(Sp., from zarza: ‘bramble’, ‘bramble bush’).
A Spanish genre of musical theatre characterized by a mixture of sung and spoken dialogue. Covarrubias's Tesoro de la lengua castellana (1611) defines zarza as ‘a spiny mat … a thing that is all linked together and intertwined in itself’. ‘Zarzuela’ is also used generally to describe a mixture or jumble.
2. The 19th century and the ‘género chico’.
LOUISE K. STEIN (1), ROGER ALIER (2, 3)
The first use of the word ‘zarzuela’ in a theatrical and musical context is found in the auto sacramental De los cantares by Lope de Vega. In a scene that includes rustic dances, one called ‘zarzuela’ carries as its text an adaptation of an older popular peasant song or seranilla.
In the late 1650s ‘zarzuela’ was used to refer to short musical plays of a lightly burlesque nature organized by Gaspar de Haro, the Marquis of Heliche, to entertain the king and his guests at the renovated Palacio Real de la Zarzuela, a royal hunting-lodge in the wooded outskirts of Madrid. The first such plays, with texts by Pedro Calderón de la Barca and music presumably by Juan Hidalgo, called for an especially large number of female actor-singers. Musical intervention was not at all new in court plays, and in the 1650s both the two-act pastoral zarzuelas and the more complex, heavily dramatic, three-act mythological comedias or semi-operas (see Semi-opera) performed at the Coliseo del Buen Retiro included songs of various sorts and spoken dialogue together with declamatory sung dialogue. Although most 17th-century zarzuelas do not call for recitative at all, or require at most only one or two small sections of it, recitative was included in Calderón’s mythological plays as early as 1652 in La fiera, el rayo, y la piedra and in the extensively musical semi-opera Fortunas de Andrómeda y Perseo (presumably with music by Hidalgo) of 1653.
The first known zarzuela is Calderón’s El laurel de Apolo, in two acts, written in 1657 to celebrate the birth of Prince Philip (Felipe Próspero) but not performed until early in 1658. Court documents confirm that it and his one-act ‘piscatory eclogue’ El golfo de las sirenas (1657) were produced by the Marquis of Heliche emphasizing musical splendour rather than extensive visual display. Since Calderón seems to have abruptly left off writing mythological semi-operas after 1653 (though he later returned to the genre), it is likely that these works of 1657 were invented to present highly entertaining musical plays appropriate for the royal decorum on the small stage of the Zarzuela palace, without the enormous rehearsal time and expenditure that the semi-operas required. In 1658, however, the Marquis of Heliche produced a spectacular musical play at the Coliseo del Buen Retiro in celebration of the prince’s birth. This play, Triunfos de Amor y Fortuna by Antonio de Solís (extant songs by Juan Hidalgo and Cristóbal Galán), is much like a zarzuela in its musical scenes, with ensemble songs (coros) and solo songs mostly in the form of coplas and estribillo. Its plot also exhibits the mixed and somewhat messy character of the zarzuela, combining two different mythological love stories in a rustic and pastoral setting, complete with classical deities as protagonists in the company of pastoral and allegorical figures.
17th-century zarzuelas varied in the quantity of music they included, so that the genre cannot be defined or understood on this basis alone. They take the rustic and pastoral landscape as their setting, and, just as the zarza is a common sort of vegetation, the zarzuela used predominantly common sorts of music. Calderón’s text for El laurel de Apolo is exemplary, although its music seems not to survive. This is a fiesta de zarzuela in two acts, introduced by a loa (prologue), set in the ‘fields of Madrid’, in which the character of Zarzuela explains that rustic simplicity is an element long overlooked in courtly entertainments, and promises that everyone will enjoy the new genre, which is not a comedia but a shorter pastoral fable that is partly sung and partly spoken. El laurel de Apolo is not a opera text: its stage directions make clear that it was not fully sung; yet Calderón mentioned Italian practice in Zarzuela’s monologue (‘a imitación de Italia / se canta y se representa’), referring to the alternation between sung and spoken dialogue that came to characterize the zarzuela and most other large-scale Spanish court plays. It is likely that Calderón needed to explain his choice of the pastoral as a musical entertainment because the mythological pastoral had not been cultivated at court for nearly three decades. By recuperating it as a hybrid zarzuela, Calderón introduced a new genre.
Virtually all the dramatists who wrote for the Spanish court in the 17th century provided zarzuela texts, and the zarzuela became the favourite and most prolifically cultivated genre of palace play during the reigns of the last of the Spanish Habsburgs. Younger contemporaries of Calderón, including Francisco de Avellaneda, Juan Bautista Diamante, Melchor Fernández de León, Agustín de Salazar y Torres, Antonio de Solís and Juan Vélez de Guevara, contributed zarzuelas to great acclaim. This kind of zarzuela set the model for some courtly celebrations in Latin America as well, to judge by the elegantly preserved text for También se vengan los dioses, a zarzuela in two acts by Lorenzo de las Llamosas (a Peruvian writer who later emigrated to the Spanish court in Madrid), performed in Lima to honour the birth of the second son of the viceroy, the Count of Monclova.
The extant music for many of the Madrid productions, which has survived mainly as individual songs in performing parts and anthologies, points to Hidalgo as the chief composer for court musical plays from the 1650s to his death in 1685, although Galán also wrote for a few plays. Hidalgo’s songs were composed as perfect vehicles for affective expression in their respective scenes, using the standard Spanish forms of the tono (usually with coplas and estribillo) and tonada, while closely projecting and interpreting the elaborately baroque song texts provided by the dramatists. Hidalgo’s music set the standard for other composers, and his collaborations with the dramatists of his time reflect the solidification of the musical-theatrical conventions that characterized Spanish musical drama for some time to come.
Hidalgo’s pupil Juan Francisco de Navas and Juan Serqueira de Lima, a famous composer and harpist who worked in the theatre companies, composed for revivals of older zarzuelas when the original music had been lost. Navas composed new zarzuelas to texts by Fernández de León and later authors such as Francisco de Bances Candamo, Lorenzo de las Llamosas, Manuel Vidal Salvador and Antonio de Zamora. The extant songs by Navas for these works and the invaluable printed score of his music for Destinos vencen finezas (1698; text by Llamosas) demonstrate a slightly more modern musical style incorporating obbligato instrumental parts that join the vocal parts in dialogue, longer phrases and more ornamented, longer-breathed vocal lines. Navas also composed longer, continuous musical scenes that incorporate recitado (a Spanish type of recitative) together with highly affective estribillos and traditional, typically declamatory coplas.
Musical innovations are also found in the extant scores of zarzuelas by Sebastián Durón, who collaborated with Navas in at least one work and succeeded him as the most brilliant composer of zarzuelas in the last years of the 17th century and the first two decades of the 18th. The several zarzuelas that Durón composed for the court (with texts by José de Cañizares, Marcos de Lanuza and Antonio de Zamora) were also performed with great success in the public theatres of Madrid in the period 1710–20, although Durón was forced for political reasons into exile in France and died there in 1716. Another court musician, the highly original Antonio Literes, incorporated the traditional Spanish musical forms (tonos, tonadas, coplas, estribillos, recitados) and the stylistic ideals and affective conventions of Hidalgo, Navas and Durón into his zarzuelas of 1708–11, alongside italianate arias and recitatives. Literes also composed stage works for noble patrons, which may be why he composed so few works for the royal court and the public theatres. Literes’s zarzuela Accis y Galatea (1708), however, was a great success at court and subsequently became extremely popular in the public theatres.
In the first and second decades of the 18th century the zarzuela was transformed from a genre designed to delight princes into a genre beloved of the mixed public that attended the public theatres. This transformation came about because of political change (the War of the Spanish Succession resulted in the accession of the Bourbon dynasty to the Spanish throne), a change in royal preferences, changes in literary taste and fashion and a renewed interest on the part of Madrid’s theatre-going public for musical plays. The administrators of the public theatre discovered (through the production of works like Literes’s Accis y Galatea) that musical plays brought in substantial revenue. This also meant that violinists and oboists were suddenly in demand for the theatre orchestras – further evidence of the zarzuela’s adaptation to the demands of new musical practices, since these small orchestras had traditionally been large continuo bands built of harps and guitars. Talented female actor-singers were also newly in demand for the busy theatrical troupes. Castrato singers were not a part of the Spanish theatrical practice (they sang only in chapel) and it was traditional that serious singing roles were taken by women.
Apart from the works of Durón and Literes, few zarzuelas survive from the early 18th century, although administrative documents record their performance histories. The character of the full-blown 18th-century zarzuela, with its absorption of the mainstream pan-European operatic style (principally in mature da capo arias and italianate recitatives) and conservation of traditionally Spanish numbers (coplas, seguidillas and frequent four-voice coros, for example), characters (the graciosos) and conventions is exemplified in José Nebra’s hugely successful Viento es la dicha de Amor (first version 1743; later versions 1748 and 1752) to a text by Antonio de Zamora (who died about 1728). Nebra’s score preserves Zamora’s older libretto, except that all the song texts for the principal serious characters (Amor, Liríope, Céfiro, Ninfa) are replaced by new texts appropriate for recitative and da capo arias. In this sense Nebra’s work demonstrates the flexible, hybrid character of the zarzuela, with its admixture of typically Spanish numbers (for the comic and castizo characters) and musical forms drawn from contemporary opera seria.
The history of the zarzuela in the 18th century unfolds in an epoch characterized by the co-existence of musical styles and genres, and by the increasing separation of the court’s musical and musical-theatrical life from that of the public sphere. The preference of the Bourbon kings and their wives for Italian opera seria and Italian singers (almost entirely in private performances in the Coliseo del Buen Retiro and other royal theatres) did not find popular support in Madrid, though Italian composers and musicians had worked in the public theatres during the first half of the 18th century, providing music for comedias and zarzuelas. Operatic music was cultivated in the public theatres in Madrid in productions of texts by Metastasio, but these were adapted to the Spanish practice. The librettos were translated into Spanish, the recitative dialogues were replaced by spoken dialogue in Spanish and a number of arias were cut. These ‘operas’ were performed by all-female casts and were clearly shaped not by the aesthetic of opera seria but by the aesthetic and conventions of zarzuela.
About 1760 Spanish composers recaptured the public by deliberately and selfconsciously cultivating a recognizably ‘Spanish’ and madrileño musical style, shaping large-scale works according not to operatic convention but to the conventions developed a century earlier. This was a nationalist movement that depended to a large degree on the new influence of the prolific dramatist Ramón de la Cruz (1731–94), and the inspiration of new native or castizo forms such as the comic sainete and tonadilla, cultivated by composers such as Jacinto Valledor, Pablo Esteve and Blas de Laserna. The large-scale zarzuela burlesca El tío y la tía (1767) by Antonio Rosales, to a one-act libretto by Ramón de la Cruz, was the first important production of this new movement. In 1769 a two-act zarzuela by Antonio Rodríguez de Hita, Las labradoras de Murcia, also with text by Ramón de la Cruz, was produced in Madrid. This is the first extant zarzuela de costumbres. Its plot is not only laced through with popular humour, but is devoted to an exposition of local customs and social convention with highly castizo musical numbers. It may have served as an example to those composers and librettists who took up the cause of the zarzuela in the later 19th century. In the works of Rosales and Rodríguez de Hita there are obvious musical gestures from opera buffa and the predominant musical style is pan-European.
In the last quarter of the 18th century and the first of the 19th the zarzuela disappeared from the stages of Madrid and no new works were added to the repertory. Ramón de la Cruz wrote no zarzuela texts after about 1776, and late 18th-century composers devoted themselves to composing shorter comic works (sainetes and tonadillas) in which the emphasis was wholly on singing, with buffa arias, duets and ensembles combined with fashionable Spanish dances and castizo songs. Indeed, a number of these sainetes play the Spanish and Italian conventions and musical styles against each other in a humorous and lightly selfconscious fashion. Their arias contain sometimes exceedingly long and difficult passages of coloratura writing, and demand expertise, control and vocal range from the singers. This would seem to demonstrate that in the late 18th century the focus of musical plays for the public was on music and musical performance. Although the sainetes and tonadillas were not zarzuelas, they benefit from the legacy of the hybrid zarzuela, with its focus on lyrical songs and its selective exploitation of elements from the pan-European musical style of 18th-century opera, alongside popular Spanish songs and dances.
In the early 1800s the zarzuela was virtually forgotten; Italian opera had taken its place. When in 1832 Ramón Carnicer, Mateo Albéniz and the musicologist Baltasar Saldoni wrote a little opera in Spanish, Los enredos de un curioso, for the Madrid Conservatory, Saldoni insisted on calling it a zarzuela since it had spoken parts in Spanish; but the revival of the genre would have to wait until the mid-19th century. Among the first to try his hand at it was the Italian Basilio Basili, whose one-act pieces El novio y el concierto (1839) and El ventorillo de Crespo (1842) were billed as zarzuelas and show some Andalusian influence. While musical circles in Madrid were trying to create a truly ‘national opera’ in Spanish, other less ambitious composers revived the zarzuela tradition, especially after Rafael Hernando won great success with Colegiales y soldados at the Teatro del Instituto, Madrid, in 1849. This is usually considered the first modern zarzuela, but other pieces by Cristóbal Oudrid, Augustín Azcona, Mariano Soriano Fuertes, Sebastián Iradier and Hernando himself had already been performed with some success.
Hernando’s El duende (libretto by Luis de Olona) had over 100 performances after its première at the Teatro de Variedades, Madrid, in 1849 and encouraged other composers, including Joaquín Gaztambide, José Inzenga and Francisco Asenjo Barbieri to compose zarzuelas. These three, together with Hernando, Oudrid, Olona and the baritone Francisco L. Salas, formed in 1851 a Sociedad Artística which hired the Teatro de Circo for a season of zarzuelas. Their first production, Gaztambide’s Tribulaciones, was unsuccessful, but the venture was saved by Barbieri’s Jugar con fuego, which enhanced the composer’s standing as leader of the group. Under Barbieri’s influence the zarzuela was italianate in musical style but took the outward form of the French opéra comique. Many librettos follow the French genre closely, including those of Gaztambide’s El valle de Andorra (1852, based on Halévy’s opera) and Catalina (1854, on Meyerbeer’s L’étoile du nord), Barbieri’s Los diamantes de la corona (1854, on Auber’s opera), Inzenga’s ¡Si yo fuera rey! (1862, on Adam’s Si j’étais roi) and Martín Sánchez-Allú’s Fra Diavolo (1857). Some also use plots derived from Italian opera, such as Gaztambide’s Un día de reinado (1854, following Verdi’s Un giorno di regno) and his El juramento (1858, following Mercadante’s opera).
The effectiveness of these zarzuelas attracted composers who had at first snubbed them, the most remarkable being Pascual Emilio Arrieta, who had worked on Italian opera in Spanish for Queen Isabella II at her private theatre in the royal palace (closed after the public Teatro Real was opened in November 1850). With El dominó azul (1853, after Auber) Arrieta followed the trend of imitating French opéra comique and had great success with El grumete (1853), but it was his Marina (1855, libretto by Francisco Camprodón) which was to prove his masterpiece after being made into a Spanish opera in 1871 at the request of the Italian tenor Enrico Tamberlik.
The Sociedad Artística’s success was so great that its members (Arrieta was admitted, while Inzenga and Oudrid left when more money was required) decided to build a new theatre, the Teatro de la Zarzuela, which still exists. It opened in October 1856 but faced a severe crisis almost immediately and was always on the brink of bankruptcy, from which it was saved by occasional long-running works such as Gaztambide’s Los magyares (1857) and Barbieri’s Pan y toros (1864).
Other composers who took up the genre were Manuel Fernández Caballero (not well known until many years later), Dionisio Scarlatti (a great-grandson of Domenico Scarlatti) and Joaquín Espín y Guillén (1812–81), whose main work was Carlos Broschi (1854, Seville). In Barcelona the composers in what was there a new genre included Francesc Porcell and the Minorcan Nicolau Manent, whose La tapada del Retiro, given in 1853 at the Gran Teatre del Liceu, was a lasting success. Josep Pujadas (with Setze jutges, 1858) and José Anselmo Clavé (with L’aplec del Remei, 1858) started a new brand of zarzuela in Catalan, while Manent, the Austrian Demay de Schönbrunn and Gabriel Balart (1824–93) usually composed theirs to Spanish librettos.
During the early 1860s the zarzuela attracted a large following, and troupes of singers and musicians travelled throughout the former Spanish dominions in South and Central America and Mexico. Gaztambide, Arrieta and Barbieri were the most popular composers, and Gaztambide’s Una vieja (1860) and La conquista de Madrid (1863), together with Barbieri’s Pan y toros, the main landmarks in the zarzuela’s progress.
Zarzuelas in opéra comique style were not to everyone’s taste, however, and when the impresario Francisco Arderíus had the idea of imitating Offenbach, offering buffo zarzuelas on non-mythological subjects (beginning with El joven Telémaco, with music by José Rogel, in 1866), it met with instant approval. At the Teatro de Variedades in Madrid Arderíus’s troupe, the Bufos Madrileños, almost ousted the regular zarzuela company and spread the newer style to other cities (they visited Barcelona in the 1870s and 80s). One consequence was the introduction of translated French operetta; Offenbach’s works at first, but then Audran’s La mascotte and Lecocq’s popular pieces (especially La fille de Madame Angot) began to rival the prestige of the zarzuela.
A type of shorter zarzuela, usually in one act – the so-called género chico – developed after the revolution of 1868. Its main characteristics were extended dialogue and a relatively small amount of music; the plots were mostly set in the working-class districts of Madrid, and composers drew on such popular music as the schottische and the mazurka, which the madrileños had come to regard as part of their folklore. Against this trend some composers, notably Fernández Caballero (who scored a political and musical success with La Marsellesa in 1876) and the Valencian Ruperto Chapí, maintained the standards of the traditional ‘zarzuela grande’, even though some of their works (such as Fernández Caballero’s El dúo de la africana and Gigantes y cabezudos, set in Aragon; see illustration) belong to the género chico. A Majorcan composer, Pere Miquel Marquès (1843–1918), wrote a few works remarkable for their robust, almost operatic orchestration, among them El anillo de hierro (1878), which is still fairly well known.
The género chico’s success was unparalleled, however, and the demand for it so great that in the 1890s no fewer than 11 theatres in Madrid were entirely given over to it and more than 1500 examples were produced. Federico Chueca, Joaquín Valverde, Manuel Nieto (1844–1915) and Tomás Bretón were among the best-received composers in the género chico. Some of their works have remained popular, especially Bretón’s La verbena de la paloma (1894) and Chapí’s La revoltosa (1897), both of which are set in a typical Madrid district. Chueca and Valverde usually worked together (Valverde for the most part scoring Chueca’s musical ideas) and they wrote extremely popular works such as La gran vía (1886) and El año pasado por agua (1889). After parting with Valverde, Chueca wrote Agua, azucarillos y aguardiente (1897) and El bateo (1901), delightful sketches of lower middle-class life in old Madrid. In the same vein Tomás López Torregrosa composed El santo de la Isidra and La fiesta de San Antón (both 1898), while Jerónimo Giménez set his short and tuneful sketches El baile de Luis Alonso (1896) and La boda de Luis Alonso (1897) in a romanticized Andalusia of the 1840s. Giménez was popular because of his elegant dance music and his interest in genuine folklore and gypsy music, evident in, for example, La tempranica (1900).
In Barcelona the zarzuela in Catalan thrived, especially with Urbano Fando, whose Lo somni de l’Ignoscencia (1895) was performed more than 3000 times in its first 25 years. A more intellectual approach was taken by the modernista generation, with composers such as Enric Morera (1865–1942), who fought to create a renewed Teatre Líric Català excluding the Spanish zarzuela. In Valencia Salvador Giner and Vicent Díez-Peydró (1861–1938) wrote zarzuelas in their Valencian brand of the Catalan language.
The turn of the century almost coincided with a renewal in the ranks of zarzuela composers. The elder ones were almost all gone by 1910 and the género chico started a speedy decline, despite some late landmarks such as Chapí’s El puña de rosas (1902). The influence of Lehár and his operettas, especially Die lustige Witwe, quickly made itself felt, and the waltz soon replaced the schottische and the mazurka in a series of longer works that set typical operetta stories to lilting, delightful tunes. The first in this field, El rey que rabió, was written by Chapí as early as 1891, but the influence of the foreign operetta was mainly felt from about 1910, when Vicente Lleó scored a triumph with his suggestive and amusing La corte de faraón, while Pablo Luna started his career with Molinos de viento (1910) and confirmed it with Los cadetes de la reina (1913) and El asombro de Damasco (1916). Luna then took a somewhat different path with El niño jurío (1918), which started a fashion for including a patriotic song in every zarzuela.
Several younger composers excelled in this new type of operetta-zarzuela, especially Amadeo Vives, who also showed a bent towards opera with Euda d’Uriac (1900) and Bohemios (1904, based on Henry Murger’s famous novel). In Maruxa (1914) he made something worthwhile of an unpromising libretto set in Galicia. His remarkable operetta La generala (1912) retains its place in the repertory, as does Doña Francisquita (1923), his most popular work. José Maria Usandizaga moved further away from operetta in his verista zarzuela Las golondrinas (1914); after his death his brother transformed it into an opera.
The Valencian José Serrano was among the few composers of this period who remained faithful to some extent to the género chico. His keen feeling for Spanish folklore is evident in his most popular works, such as La reina mora (1903), Moros y cristianos (1905), La alegría del batallón (1909), La canción del olvido (1916) and, in the last years of his career, Los claveles (1929) and La dolorosa (1930). Another Valencian, Manuel Penella, was most successful in his operettas, including El gato montés (1916). He often wrote his own librettos; Don Gíl de Alcalà (1932) is set in 18th-century Mexico.
Of the composers who came to the fore in the 1920s and 30s, many chose to work in the more lengthy type of zarzuela, among them Jacinto Guerrero, whose Los gavilanes (1923) and La rosa del azafrán (1930) are influenced by operatic verismo. At the same time, some composers were trying to update the zarzuela by including new dances or dance rhythms such as the tango and the foxtrot. Francisco Alonso was able enough to succeed with mainly short zarzuelas, most of which might be counted as género chico, although they lack many of the features usually associated with that genre. Among other composers of this period were Jesús Guridi, whose Basque zarzuela El caserío (1926) shows a keen theatrical sense and who also wrote some successful operas, the Galician composer Reveriano Soutullo, whose tuneful and attractive zarzuelas, including La leyenda del beso (1924), La del soto del Parral (1927) and El último romántico (1928) were written in collaboration with Joan Vert Carbonell (1890–1931); and José Padilla, whose songs include the well-known ‘Valencia’ from his La bien amada (1925).
Madrid had been losing its hold on the zarzuela. For a number of years Barcelona became a more active centre, and some important premières took place there, including those of Rafael Millán’s La dogaresa (1920, set in medieval Venice) and El pájaro azul (1921), Fernando Díaz Giles’s El cantar del arriero (1930) and Penella’s Don Gíl de Alcalà. The great baritone Marcos Redondo settled in Barcelona in the 1920s and the finest productions and most interesting premières were to be seen in the Catalan capital. At that time a Valencian composer, Rafael Martínez Valls, became a favourite in Barcelona; his Cançó d’amor i de guerra (1926) and La legió d’honor (1930) are still the most popular zarzuelas in Catalan.
Madrid soon had a new and remarkable composer in Federico Moreno Torroba, whose Luisa Fernanda (1932), set in the Madrid of the last years of Isabella II, revived interest in Madrid stories. Moreno Torroba repeated his success with La chulapona (1934) and wrote many other zarzuelas, several of which remain in the repertory. The Basque composer Pablo Sorozábal started his long career in the 1920s; his first great success came with Katiuska (1931), and just before the Spanish Civil War he scored an even bigger one in Barcelona with La tabernera del puerto (1936).
Zarzuela suffered severely from the restrictions of the civil war and never fully adapted itself to changing times. Some composers tried to follow new trends; in Sorozábal’s Don Manolito (1942) a football match is described on the radio. Before the war several of the leading Spanish composers had tried their hands at writing zarzuelas, including Falla, Albéniz, Granados and Conrado del Campo, but after their deaths the prestige of the zarzuela declined, and among composers of quality only Sorozábal and Moreno Torroba still sought to keep the genre alive. With Moreno Torroba’s Maria Manuela (1957) the last chapter in the history of the zarzuela seems to have been written; only Manuel Moreno-Buendía, Manuel Parada and a few others have since made the occasional attempt to compose new works of this kind.
The preservation of the repertory owes much to the conductor Ataúlfo Argenta, who in the 1950s began recording many of the finest zarzuelas. His example was followed by others, and today the music of almost 100 zarzuelas is available on disc. Since the 1960s the Spanish government has tried to protect the zarzuela through publicity and radio broadcasts of the most important recordings, but the Teatro de la Zarzuela, refurbished and reopened in 1956, is now the only subsidized house in Spain which regularly includes zarzuelas in its repertory.
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A. Martín Moreno: ‘La música teatral del siglo XVII español’, La música en el Barroco, ed. E. Casares (Oviedo, 1977), 125–46
A. Martín Moreno: Salir el amor del mundo: transcripción y estudio de la zarzuela (1696) de S. Durón (Málaga, 1979)
L.K. Stein: ‘El “Manuscrito Novena”: sus textos, su contexto histórico-musical y el músico Joseph Peyró’, RdMc, iii (1980), 197–234
L.K. Stein: ‘Música existente para comedias de Calderón de la Barca’, Calderón y el teatro español del siglo de oro: Madrid 1981, ii, 1161–72
W.M. Bussey: French and Italian Influence on the Zarzuela 1700–1770 (Ann Arbor, 1982)
L.K. Stein: ‘Un manuscrito de música teatral reaparecido, Veneno es de amor la envidia’, RdMc, v (1982), 225–33
M.R. Greer, ed.: P. Calderón de la Barca: La estatua de Prometeo (Kassel, 1986) [incl. L.K. Stein: ‘La plática de los dioses: Music and the Calderonian Court Play, with a Transcription of the Songs from La estatua de Prometeo’, 13–92]
A. Martín Moreno: Historia de la música española, v: Siglo XVIII (Madrid, 1986)
M.C. de Brito: Opera in Portugal in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1989); see also review by L.K. Stein: JAMS, xliv (1991), 332–43
C. Caballero: ‘Nuevas fuentes musicales de Los celos hacen estrellas de Juan Vélez de Guevara’, Cuadernos de teatro clásico, iii (1989), 119–55
L.K. Stein: ‘Opera and the Spanish Political Agenda’, AcM, lxiii (1991), 125–67
L.K. Stein: ‘Convenciones musicales en el legado de Juan Hidalgo: el aria declamatoria como tonada persuasiva’, F. Bances Candamo y el teatro musical de su tiempo (1662–1704): Oviedo 1992, 177–217
M.S. Alvarez Martínez: José de Nebra Velasco (Zaragoza, 1993)
L.K. Stein: ‘The Iberian Peninsula’, Man & Music: the Late Baroque Era, ed. G.J. Buelow (London, 1993), 411–34
L.K. Stein: Songs of Mortals, Dialogues of the Gods: Music and Theatre in Seventeenth-Century Spain (Oxford, 1993)
L.K. Stein: ‘Spain’, Man & Music/Music and Society: the Early Baroque Era, ed. C. Price, (London, 1993), 327–48
Música y literatura en la península ibérica: Valladolid 1995 [incl. P. Bolaños and M. de los Reyes Peña: ‘Teatro español en Lisboa durante la temporada de 1724–25: la fiesta de Las nuevas armas de amor’, 13–29; L.K. Stein: ‘“Este nada dichoso género”: la zarzuela y sus convenciones’, 185–217; M.C. de Brito: ‘Relações entre o teatro, a literatura e a ópera em Portugal e no Brasil do sécolo XVIII’; J.M. Leza Cruz: ‘La zarzuela Vientos es la dicha de Amor: producciones en los teatros públicos madrileños en el siglo XVIII’, 393–405]
J.J. Carreras: ‘“Conducir a Madrid estos moldes”: producción, dramaturgia y recepción de la fiesta teatral Destinos vencen finezas (1698/99)’, RdMc, xviii (1995), 113–43
J.J. Carreras: ‘Entre la zarzuela y la ópera de corte: representaciones cortesanas en el Buen Retiro entre 1720 y 1724’, Teatro y música en España (siglo XVIII), ed. R. Kleinertz (Kassel, 1996)
J.J. Carreras: ‘“Terminare a schiaffoni”: la primera compañía de ópera italiana en Madrid (1738/39)’, Artigrama, xii (1996–7), 99–121
J.M. Leza Cruz: ‘Francesco Corradini y la introducción de la ópera en los teatros comerciales de Madrid (1731–1749)’, ibid., 123–46
G.G. Stiffon: ‘La música teatral de Nicoló Conforto: el estado de la investigación’, ibid., 147–62
J.J. Carreras: ‘From Literes to Nebra: Spanish Dramatic Music between Tradition and Modernity’, Music in Eighteenth-Century Spain (forthcoming)
L.K. Stein: ‘Zarzuela’, Diccionario de la música española e hispanoamericana, ed. E. Casares Rodicio (Madrid, 2000)
LaborD
A. Peña y Goñi: La ópera española y la música dramática en España en el siglo XIX (Madrid, 1881)
F.A. Barbieri: La zarzuela: carta a D. Pascual Millán (Madrid, 1887)
F. Pedrell: Teatro lírico español anterior al siglo XIX (La Coruña, 1897–8)
E. Cotarelo y Mori: Historia de la zarzuela, o sea El drama lírico en España (Madrid, 1934)
G. Chase: ‘Barbieri and the Spanish Zarzuela’, ML, xx (1939), 32–9
G. Chase: The Music of Spain (New York, 1941, 2/1959)
J. Subirá: Historia de la música teatral en España (Barcelona, 1945)
M. Muñoz: Historia de la zarzuela y el género chico (Madrid, 1946)
J. Deleito y Piñuela: Origen y apogeo del ‘género chico’ (Madrid, 1949)
R. Mindin: Die Zarzuela (Zürich, 1965)
A. Fernández Cid: Cien años de teatro musical en España (1875–1975) (Madrid, 1975)
J. Arnau and C.M. Gómez: Historia de la zarzuela (Madrid, 1980–81)
R. Alier and others, eds.: El libro de la zarzuela (Madrid, 1982, 2/1986 as Diccionario de la zarzuela)
R.J. Vázquez: The Quest for National Opera in Spain and the Reinvention of the Zarzuela (1808–1849) (diss., Cornell U., 1992)
E. Casares Rodicio and C. Alonso González: La música española en el siglo XIX (Oviedo, 1995)