In the second half of the nineteenth century, the industrial world discovered rubber. Bicycles and carriages and electrical cables and, soon, automobiles all demanded it. The only source was the Hevea brasiliensis tree, which grew wild in the Amazon basin. Manaus - a small river port where the Rio Negro joins the Solimões - became, almost overnight, the center of a global commodity market. Rubber merchants made fortunes. They wanted a city to match their wealth. They paved the streets with European stone, strung electric lights before Boston had them, laid tramway tracks, and sent their shirts to Lisbon to be laundered because no local laundry could meet their standards. They decided they needed an opera house. Construction of what became the Teatro Amazonas was first proposed in 1881 by a member of the local House of Representatives, Antonio Jose Fernandes Júnior, who wanted a jewel in the heart of the Amazon rainforest.

In 1882, the president of the Province of Amazonas, José Lustosa Paranaguá, approved a larger budget and ran a design competition. A Lisbon firm - the Gabinete Português de Engenharia e Arquitectura - won. The Italian architect Celestial Sacardim took over construction on site. Work began in 1884 and stopped and started over the next fifteen years. By 1895, the masonry was finished and the installation of the interior began. The theatre opened on December 31, 1896. The first full performance came a week later on January 7, 1897, with Amilcare Ponchielli's La Gioconda - an Italian opera, sung by an Italian company, in a Renaissance Revival building in the middle of the Amazon rainforest. The merchants who paid for it all sat in the first and second tier boxes. The auditorium could seat 701 people.

The rubber that made Manaus rich was tapped by seringueiros - rubber tappers - who worked deep in the forest under a system that sometimes approached debt bondage. Many were migrants from drought-stricken northeastern Brazil, lured west by labor recruiters who promised wages and delivered credit accounts at company stores that could never be paid off. Many more were indigenous people - Bare, Tukano, Baniwa, Marubo, and others - forced or coerced into rubber work through a combination of violence, displacement, and dependency. Some rubber estates used outright enslavement. The Putumayo scandal, documented by the Irish diplomat Roger Casement in 1910, exposed Peruvian Amazon rubber operations that had killed tens of thousands of indigenous workers through starvation, forced labor, and murder. Conditions in the Brazilian Amazon were often better but rarely good. The seringueiros who hauled the latex that built the Teatro Amazonas were not invited to its opening.

The architectural style is Renaissance Revival. Domenico de Angelis the Younger, an Italian painter, did the ceiling panels of the auditorium and the audience chamber. Crispim do Amaral created the stage curtain in Paris - its image of the Meeting of the Waters is the most specifically Amazonian detail in a building otherwise composed entirely of European imports. The dome's 36,000 ceramic tiles, painted in the colors of the national flag, give the Teatro its distinctive silhouette on the Manaus skyline. The boxes fan out in four tiers. The orchestra pit is modest. The main stage is functional rather than spectacular. But the building is still one of the most beautiful opera houses in the world - Vogue magazine listed it among the fifteen most beautiful in 2019 - and it still hosts the annual Festival Amazonas de Ópera, the Amazonas Opera Festival, which draws singers and conductors from around the world.

In 1982, Werner Herzog made Fitzcarraldo - the story of an opera-obsessed rubber baron in turn-of-the-century Iquitos who drags a steamship over a mountain to reach a rubber concession. The film opens at the Teatro Amazonas, where Fitzcarraldo and his partner Molly paddle a boat to hear Enrico Caruso sing Verdi's Ernani. Caruso never actually sang at the Teatro, though the legend that he did has circulated in Manaus for a century. But in 1995, Luciano Pavarotti did travel to the Teatro and perform there, partly to replicate the Caruso myth - the visit forms the opening sequence of the 2019 documentary Pavarotti. Eva Ibbotson set two novels partly in the theatre: Journey to the River Sea, a children's book, and A Company of Swans, a young-adult romance. Ann Patchett set her 2011 novel State of Wonder in Manaus and the forest. The Teatro Amazonas is now what it always threatened to become: a symbol. It was built to declare that rainforest wealth could buy culture equal to Paris or Milan. Today it stands as a reminder of what that wealth cost - and still plays the operas it was built for.