Spanish opera
Encyclopedia
Spanish opera is both the art of opera
in Spain
and opera in the Spanish language
. Opera
has existed in Spain
since the mid 17th century.
, Italy
, and to a lesser extent Germany
which have had continuous traditions of opera since the early part of the 17th century. One of the reasons for this slow development was the existence of a strong tradition of spoken drama in Spain which made some critics believe that opera was a less worthy artform. However, there was a tradition of songs given within largely spoken plays which began in the early 16th century by such distinguished composers as Juan del Encina
.
The earliest Spanish operas appeared in the mid 17th century with libretti
by such famous writers as Calderón de la Barca and Lope de Vega
to music by such composers as Juan Hidalgo de Polanco. These early operas, however, failed to catch the imagination of the Spanish public. It wasn't until the increasing popularity of such genres as ballad opera
and opéra comique
that opera in Spain started to gain momentum, since the use of speech in the vernacular inevitably encouraged Spanish composers to develop their own national style of opera: zarzuela
.
The opera artform flourished in Spain during the eighteenth century with two excellent composers, Sebastián Durón
and Antonio Literes. Literes' opera Accis y Galatea (1708) was particularly popular. Also of note later in the century was Rodrígues de Hita (c.1724–87) who used guitars, mandolins, tambourines, and castanets and incorporated spectacular dancing into his opera Las labradoras de Murcia (1769). The zarzuela (in this sense) was eventually superseded by a yet simpler entertainment, the tonadilla
escénica (usually a down-to-earth story of everyday folk), but this too became increasingly sophisticated. Eventually the popularity of zarzuela wained at the end of the 18th century, with the last known zarzuela of the century, Clementina by Luigi Boccherini
, premiering in 1786. For over the next sixty years Italian opera
became the predominantly popular form of opera in Spain.
In the mid 19th century there was a renewed interest in the zarzuela in Spain, just as in other countries an increasing national awareness gave rise to distinctive styles to combat the pervading influence of Italian opera. It has been estimated that over 10,000 zarzuelas were written in the hundred years after 1850. The Teatro de la Zarzuela
in Madrid became the hub of activity, but scores of companies in the capital, the provinces, and Spanish-speaking Central and South America were busily performing zarzuela in repertory.
Of particular note is composer Francisco Asenjo Barbieri
who aimed to create a distinctively national operatic style which fused the traditional tonadilla and the old, aristocratic drama into a new form evolved from Italian comic opera
. In contrast, Emilio Arrieta
stayed closer to ‘pure’ Romantic Italian models in such zarzuelas as Marina (1855). The two became intense rivals within the eyes of the public and their competitive behavior made zarzuela extremely popular.
Other composers, such as Tomás Bretón
and Ruperto Chapí
, wrote smaller zarzuelas known as género chico which were farces in one-act. These farcical operas often contained social or political satire and usually contained less music and more spoken dialogue than other forms of zarzuela. The género chico reached its height of popularity in the 1880s and 1890s with composer Federico Chueca
.
In the 20th century the zarzuela evolved with popular taste, though the mixture of spoken play and operatic music in roughly equal proportions remained. Operetta-zarzuelas, most notably by Pablo Luna
and Amadeo Vives
, coexisted with revue-style farces such as Francisco Alonso's Las leandras (1931) and sentimental verismo
dramas such as José Serrano
's La dolorosa
(1930). In the 1930s Pablo Sorozábal
attempted to restore the satirical thrust of the 1890s, but after the Spanish Civil War
the distinctive quality of zarzuela was lost in imitations of the Broadway musical. Since 1960 very few new works have entered the repertory, but the popularity of the classic zarzuelas continues.
(1962 posth.), Granados
' one-act opera Goyescas
, Bretón
's La Dolores
, and the English-language operas of Albéniz Merlin
, Henry Clifford
and Pepita Jiménez
for London and the Gran Teatro del Liceo.
Manuel García (tenor)
's Italian-language operas L'amante astuto (The astute lover) and La figlia dell' aria (The daughter of the air) had been performed in New York during the 19th Century but Spanish opera waited till the 20th Century. In the Americas operas include Alberto Ginastera
's Bomarzo, (New York 1967) and Mexican composer Daniel Catán
's Florencia en el Amazonas
(Houston 1996).
Opera
Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...
in Spain
Spain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...
and opera in the Spanish language
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
. Opera
Opera
Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...
has existed in Spain
Spain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...
since the mid 17th century.
Early history
Opera was slow to develop within Spain in comparison to FranceFrance
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
, Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
, and to a lesser extent Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
which have had continuous traditions of opera since the early part of the 17th century. One of the reasons for this slow development was the existence of a strong tradition of spoken drama in Spain which made some critics believe that opera was a less worthy artform. However, there was a tradition of songs given within largely spoken plays which began in the early 16th century by such distinguished composers as Juan del Encina
Juan del Encina
Juan del Enzina – the spelling he used – or Juan del Encina – modern Spanish spelling – was a composer, poet and playwright, often called the founder of Spanish drama...
.
The earliest Spanish operas appeared in the mid 17th century with libretti
Libretto
A libretto is the text used in an extended musical work such as an opera, operetta, masque, oratorio, cantata, or musical. The term "libretto" is also sometimes used to refer to the text of major liturgical works, such as mass, requiem, and sacred cantata, or even the story line of a...
by such famous writers as Calderón de la Barca and Lope de Vega
Lope de Vega
Félix Arturo Lope de Vega y Carpio was a Spanish playwright and poet. He was one of the key figures in the Spanish Golden Century Baroque literature...
to music by such composers as Juan Hidalgo de Polanco. These early operas, however, failed to catch the imagination of the Spanish public. It wasn't until the increasing popularity of such genres as ballad opera
Ballad opera
The term ballad opera is used to refer to a genre of English stage entertainment originating in the 18th century and continuing to develop in the following century and later. There are many types of ballad opera...
and opéra comique
Opéra comique
Opéra comique is a genre of French opera that contains spoken dialogue and arias. It emerged out of the popular opéra comiques en vaudevilles of the Fair Theatres of St Germain and St Laurent , which combined existing popular tunes with spoken sections...
that opera in Spain started to gain momentum, since the use of speech in the vernacular inevitably encouraged Spanish composers to develop their own national style of opera: zarzuela
Zarzuela
Zarzuela is a Spanish lyric-dramatic genre that alternates between spoken and sung scenes, the latter incorporating operatic and popular song, as well as dance...
.
Zarzuela
Zarzuela is characterized by a mixture of sung and spoken dialogue. Although Hidalgo's early forays into opera were more along the lines of Italian opera, he was instrumental in helping to create the art form, composing the first known zarzuela, El laurel de Apolo, in 1657. The courtly Baroque zarzuela, a mixture of sophisticated verse drama, allegorical opera, popular song, and dance, became the fashion of the Spanish court for over the next 100 years.The opera artform flourished in Spain during the eighteenth century with two excellent composers, Sebastián Durón
Sebastián Durón
-Life and career:Sebastian Duron was, with Antonio de Literes, the greatest Spanish composer of stage music of his time. He was born in Brihuega, Guadalajara, Spain, and was taught by his brother Diego Duron, also a composer...
and Antonio Literes. Literes' opera Accis y Galatea (1708) was particularly popular. Also of note later in the century was Rodrígues de Hita (c.1724–87) who used guitars, mandolins, tambourines, and castanets and incorporated spectacular dancing into his opera Las labradoras de Murcia (1769). The zarzuela (in this sense) was eventually superseded by a yet simpler entertainment, the tonadilla
Tonadilla
Tonadilla was a Spanish musical song form of theatrical origin; not danced. The genre was a type of short, satirical musical comedy popular in 18th-century Spain, and later in Cuba and other Spanish colonial countries. It originated as a song type, then dialogue for characters was written into the...
escénica (usually a down-to-earth story of everyday folk), but this too became increasingly sophisticated. Eventually the popularity of zarzuela wained at the end of the 18th century, with the last known zarzuela of the century, Clementina by Luigi Boccherini
Luigi Boccherini
Luigi Rodolfo Boccherini was an Italian classical era composer and cellist whose music retained a courtly and galante style while he matured somewhat apart from the major European musical centers. Boccherini is most widely known for one particular minuet from his String Quintet in E, Op. 11, No...
, premiering in 1786. For over the next sixty years Italian opera
Italian opera
Italian opera is both the art of opera in Italy and opera in the Italian language. Opera was born in Italy around the year 1600 and Italian opera has continued to play a dominant role in the history of the form until the present day. Many famous operas in Italian were written by foreign composers,...
became the predominantly popular form of opera in Spain.
In the mid 19th century there was a renewed interest in the zarzuela in Spain, just as in other countries an increasing national awareness gave rise to distinctive styles to combat the pervading influence of Italian opera. It has been estimated that over 10,000 zarzuelas were written in the hundred years after 1850. The Teatro de la Zarzuela
Teatro de la Zarzuela
The Teatro de la Zarzuela is a theatre in Madrid, Spain. The theatre is today mainly devoted to zarzuela , as well as operetta and recitals. In the past, in the city's long absence of an opera theatre , this was Madrid's theatre where most major opera performances were shown...
in Madrid became the hub of activity, but scores of companies in the capital, the provinces, and Spanish-speaking Central and South America were busily performing zarzuela in repertory.
Of particular note is composer Francisco Asenjo Barbieri
Francisco Asenjo Barbieri
Francisco Asenjo Barbieri was a well-known composer of the popular Spanish opera form, zarzuela. His works include: El barberillo de Lavapiés, Jugar con fuego, Pan y toros, Don Quijote, Los diamantes de la corona, and El Diablo en el poder.He was born and died in Madrid, appropriately, since the...
who aimed to create a distinctively national operatic style which fused the traditional tonadilla and the old, aristocratic drama into a new form evolved from Italian comic opera
Comic opera
Comic opera denotes a sung dramatic work of a light or comic nature, usually with a happy ending.Forms of comic opera first developed in late 17th-century Italy. By the 1730s, a new operatic genre, opera buffa, emerged as an alternative to opera seria...
. In contrast, Emilio Arrieta
Emilio Arrieta
Pascual Juan Emilio Arrieta Corera was a Spanish composer.Arrieta was born in Puente la Reina, Navarre, and died in Madrid...
stayed closer to ‘pure’ Romantic Italian models in such zarzuelas as Marina (1855). The two became intense rivals within the eyes of the public and their competitive behavior made zarzuela extremely popular.
Other composers, such as Tomás Bretón
Tomás Bretón
Tomás Bretón was a Spanish musician and composer.-Biography:Tomás Bretón was born in Salamanca.He gained renown as a result of the success of his zarzuela La verbena de la Paloma, although other were well-received works, included his operas Los amantes de Teruel, based on the eponymous legend,...
and Ruperto Chapí
Ruperto Chapí
Ruperto Chapí y Lorente was a Spanish composer, and co-founder of the Sociedad General de Autores y Editores.Chapí was born at Villena, the son of a Valencian barber. He trained in his home town and Madrid...
, wrote smaller zarzuelas known as género chico which were farces in one-act. These farcical operas often contained social or political satire and usually contained less music and more spoken dialogue than other forms of zarzuela. The género chico reached its height of popularity in the 1880s and 1890s with composer Federico Chueca
Federico Chueca
Federico Chueca was a Spanish composer of zarzuelas and author of La gran vía along with Joaquín Valverde Durán in 1886. Chueca was one of the most prominent figures of the género chico....
.
In the 20th century the zarzuela evolved with popular taste, though the mixture of spoken play and operatic music in roughly equal proportions remained. Operetta-zarzuelas, most notably by Pablo Luna
Pablo Luna
Pablo Luna Gamio is a Mexican coach in the Liga de Ascenso. He is the current manager of Alacranes de Durango....
and Amadeo Vives
Amadeo Vives
Amadeu Vives i Roig was a Catalan Spanish musical composer, creator of over a hundred stage works. He is best known for Doña Francisquita, which Christopher Webber has praised for its "easy lyricism, fluent orchestration and colourful evocation of 19th Century Madrid—not to mention its memorable...
, coexisted with revue-style farces such as Francisco Alonso's Las leandras (1931) and sentimental verismo
Verismo
Verismo was an Italian literary movement which peaked between approximately 1875 and the early 1900s....
dramas such as José Serrano
José Serrano
José Enrique Serrano is the U.S. Representative for , serving since 1990. He is a member of the Democratic Party....
's La dolorosa
La dolorosa (play)
La dolorosa is a zarzuela by Spanish composer José Serrano. La dolorosa premiered at the Teatro Apolo in Valencia on 23 May 1930 with text by J.J.Lorente...
(1930). In the 1930s Pablo Sorozábal
Pablo Sorozábal
Pablo Sorozábal Mariezcurrena was a Basque-Spanish composer.Trained in San Sebastián, Madrid and Leipzig; then in Berlin, where he preferred Friedrich Koch as composition teacher to Arnold Schönberg, whose theories he disliked. It was in Germany that he made his conducting debut, and the rostrum...
attempted to restore the satirical thrust of the 1890s, but after the Spanish Civil War
Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil WarAlso known as The Crusade among Nationalists, the Fourth Carlist War among Carlists, and The Rebellion or Uprising among Republicans. was a major conflict fought in Spain from 17 July 1936 to 1 April 1939...
the distinctive quality of zarzuela was lost in imitations of the Broadway musical. Since 1960 very few new works have entered the repertory, but the popularity of the classic zarzuelas continues.
Full opera
Attempts to write a full, through-sung, opera include de Falla's AtlàntidaAtlàntida
Atlántida is an opera by Manuel de Falla based on a Spanish translation of the Catalan poem L'Atlàntida by Jacint Verdaguer.Atlántida started in the 1920s as a cantata, but grew over 20 years to become a full opera. De Falla died in Argentina before it was finished, leaving a loose collection of...
(1962 posth.), Granados
Granados
Places called Granados:*Granados, Baja Verapaz, Guatemala*Granados, Sonora, MexicoPeople named Granados:* Enrique Granados , Spanish composer* Federico Tinoco Granados , president of Costa Rica...
' one-act opera Goyescas
Goyescas
Goyescas, Op. 11, subtitled Los majos enamorados , is a piano suite written in 1911 by Spanish composer Enrique Granados. This piano suite is usually considered Granados's crowning creation and was inspired by the paintings of Francisco Goya, although the piano pieces have not been authoritatively...
, Bretón
Breton
Breton usually refers to:* anything associated with Brittany, and generally;** the Breton people of Brittany;** the Breton language, a Celtic language spoken in Brittany;** the Breton , a breed of horses; and...
's La Dolores
La Dolores
La Dolores is an opera by Tomás Bretón.La Dolores was first performed in Madrid in 1895 and was an immediate success. It had 66 consecutive performances in Madrid and another 112 in Barcelona. The title character Dolores is maid at an inn in Catalayud....
, and the English-language operas of Albéniz Merlin
Merlin (opera)
Merlin is the last of the operas of Isaac Albéniz. It is in three acts and the libretto was written in English by Francis Money-Coutts, 5th Baron Latymer ....
, Henry Clifford
Henry Clifford (opera)
Henry Clifford is a grand opera in three acts composed by Isaac Albéniz to an English libretto written by Francis Money-Coutts . It premiered at the Gran Teatro del Liceo on 8 May 1895...
and Pepita Jiménez
Pepita Jiménez
Pepita Jiménez is a lyric comedy or comic opera with music written by the Spanish composer Isaac Albéniz. The original opera was written in one act and used an English libretto by Albéniz's patron and collaborator, the Englishman Francis Money-Coutts, which is based on the novel of the same name by...
for London and the Gran Teatro del Liceo.
Manuel García (tenor)
Manuel García (tenor)
Manuel del Pópulo Vicente Rodriguez García was a Spanish opera singer, composer, impresario, and singing teacher.-Biography:...
's Italian-language operas L'amante astuto (The astute lover) and La figlia dell' aria (The daughter of the air) had been performed in New York during the 19th Century but Spanish opera waited till the 20th Century. In the Americas operas include Alberto Ginastera
Alberto Ginastera
Alberto Evaristo Ginastera was an Argentine composer of classical music. He is considered one of the most important Latin American classical composers.- Biography :...
's Bomarzo, (New York 1967) and Mexican composer Daniel Catán
Daniel Catán
Daniel Catán was a Mexican composer of Russian Sephardic Jewish descent known particularly for his operas and his creative friendship with the tenor Plácido Domingo.-Career:...
's Florencia en el Amazonas
Florencia en el Amazonas
Florencia en el Amazonas is an opera in two acts composed by Daniel Catán. It contains elements of magical realism in the style of Gabriel García Márquez and uses a libretto by Marcela Fuentes-Berain, one of his pupils...
(Houston 1996).
Sources
- Nicholas Temperley: "Opera", Grove Music Online ed. L. Macy (Accessed October 25, 2008), (subscription access)
- Christopher Webber: "Zarzuela", Grove Music Online ed. L. Macy (Accessed October 25, 2008), (subscription access)
External links
- Foundation for Iberian Music at The City University of New York
- Ars Hispana Information about Spanish operas and zarzuelas ("música escénica española")