BY GEORGIA GRIMOND
IT’S A GLORIOUS Monday morning in Rio de Janeiro, and I’m standing outside the city’s Municipal Theater with Manoel de Almeida e Silva, an author and former spokesman for the U.N. A neat man, with a head of soft gray curls and carrying a backpack, he is explaining how a statue of Carlos Gomes, Brazil’s most famous composer, came to be here.
In the 1940s, he tells me, Polish expats in Rio commissioned a statue of the composer Frédéric Chopin to replace one destroyed by the Nazis in Warsaw a few years earlier. The Chopin statue was originally placed in Urca, a neighborhood near Sugarloaf Mountain, but in 1951, the city’s mayor had it moved in front of the municipal theater, where the great Polish composer stood as if he were conducting the theater’s orchestra. At Carnival time, citizens decorated the statue with flowers and musical instruments.