Zarzuela - The Spanish Lyric Theatre:  A Complete Reference

THE NEED FOR AN ENGLISH LANGUAGE REFERENCE TEXT ON ZARZUELA

As early as 1977, Cincotta saw the urgent need for an English language reference text on Zarzuela. In a specialized course he was teaching at the University of Wollongong on the history of Italian opera and the relationship between literature and libretto, students were required to research the development of opera outside of Italy. When it came to Spain and its unique adaptation of the Italian favola in musica into what would become Zarzuela, and its 19th Century resurrection as a distinct genre labelled Zarzuela Moderna, very little printed material was available in English. This, despite Spain’s musical theatre being, at least over the past 150 years, one of the most vibrant in the world: Luis Iglesias de Souza catalogues approximately 40,000 titles in his four volumes(La Coruña, 1991-1996); the archives of the Instituto Complutense de Ciencias Musicales (SGAE) in Madrid contain the complete score with its accompanying libretto of 7,753 zarzuelas! In reference works published in English, Donald Jay Grout’s A Short History of Opera (Columbia, 1965) contains only 9 pages on Zarzuela out of 852. The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and The New Grove Dictionary of Opera between them have a total of approximately 30 to 40 entries on Zarzuela composers and librettists. Slonimsky’s Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians (Schirmer, 1984) does not fare much better when it comes to Zarzuela entries In Kurt Gänzl and Andrew Lamb’s Book of the Musical Theatre (Schirmer, 1989), only 23 out of a total of 1,353 pages are devoted to Spanish Zarzuela Moderna. The 23 pages include the synopses of 7 Zarzuelas and a two page discography.

Louise Stein’s excellent book on Zarzuela Antigua, Songs of Mortals, Dialogues of the Gods (Music and Theatre in Seventeenth-Century Spain (Clarendon) appears in 1993. In terms of recent publications, Andrew Lamb’s 150 Years of Popular Musical Theatre (Yale, 2000) devotes only 8 out of 380 pages to Zarzuela Moderna. The just released Zarzuela Companion (Scarecrow, 2002) by Christopher Webber is, as the title indicates, an English language handy companion to LP and CD Zarzuela recordings.

The first English language comprehensive reference book published to date on the history of Zarzuela moderna and its major composers and librettists is Cincotta’s Zarzuela - The Spanish Lyric Theatre: A Complete Reference. This 766 page academic yet very readable and well-illustrated Reference devoted entirely to Zarzuela is replete with information otherwise unavailable in English: indeed, some of it not that easy to come by even in Spanish.