botelho de Oliveira (1636-1711),who interspersed with musical numbers the dialogues of his play Amor, engaños y celos.Performances in Portuguese language be came more common after the 1740s,with the success of the more colloquial style by Brazilian playwright Antonio José da Silva(1705-1739).It was only  in these cond half of the eighteenth century that Brazilian audiences were exposed to Italian libretti, though performed in Portuguese and subjected to adaptations...)

Opera and Musical Theater in Eighteenth-Century Brazil (Studi Musicali 35:1, 2006)