<html> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252"> <meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-us"> <meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft FrontPage 6.0"> <meta name="ProgId" content="FrontPage.Editor.Document"> <title>Main Heading Goes Here Subheading Goes Here</title> <bgsound src="Z%20aud%2022_22k%20GRA%2062sec%20176k.wma" loop="2"> </head> <body bgcolor="#FFFF99">     <a href="http://www.jarvisconservatory.com">Back to home page-</a> <div align="center"> <center> <table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="4" width="94%"> <tr> <td valign="bottom" colspan="3"> History of the Zarzuela</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Excerpts from  a lecture given by William Jarvis at a Zarzuela Workshop, June, 2001.</td> <td></td> <td></td> </tr> </table> </center> </div> For the beginning of the Zarzuela we go back to 1633 in Spanish history with the advent of King Philip IV who was called the Poet King. Philip IV had a hunting lodge at the edge of Madrid that he renovated  into a small palace.  Around this hunting lodge were bushes  called Zarza bushes, and his hunting lodge palace came to be known as the Palace of the Zarzuela. Incidentally these same Zarza bushes grow in profusion on the Jarvis home property in Napa, California.  Nobody wants to touch them because of the thorns, but they have a delicious blackberry fruit all during the summertime and fall.  The Poet King, Philip IV, started giving little theatrical recitals in the garden just outside of his Palace, and he had the composers and musicians come out from Madrid for this – it was the beginning of the art form called the Zarzuela which  took its name from the Palace of the Zarzuelas. This particular style of musical theater  was then to develop slowly over the next 200 years. Meanwhile, during this time when the Zarzuela was still developing,  King Philip V,  (after Philip IV there were a few other kings in between).  had a big problem with depression, so serious, he couldn’t sleep, and  he could hardly function as king. To alleviate his problem, he brought in Farinelli who was the greatest Castrato of that time in Italy; we would call him a counter tenor today.   Farinelli came to have a huge influence in the court. He did much more than just sing the same songs to the king every night after dinner to relieve his depression. He became to be in charge of the whole court music. In this capacity he brought in more music from the outside than there ever had been before or after in Spanish history. The music that he brought in was from Farinelli's home country of Italy, the composers, the performers, the operas, all being  totally Italian. Farinelli had a profound influence because he was music director all during his 20 years with King Philip V, and when Philip died, he became even more important under the succeeding king, Ferdinand VI, bringing in more composers than ever before, always Italian;  more than any other one person he helped to make Spain a cultural vassal of Italy. There were other kings who also imported music, but Farinelli had the major influence. Another  relevant time period is in the early 1800's when  Spain was occupied by France but still a cultural vassal of Italy,  Spain's own  Zarzuela was  being perfected and started to be played.  In the year of 1810, the Spanish middle class, organized to successively push Napoleon Bonaparte’s troops out of Spain. They didn’t want anymore of this French influence and  to expel the French, they organized themselves into bands of  guerillas thus originating the use of Guerilla warfare. The use of  guerillas, or in Spanish  called "Guerreros", has proliferated quite a bit since then. They were successful in getting Napoleon’s troops out of Spain and their elation led to a very strong Spanish nationalist feeling - they weren’t French anymore, they were Spanish. It was natural for them to add that they were not Italian either, and there were editorials to this effect in the newspapers.  I read an editorial written in 1840 in a Madrid newspaper that was castigating the theatre owners of Madrid for being money grubbers, thinking only of their ticket sales and nothing of the Spanish culture; they were just bringing in Italian acts that would make money, and then they would leave Spain and they would leave nothing behind. This meant that the theatre goers had no choice but to see Italian works. The government reacted to this criticism and built theatres, some four different theatres in Madrid, three in Barcelona, and several in other cities, and I found a stipulation for one such theatre, perhaps it was typical, is that no more than 25% of the works in the theatre would be Italian. This was setting the stage for the great proliferation of Spanish composers. Fortunately, the Spanish composers were ready. They had a group of exceptionally gifted composers who got together and said," we’ll meet the challenge". Let’s proliferate a Spanish culture, a Spanish opera, we will replace not only the Italian operas but the Italian theatre and we will bring the Zarzuela that we have been developing over these years to all these new theatres. The leader of this group was Barbieri. who had a way of organizing his fellow composers. One of his groups was called Los Siete Pecados Mortales or the Seven Mortal Sins. Unfortunately this close association of the artists had a couple of bad effects in the long run but in the short run they were fabulous. When one composer had trouble meeting a deadline for his opera commitment, another composer would jump in and help him. There was more than one story of a composer on his deathbed, trying to finish his last work and get it to the theatre on time and his associates coming in to finish the composition for him. The composers banded together in another self serving way by forming an organization that was later to become SGAE, the Society General of Artists and Editors;  which  grew to become the powerful organization it is today. During the 75 years, from 1850 on, the collective works of these composers developed into one of the greatest outpouring of artistic creations in the world’s history. There were about 10,000  Zarzuelas composed over this period of time of which of course some were a huge success. I did some research on a Zarzuela that we did a few years ago called La Verbena de la Paloma; in the year that it came out it immediately opened in seven different theatres in Madrid. It was soon playing abroad in over two hundred theatres. Several of these great Zarzuela successes are still around today. What is the end of the story, why are Zarzuelas considered today to be the best kept secret in the musical world and why aren’t they performed more?  I think there are three reasons that the Zarzuelas are not performed more.  First, Zarzuela performance is complicated by a fair amount of dialogue. A typical Zarzuela in its original libretto may have more spoken words than sung words. The Jarvis Conservatory productions have left out many  of these unneeded spoken words and added music so as to significantly improve the musical balance of the pieces. The second drawback,  and the principle one, is the difficulty of obtaining music from the usual sources, plus a rigorous copyright protection from the music authors.. The third reason I think the Zarzuela is not performed more is the cultural barrier between Spain and the rest of the world, this barrier being partly self imposed by Spain itself.   How about the nature of the Zarzuela itself?  It's difficult to type a Zarzuela because there are so many varieties. There’s the short Genero Chico with one act, and there’s the longer Genero Grande which is typically three acts. But the two different genres have a lot in common, mainly the type of music.. In  the very earliest days the Spanish composers got together and made a policy to incorporate the Spanish regional folk music into their compositions;  and over the years this gave their compositions a delightful Spanish flavor.  <table border="1" cellspacing="1" width="100%"> <tr> <td width="50%">     <a href="http://www.jarvisconservatory.com">Back to home page-</a></td> <td width="50%">  </td> </tr> </table> <div align="left"> <table border="0" cellspacing="1" width="100%"> <tr> <td width="50%"> </td> <td width="50%"></td> </tr> </table> </div> </body> </html>