(Sp., diminutive of tonada: ‘song’).
An intermezzo sung between the acts of a play or (more rarely) an opera or auto sacramental (see Auto) in 18th-century and early 19th-century Spanish theatre. The name was used originally for a strophic song usually preceding a dance, which is why the theatrical tonadilla is sometimes referred to as a tonadilla escénica. The genre developed from about 1750 in Madrid, where it became a customary part of the miscellaneous fare in the playhouses, along with dances, songs and the main entertainment. The first tonadilla was once thought to have been written in 1757 by the Catalan composer Luis Misón, who was then active in Madrid, but Subirá showed that Antonio Guerrero had included tonadillas in many of his plays a few years earlier. His early tonadillas include Los señores fingidos and Los náufragos.
The tonadilla, which dealt mainly with lower-class characters (peasants, innkeepers, gypsies, barbers etc.), soon found popular acceptance, first in Madrid and then elsewhere in Spain and in Latin America, and developed into a kind of short comic opera akin to the Neapolitan intermezzo. Some tonadillas were for one singer only, others for two, three, four or more; a tonadilla with more than four characters was sometimes called a tonadilla general. The most complex example ever performed seems to have been Jacinto Valledor’s La plaza de palacio de Barcelona (1774), which required 12 singers and was performed, as the printed libretto informs us, on King Charles III’s nameday (4 November) in Barcelona’s Teatro de la S Cruz (see illustration). Some tonadillas required a chorus, but such works were not common.
Subirá described the earliest type, from about 1751–7, as usually a short piece which, like the Sainete or Entremés, served to separate the acts of a play. It reached its maturity between 1771 and 1790, when it developed a kinship to Italian opera, with the Catalan Pablo Esteve y Grimau and the Navarrese Blas de Laserna as its most distinguished composers. During the following years (1791–1810) it suffered a kind of hypertrophy, becoming longer and more complicated. A contest announced by the Spanish government in the Gaceta de Madrid in 1791 was for a tonadilla for one to four characters with a length of between 10 and 22 minutes. Leandro Fernández de Moratín, a well-known playwright and sometime theatrical censor, frowned on the tonadilla of this period as ‘cheap and low’. In the years between 1810 and 1850 the tonadilla slowly declined; a few remained in the repertory for a time, often with an admixture of well-known numbers from other pieces, but the Romantic theatre found no place for them.
The spirit of Spanish music is evident in the tonadilla above all in its melodies and rhythms (specifically those of the fandango, folía, jota, seguidilla, tirana and other Spanish dances) and in the use of some typically Spanish instruments such as the guitar and castanets. Italian influence is present too in the musical style, the aria form, the titles of set numbers (‘quartetto’, ‘arietta’ etc.) and even in Italian texts or subjects concerning Italian music or life. The song, or aria, usually to be found at the beginning has a simple binary form (AA') or the typical aria form ABA; the two sections of the AA' type were often separated by a few spoken lines. A chorus, if present, would sometimes sing a refrain once or twice at the end of a number. In the mature tonadilla the first aria was usually introduced by a ritornello, sometimes entitled ‘introducción’, ‘preludio’ or even ‘obertura’.
Up to 1760 most tonadillas had only three numbers, the middle one consisting of coplas (verses) which told the story, but in the 1760s it became customary to have four sections, the second and fourth being normally seguidillas, with the coplas placed third. However, no regular pattern was established, and several different numbers could be included under cover of a single one; for instance, a seguidilla could include other popular dances such as the jota or (more likely) the tirana. The verses sung with a seguidilla were usually repeated many times, making it an item of some length. Some of the musical numbers might be preceded by recitative, as in Italian opera.
Despite Subirá’s efforts to establish the genre as an important part of Spain’s musical past, the tonadilla repertory remains today largely unexplored and unperformed.
LaborD
F. Pedrell: Teatro lírico español anterior al siglo XIX (La Coruña, 1897–8)
J. Gómez: ‘Don Blas de Laserna: un capítulo de la historia del teatro lírico español visto en la vida del último tonadillero’, Revista de la Biblioteca, archivo y museo [de ayntamiento de Madrid], ii (1925), 406–30, 531–48; iii (1926), 88–104, 222–40
J. Subirá: La tonadilla escénica (Madrid, 1928–30)
J. Subirá: Tonadillas teatráles inéditas (Madrid, 1932)
J. Subirá: ‘Les influences françaises dans la tonadilla madrilène du XVIIIe siècle’, Mélanges de musicologie offerts à M. Lionel de La Laurencie (Paris, 1933), 209–16
J. Subirá: La tonadilla escénica: sus obras y sus autores (Barcelona, 1933)
M.N. Hamilton: Music in Eighteenth Century Spain (Urbana, IL, 1937/R)
N. González Ruiz: La Caramba: vida alegre y muerte ejemplar de una tonadillera del siglo XVIII (Madrid, 1944)
J. Subirá: ‘El “cuatro” escénico español, sus antecedentes, evoluciones y desintegración’, Miscelánea en homenaje a Monseñor Higinio Anglés (Barcelona, 1961), 895–921
J. Subirá: ‘Cosmopolitanismo en la tonadilla escénica española’, Revista musical de Venezuela, xxv (1988), 199–209
C. Real and L.Alcalde: ‘La tonadilla: un capítulo de la historia del espectáculo del siglo XVIII’, Teatro y música en España: Salamanca 1994, 125–44
ROGER ALIER