Zarzuela

Abstract

In 1888 in Turin, Italy, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote the following about La Gran Vía (1886), one of the best-known pieces of the zarzuela repertoire: [It] is the strongest thing that I have heard and seen . . . Cenerentola [by Rossini] is a thousand times too kindhearted when compared with the Spaniards . . . Offenbach's Schöne Helena (The Beautiful Helen) coming after it was a sorry falling-off. I left. Nietzsche regarded the music by Federico Chueca (1846–1908) and Joaquín Valverde (1846–1910), and the libretto by Felipe Pérez y González (1854–1910) as among the finest operatic achievements of the nineteenth century. The grace and popular cheerfulness of the so-called revista madrileña cómico-lírica, fantástico-callejera (Madrid comic-lyric fantastic-streetwise revue) conformed both to his theory of vitalism and his radical ideas on mankind. Nietzsche's words speak of a time in which the Spanish musical theatre was thriving and securing a place within the wider European operatic repertoire. In the twenty-first century, with no new zarzuelas premiered for over fifty years, there might be a case to be made that the genre has effectively exhausted its own creative means and now remains a historical relic.

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