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Spain  Opera  Louise K. Stein Opera was a politically charged genre in the Spanish dominions, though the mechanisms of theatrical production developed for the comedia were better suited to spoken and partly sung drama. Musicians enjoyed only low social status, and those who sang in the Hispanic theaters were professional actors and actresses who sang, rather than highly trained court virtuosi. Appreciated for their histrionic ability, theydid not cultivate the same kind of refined virtuosity sought by performers in Italy. Their singing was rooted in popular music and the tradition of the romance. Though Hispanic music (with its formal flexibility, bold contrasts, clear harmonic organization, and sensitive expression) participated in the European Baroque, the legacy of the actress-­ singers is difficult to assess because so much of their music was improvised and circulated orally. A characteristic Hispanic sound emerged from the improvisation of singers and instrumentalists in the theaters, now only barely represented in scattered written sources. Opera was not a natively Hispanic genre, so it is hardly surprising that the first opera performed in Madrid, La selva sin amor (1627), was produced by Florentine diplomats to celebrate the good health of Philip IV and promote the recently arrived stage engineer Cosimo Lotti. Because none of the Spanish court composers was familiar with opera or the new Italian stile rappresentativo, the king’s Bolognese lute player, Filippo Piccinini, was drafted under protest as the composer. The longest scenes were nevertheless composed by Bernardo Monanni, an amateur musician and secretary with the Florentine delegation.1 The poet Lope de Vega prepared a short libretto in Spanish that unfolds almost entirely in Italian poetic meters; the “coro” (a duet) that opens scene four is the only section in traditional octosyllabic Spanish verse. La selva sin amor (whose music does not survive) is an amorous pastoral eclogue with a prologue and seven scenes, probably modeled on the earliest Florentine pastoral libretti and intended primarily for a recitative setting, though it has a tighter poetic structure. Like thoseoperas, however, La selva sin amor was an elite private entertainment with a small cast of soloists (the identity of these performers and their social class are unknown). As was typical at the Spanish court, the names of the composerand singers do not appear in the later publication of Lope’s libretto, though he praised Lotti and recalled the pleasure of hearing his own verses sung.2 La selva sin amor was not a success, provoked no commentary, and failed to inspire similar productions.3 Even the experiment with recitative seems to have been forgotten when, almost thirty years later, a passionate Spanish patron, Gaspar de Haro y Guzmán, marquis de Heliche (son of the king’s first minister and political favorite , Luis Méndez de Haro), invested in musical theaterafter Philip IV’s second marriage. Heliche designed stimulating, affectively charged entertainments for the aging king and his barely adolescent bride. With the collaboration of the court poet, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, and the harpist and composer Juan Hidalgo, he produced the partly sung genres of Spanish semi-­ opera and zarzuela as elaborately musical shows with visual effects by Baccio de Bianco at the renovated Buen Retiro and Zarzuela palaces. The first mythological semi-­ opera was La fiera, el rayo y la piedra (1652) by Calderón, most of whose music is lost. Cupido’s monologue in act 2 beginning “Si el orbe de la luna” was to be sung in recitative, following the rubric “sale Cupido cantando en estilo recitativo,” and its text is in seven- and eleven-­syllable lines—rare for Spanish song-­texts but typical of Italian recitative. Several stagedirections suggest that recitative was introduced only for the conversations of the deities. This experiment with recitative was undoubtedly suggested by an influential visitor, most likely the papal legate and Roman librettist Giulio Rospigliosi.4 He is mentioned as the purveyor of operatic ideas in one of Baccio’s letters, with the caveat that “one cannot get it into the heads of these [Spanish] gentlemen that it is possible to speak in song.”5 The vocal music from the mythological semi-­ opera Las fortunas de Andrómeda y Perseo (1653) confirms that recitative was exploited to heighten the discourse of the gods but was neither Italianate nor composed by an Italian . The importance of natively Spanish theatrical conventions and musical performance practices in Madrid, even in the first century of opera’s European development, cannot be overemphasized. Rubrics in the presentation manuscript...

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