The Music of the Netherlands Antilles. Jan Brokken

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      10

       An Island of Defaulters

      In 1886 Curaçao boasted seven composers with a population of no more than twenty-six thousand souls. By the start of the twentieth century their number had tripled. The printing presses of music publishers Librería A. Bethencourt e Hijos rolled from early in the morning until sunset. Composers from Willemstad, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, and Santo Domingo all had their musical scores printed there either by Imprenta Capriles or Tipografía Excelsior.

      The local composers lived on an insignificant rock sixty-one kilometers long and eleven kilometers wide, and were in seventh heaven. They could choose from no less than three music publishers who were all keen to acquire new works. Chopin had to hawk his wares all his life and a third of his work was never published. And he lived in the cultural capital of the world.

      Don Agustín Bethencourt laid the basis for publishing music on Curaçao. Born in 1826 in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, at the age of fourteen he decided to try his luck in the New World and exchanged the Canary Islands for Venezuela. He became merchant, teacher, justice of the peace, and pharmacist—the nineteenth-century man could still have all this on his plate in the vast country that was Venezuela, which had in common with the Wild West that it lay waiting with open arms for new settlers to arrive. In Valencia he had presumably already started printing pamphlets and lampoons; in any case he learned how to print. After nineteen years of residence he had to suddenly flee for political reasons. He sailed to Curaçao, taking in Willemstad’s ambience while waiting there for a ship to take him back to Santa Cruz de Tenerife—lighthearted, hard-working, free, for whites at least. Bethencourt was as white as his Norman forefathers, who had settled large areas of the Canary Islands. He mingled easily in the company of Huguenots and Jews who ruled the roost in Curaçao, and he did not have to learn another language to make himself understood. He rented a store, began importing sheet music from Schonberger Musique in Paris, and quickly established his own bookstore and music publishing house.