A sainete was a popular Spanish comic opera piece, a one-act dramatic vignette, with music. It was often placed at the end of entertainments, or between other types of performance. It was vernacular

Vernacular

A vernacular is the native language or native dialect of a specific population, as opposed to a language of wider communication that is not native to the population, such as a national language or lingua franca.- Etymology :The term is not a recent one...

 in style, and used scenes of low life. Active from the 18th to 20th centuries, it superseded the entremés

Entremés

Entremés, is a short, comic theatrical performance of one act, usually played during the interlude of a performance of a long dramatic work, in the 16th and 17th centuries in Spain. Later it became the sainete....

. Sainetes began to be developed into zarzuelas in Cuba around 1850.

Among its most prolific composers were Ramón de la Cruz

Ramón de la Cruz

Ramón de la Cruz , Spanish neoclassical dramatist, was born in Madrid.He was a clerk in the ministry of finance, and is the author of three hundred sainetes, little farcical sketches of city life, written to be played between the acts of a longer play. He published a selection in ten volumes...

 and Antonio Soler

Antonio Soler

Antonio Francisco Javier José Soler Ramos, usually known as Padre Antonio Soler, known in Catalan as Antoni Soler i Ramos was a Spanish Catalan composer whose works span the late Baroque and early Classical music eras...

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