Music Theater and Popular Nationalism in Spain, 1880-1930

Clinton D. Young

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780807161050
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia europea

From its earliest appearance in the mid-1600s, the lyric theater form of zarzuela captivated Spanish audiences with its witty writing and lively musical scores. Clinton D. Young's Music Theater and Popular Nationalism in Spain, 1880–1930 persuasively links zarzuela's celebration of Spanish history and culture to the development of concepts of nationalism and national identity at the dawn of the twentieth century.As a weak Spanish government focused its energy on preventing a recurrence of mid-nineteenth-century political upheavals, the project of articulating a national identity occurred at the popular level, particularly in cultural venues such as the theater. Zarzuela suited this aim well, depicting the lives of everyday citizens amid the rapidly changing norms brought about by industrialization and urbanization. It also integrated regional differences into a unified vision of Spanish national identity: a zarzuela performance set in Madrid could incorporate forms of music and folk dancing native to areas of the country as far distant as Andalucía and Catalonia. A true "music of the people" (música popular), zarzuela offered its audiences an image of what a more modern Spain might look like.Zarzuela alone could not create a unified concept of Spanish identity, particularly with competition from new forms of mass culture and the rise of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship in the 1920s. Yet, as this riveting study shows, it made an indelible contribution to popular culture and nationalism. Young's history brings to life the stories, songs, and evolving contexts of a uniquely Spanish art form.

1

Theatrical and Political Revolutions in Nineteenth-Century Spain

Two revolutions occurred in Spain in 1868. The first will be familiar to everybody with even a cursory knowledge of Spanish history: the political revolution that dethroned Queen Isabella II and set off the chaotic interval known as the Revolutionary Sexenio. Between 1868 and 1874, Spain would experiment with various styles of government. Two attempts were made at enticing members of the European aristocracy into replacing the House of Bourbon as monarchs of Spain. The first attempt, which would have placed a member of the Hohenzollern family on the throne, inadvertently triggered the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, while the second enticed a member of the House of Savoy to reign in Spain as Amadeo I. He quickly abdicated, claiming that the Spanish were ungovernable. When that attempt at monarchy failed, the Spanish had a go at republican government that lasted eleven months. There were various caretaker military dictatorships, and after a politically exhausting six years, a final reversion to the Bourbon monarchy in 1874 in the person of the English-educated Alfonso XII, Isabella’s son.

The second revolution of 1868 does not appear in books on the political history of Spain, as it took place not in the corridors of power but in the Café el Recreo in Madrid. It did not involve people shooting at each other or the fall of governments; instead, it involved people finding new ways to stage plays and profit from the theater. It was the birth of a unique theatrical system that flourished in Spain in the late nineteenth century. By the 1880s it would come to be known as the teatro por horas, the “theater by hours.” The idea was simple. Rather than staging a full-length play, theaters would stage several one-act plays per evening. What made the idea revolutionary was the fact that a separate admission fee would be charged for each play, and the audience would come and go as they pleased without having to sit through the entire evening’s bill, as is common when one-act plays are normally staged. Even with lowered prices—one could hardly charge full price for a forty-minute play—the potential profits for a theater were greater than if they had simply staged a full-length work.¹

The birth of the teatro por horas was the birth of popular culture in Spain. Theaters would suddenly be responsible to a popular audience, and the survival of theatrical works would increasingly depend upon their box office appeal. One of the ways in which popular culture sought to maintain its hold on audiences and consumers was by presenting the world in a dramatic and spectacular fashion. Because of its need to attract audiences from across social boundaries, popular culture became one of the ways in which the rapidly shifting class structures of nineteenth-century Europe were portrayed and negotiated. And popular culture became one way in which people came to understand themselves, as material consumerism became a new marker of identity.² The revolution of the teatro por horas would take some time to fully change the culture of zarzuela, however. The major works of the 1870s and the 1880s consisted of what has become known as the zarzuela grande, full-length works with complex musical scores set against historical backdrops. But the zarzuela grande was running counter to the slowly developing ideas of popular culture: not only did it operate outside of the new system of the teatro por horas, there was an increasing disconnect between zarzuela and life as it was lived in Spain. Zarzuela, which had established itself as a nationalistic and essentially political genre in the 1850s, increasingly retreated from such stands after the Bourbon Restoration of the 1870s. It would be this withdrawal from the political that would allow the shorter works that developed under the teatro por horas to develop a new vision of Spanish nationalism.

Such musical nationalism would come from Spain’s capital, Madrid. On the surface, this might seem odd, since the musical capital of Spain was arguably Barcelona. The Mediterranean port city, with its extensive rail and sea transport links, had much closer connections with musical life in France and Italy than did the relatively isolated capital. Barcelona’s main opera house, the Teatre del Liceu, dates from 1838 while the Teatro Real in Madrid only opened in 1850. Barcelona was a center for choral and symphonic music, and boasts one of the most architecturally stunning concert halls in the world, the Palau de la Música Catalana—which opened in 1908 and remains one of the finest examples of Catalan modernisme. In any study of serious art music, Barcelona would have to take center stage. But outside of choral music, the musical life of Barcelona centered on Italian opera.³ In contrast, Madrid was the center of Spain’s popular theater, which featured works by Spanish authors and composers. Like the Broadway theaters of New York City, Madrid’s theaters were the epicenter of popular theatrical production. Zarzuelas premiered there and would tour the country after their initial successes. Barcelona fostered the growth of art music and high musical culture in Spain, but the heart of the popular theater was in Madrid. And that popular culture was bound up in the success of the teatro por horas.

The teatro por horas system was an outgrowth of a rapidly burgeoning theatrical culture that had begun with the economic boom of the 1850s. The number of theaters operating in Madrid rose from ten in 1850 to sixteen in 1875 to twenty-six in 1900—more than doubling the city’s theatrical capacity in a mere fifty years.⁴ In addition to formal theaters there were the salones-teatros, where the shows had modest production values (only a few actors, and perhaps only a piano to provide music) and where the profits were augmented by serving as a café. Madrid’s theatergoing audiences were also served by large multipurpose venues like the Circo Price, which, as the name implies, housed spectacles like circuses as well as theater and opera performances. The burgeoning European bourgeoisie was looking for places to spend its leisure time, and theaters were one of the many venues that catered to the newly emergent middle classes. But the bourgeois audience led to a subtle change in the subsidiary function of the theater. While the primary purpose of a theater was still to house the performances being staged, during the nineteenth century theaters lost their function as places where aristocrats went to see and be seen. Theaters evolved from being sites of sociability to being sites of economic activity.

The decline in theater as a nexus of sociability seems to have begun in Paris during the French Revolution and solidified with the increased bourgeois presence in theaters there during the 1830s.⁵ The wider bourgeois audience caused basic changes to theater construction: the number of seats increased, foyers and staircases grew in size to accommodate more spectators, cafes were often built into theaters, and private rooms were built for subscribers to relax in before performances. Improvements in lighting technology, as theaters graduated from candlelight to gaslight to electric light, allowed house lights to be lowered during the performance. These changes in lighting shifted the audience’s attention increasingly toward the stage, enhancing the theatrical illusions being portrayed there while turning one’s attention away from other audience members.⁶ All of these changes were designed to draw a paying audience into the theater. The teatro por horas was a particularly Spanish aspect of the increasing commercialization of the theater.⁷

The popularity of the teatro por horas was augmented by the introduction of another theatrical novelty to Spain. On 23 September 1868—the same week that General Juan Prim led the revolt that toppled Isabella II—the Teatro de Variedades premiered El joven Telémaco (Young Telemachus). This was the first play in the so-called género bufo, the Spanish version of what Jacques Offenbach had done at the Bouffes-Parisiens in Paris. Offenbach had used classical mythology to satirize the people and the mores of his day, and had succeeded by combining this satire with his tuneful music. The Spanish version aimed a little lower. The emphasis was not on the satire and the music, but on the physical charms of the chorus girls. Singing ability was not required as long as the prospective chorine was willing to appear half-undressed in “classical” gowns. (Most of the performers were untrained, and many were seamstresses put out of work by the rise of the sewing machine.)⁸ The shrewd political humor of Paris was replaced by slapstick and nonsensical jokes. In any event, the Bufos Madrileños (the original company set up to produce not only El joven Telémaco but Spanish translations of other Offenbach’s operettas) proved wildly popular to theatrical audiences looking for entertainment. Almost all of the pieces written in the género bufo style were short, one-act works, and they formed a vital part of the early repertory of the teatro por horas.

For the first two decades of its existence—from the late 1860s through the late 1880s—the teatro por horas was dominated by nonmusical works. While the development of the teatro por horas was based on economics and the desire to maximize profit, it is important to note that the system was predicated upon Spanish theatrical traditions that emphasized shorter plays. Beginning in the seventeenth century, Spanish theaters performed entremeses—short plays that were performed as curtain raisers or between acts of full-length plays (hence the name). Keeping the audience entertained was a necessity, as Spanish theaters catered to a specifically popular audience, much like the English theaters of the period and unlike the court theaters on the rest of the continent. The entremes was a crucial component of this system. By the eighteenth century the popular nature of Spanish theater meant that the most memorable plays being performed were shorter works. Arguably the central Spanish playwright of the eighteenth century was Ramón de la Cruz, whose plays would have a vast influence on the nineteenth-century teatro por horas system.⁹

Ramón de la Cruz specialized in a genre of play known as the sainete. The sainete is a short play, always comic, usually set among the lower classes. Its dramatic emphasis is built on depicting the customs and habits of the population. Unlike full-length plays, these short works rarely have the time or space to develop a plot or fully drawn characterizations; thus the dramatic interest in the sainete falls to the depiction of local customs and the use of language—especially colloquialisms and slang. Cruz’s works were always set in Madrid or its environs. Some of his contemporaries expanded the reach of the sainete to depict regional customs in other parts of Spain, particularly Andalucía. Notably, many of Cruz’s sainetes also featured the use of music. Cruz was the undoubted master of the sainete, and after his death in 1794 the genre underwent a decline that lasted until the rise of the teatro por horas system.¹⁰

The sainete was one of the genres that would dominate the teatro por horas system. Its short format was obviously appealing for the economics of the system, as was the fact that sainetes could usually be performed by small casts with a limited number of sets and costumes. But the genre’s emphasis on language and the depiction of everyday life also dovetailed quite nicely with the predilections of a new group of writers and journalists whom Nancy J. Membrez has dubbed the “Madrid Cómico Generation.” ¹¹ Madrid Cómico was a magazine that specialized in satirizing the news and society of the day, frequently in verse. Most of the writers who submitted their work to Madrid Cómico also wrote for the theater, and their ability to transmit a picture of society in verse was equally at home in the theater as it was on the pages of the satirical newspapers. The requirements of the sainete demanded writers with a keen ear for language, humorous jokes, and accurate depictions of everyday life. These were traits that the Madrid Cómico Generation had in abundance. The sainete was theater that was precisely keyed to the group of popular writers who made their home in Madrid during the 1860s and 1870s—figures such as Felipe Pérez y González, Javier de Burgos, and Ricardo de la Vega.

If the sainete was well situated to take part in the festive journalism of the late nineteenth century, it was also situated to take part in one of the more substantial European literary movements of the period: naturalism. On the surface, it doubtless seems a little odd to place one-act operettas into the same category as the work of Emile Zola and his compatriots. But in fact the sainete was built on much the same principles as naturalism. Both sought to portray daily life, especially daily life as lived by those classes that were not normally the subject of literature. Both rejected the tenets of high romanticism and its emphasis on style over substance. There is, of course, one major distinction between naturalism and what the sainete was doing. Naturalism sought to depict the often brutal aspect of lower-class life, usually with the goal of stimulating some sort of social change. The sainete tended to present a rather sanitized view of lower-class life; social change was hardly a part of its agenda.

Like the Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers musicals during the Great Depression, the sainete and the teatro por horas could be accused of providing light entertainment while ignoring the social realities swirling outside the theater doors. The teatro por horas was born in a time of political and social upheaval. The 1868 Revolution was more than just the removal of a monarch from the throne. It was also the first eruption of mass politics in Spain. In order to help drive Isabella II from the throne, General Juan Prim had formed an alliance with Spain’s Democratic Party—the most radical parliamentary faction of the 1850s and 1860s. The Democrats advocated a federalist republican form of government, pushing the party much further to the left than Spain’s traditionally liberal Progressive Party. The Progressives had become disenchanted with Isabella during the 1860s due to her refusal to appoint liberal ministers, but the party remained staunchly monarchist. Prim’s creation of the Progressive alliance with the Democrats in 1868 opened the way for the appearance of even more radical political groups, and the subsequent six years of upheaval politically mobilized an ever-increasing number of Spaniards.¹²

Although Prim allied himself with the Democrats, he had no intention of turning Spain into a republic. The subsequent search for a new monarch proved less than successful. Prim’s first choice, Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern, triggered the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 when Napoleon III objected to having two Prussian monarchs on his borders. The crown eventually fell to Amadeo of Savoy, the younger son of King Victor Emmanuel of Italy. Amadeo was king for a little over two years and apparently hated every minute of it. That his main supporter, Prim, was assassinated the day the new king arrived in Spain seems to have influenced Amadeo’s view that Spain was a cauldron of chaos and political discontent. He was not far wrong. The Democrats gained increased political power vis-à-vis the liberal Progressives during Amadeo’s reign. This was especially true at the local level, where they won elections in twenty provincial capitals including Barcelona and Seville. Republicanism grew as a political force, and working-class leaders were galvanized by a Congress of the First Communist International in Barcelona in June 1870. Increasingly radical ministries came to power as the Progressives were unable to come up with a workable government, while representatives of Spain’s major political parties encouraged Amadeo to abrogate the constitution. The reign of Amadeo I lasted less than three years, torpedoed by the unwillingness of Spain’s political parties to operate within a constitutional framework.

After the collapse of the Savoy monarchy, the only governmental alternative was to establish a republic. It is indicative of the chaos that ensued that the First Republic had four different presidents during its short life. The attempt to run Spain as a republic worked no better than the attempt at constitutional monarchy had. The summer of 1873 saw several risings against the central government, many of which were organized by members of the First International. To complicate matters, Spain’s ultramontane political faction, the Carlists, chose this same moment to launch a civil war against the Spanish government; the Second Carlist War would drag on into late 1874, deepening the country’s chaos. By December 1873 the First Republic had collapsed and a military dictatorship took over. In December 1874 a group of young army officers staged another pronunciamiento against the generals in charge of running the war and the government. They backed a restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in the person of Isabella’s son, Alfonso, who was then completing his education at Sandhurst Military Academy. As Alfonso XII, he returned to Spain in January 1875 while his mother remained in exile in Paris.

On the surface, it might seem as if the Bourbon Restoration of 1874 was a return to pre-1868 politics with a veneer of constitutionalism attached. Spain returned fairly smoothly to a parliamentary government with two competing parties under the control of a Bourbon monarch. There were, however, two major differences. In the 1850s the political parties had alternated in power only due to military intervention; the Restoration removed the military from the political process. This arrangement would work until 1923. The second major difference was that the primary architects of the Restoration political system, the politicians Antonio Cánovas del Castillo and Praxades Sagasta, were looking for ways to demobilize the people of Spain. The six-year interregnum had stirred up a hornet’s nest: the idea that people other than the political elites could take part in politics. The Revolutionary Sexenio had also introduced radical political ideologies like republicanism and socialism to Spain—and had even made republicanism possible (if not practicable). When structuring the political system of the Bourbon Restoration, Cánovas and Sagasta had one overriding goal: political stability. The last thing that Spain’s politicians wanted was a replay of 1868 or 1873.

The entire premise behind the Restoration government was to promote political quietism and avoid the consequences of popular political mobilization that had become evident during the Revolutionary Sexenio. Cánovas and Sagasta set up what became known as the turno pacífico (“peaceful turn”), a process by which the Conservative and Liberal Parties alternated in power on a regular basis—regardless of the demands of the electo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Overture: Theater Music and the Problem of Spanish Nationalism
• 1. Theatrical and Political Revolutions in Nineteenth-Century Spain
• 2. Urban Life on the Spanish Musical Stage
• 3. Staging History, Staging National Identity
• 4. Regenerationism, Viennese Operetta, and Spanish Nationalism
• 5. The Romance of Rural Spain and the Failure of the Restoration Settlement
• 6. Zarzuela and the Operatic Tradition
• 7. Classicism and Historicism
• Finale: Popular Music and Popular Nationalism
• Appendix: Core Zarzuelas
• A Note on the Citation of Zarzuela Libretti
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index