Zarzuela

Once the most popular form of Spanish entertainment short of the bullfight, the zarzuela boasts a long history of bridging the categories of classical and popular art. It is neither opera nor serious drama, yet it requires both trained singers and good actors. The content is neither purely folkloric nor high art; it is too popular for some and too classical for others. In Zarzuela, Janet L. Sturman assesses the political as well as the musical significance of this chameleon of music-drama. Sturman traces the zarzuela's colorful history from its seventeenth-century origins as a Spanish court entertainment to its adaptation in Spain's colonial outposts in the New World. She examines Cuba's pivotal role in transmitting the zarzuela to Latin America and the Caribbean and draws distinctions among the ways in which various Spanish-speaking communities have reformulated zarzuela, combining elements of the Spanish model with local characters, music, dances, and political perspectives. The settings Sturman considers include Argentina, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and the American cities of El Paso, Miami, and New York. Sturman also demonstrates how the zarzuela plays a role in defining American urban ethnicity. She offers a glimpse into two longstanding theaters in New York, Repertorio Espa ol and the Thalia Spanish Theatre, that have fostered the tradition of zarzuela, mounting innovative productions and cultivating audiences. Sturman constructs a profile of the audience that supports modern zarzuela and examines the extensive personal network that sustains it financially. Just as the zarzuela afforded an opportunity in the past for Spaniards to assert their individuality in the face of domination by Italian and central European musical standards, it continues to stand for a distinctive Hispanic legacy. Zarzuela provides a major advance in recognizing the enduring cultural and social significance of this resilient and adaptable genre.

On September 29, 1927, Cuban soprano Rita Montaner walked onto the stage of Havana's Teatro Regina, her features obscured under a mask of blackened glycerin and her body clad in the tight pants, boots, and riding jacket of a coachman. Standing alongside a gilded carriage and a live horse, the blackfaced, cross-dressed actress sang the premiere of Eliseo Grenet's tango-congo, "Ay Mama Ines." The crowd went wild. Montaner's performance cemented "Ay Mama Ines" as one of the classics in the Cuban repertoire, but more importantly, the premiere heralded the birth of the Cuban zarzuela, a new genre of music theater that over the next fifteen years transformed popular entertainment on the island. Cuban Zarzuela: Performing Race and Gender on Havana's Lyric Stage marks the first comprehensive study of the Cuban zarzuela, a Spanish-language light opera with spoken dialogue that originated in Spain but flourished in Havana during the early twentieth century. Created by musicians and managers to fill a growing demand for family entertainment, the zarzuela evidenced the emerging economic and cultural power of Cuba's white female bourgeoisie to influence the entertainment industry. Susan Thomas explores zarzuela's function as a pedagogical tool, through which composers, librettists, and business managers hoped to control their troupes and audiences by presenting desirable and problematic images of both feminine and masculine identities. Zarzuela was, Thomas explains, "anti-feminist but pro-feminine, its plots focusing on female protagonists and its musical scores showcasing the female voice." Focusing on character types such as the mulata, the negrito, and the ingenue, Thomas uncovers the zarzuela's richly textured relationship to social constructs of race, class, and especially gender.

It has been said that zarzuela means to Spain what operetta means to Vienna, Offenbach to Paris, Gilbert and Sullivan to London, and the musical to Broadway. Zarzuela is Spain's unique contribution to lyric theatre, a mixture of spoken and sung drama with a complex history extending over four centuries. The Zarzuela Companion is a comprehensive guide to zarzuela's most popular and romantic works written after 1850, with chapters devoted to the major Spanish zarzuela composers, writers and singers. Complete synopses of all sixty works selected are delivered at the level of detail necessary for non-Spanish speakers to follow along with ease. The book also features special sections on the history of the genre, and on the parallel Catalan and Cuban zarzuela traditions. A foreword by Plácido Domingo, a selected discography with current catalog reference numbers, a brief bilingual bibliography and glossary of Spanish terms make this book indispensable for the newcomer and aficionado alike.

Contains nearly 1000 pages of precise and accessible information on all musical subjects.

This exhaustive work is a complete reference guide to Zarzuela, the Spanish Lyric Theatre. Includes history, biographies of composers and librettists, plot synopses, discography, bibliography, chronological tables and a full index of titles.