‘The glory of having a national music’: A Translation of and Critical Commentary on the First Two Sections of José Subirá’s ‘La tonadilla escénica: Sus obras y sus autores’ (1933)

In 1930 the Spanish scholar José Subirá published his monumental La tonadilla escénica, a 1,500-page, three-volume study of a comic music-theatrical genre popular on the public stages of Enlightenment Madrid. Recognizing the value of a shorter version for the general reader, he followed it in 1933 with a pocket-sized digest entitled La tonadilla escénica, sus obras y sus autores. This article presents a translation of the Prologue and first chapter of the latter work, still a concise, useful introduction to a genre little studied in Anglophone musicology. In an Introduction and extensive critical commentary, Subirá’s scholarship is interrogated, analysed, and situated in its complex cultural context, the fraught years leading up to the Spanish Civil War.