Zarzuela: Spanish Operetta, American Stage (review)

Plácido Domingo once explained the odd fact that Spain, a country with a weak operatic tradition, has produced so many world-class opera singers with a reference to zarzuelas. These Spanish operettas may not quite make it to the level of "classical" or "art" music in the prestige totem pole but they rank above more plebeian types such as the Broadway musical. For one, their origins go back to court entertainment in Hapsburg Madrid. More pertinent to Domingo's explanation, zarzuela requires classically trained singers.

The present book offers an interesting study of this hybrid musical form but its title is a bit misleading. There is surprisingly little on the birthplace of zarzuela. Indeed, only one of the book's nine chapters deals with the development of the genre in Spain. The author argues that although the combination of spoken drama, music, and dance is an old Spanish practice that dates back to medieval religious autos, zarzuelas first appeared in the seventeenth century. The name comes from the royal palace where they were first performed, which in turn derived its appellation from the many zarzas (blackberry bushes) surrounding it. The first work to bear the name was written by one of the foremost poets of the Spanish Golden Age, Pedro Calderón de la Barca. The genre took its present shape, and experienced its heyday, in Madrid during the last third of the nineteenth century and the first third of the twentieth.

The "American Stage" in the title is equally restricted. Sturman devotes only a dozen pages to the zarzuela's reception in the New World. Regrettably, this does not include a discussion of Argentina, a country that with its rich economy and million-strong Spanish immigrant community became one of the main consumers of zarzuelas in the world during the early decades of the twentieth century. An oddly short chapter (seven pages) examines the reformulation of the zarzuela in another relatively affluent country with a large Spanish immigrant population: Cuba. Virtually all touring troupes stopped in the island. Cubans became zarzuela impresarios themselves, injected the genre with some Afro-Creole rhythms, and exported it to other parts of Latin America (in a manner similar, by the way, to what they did with U.S. baseball). A more accurate title would have been "Zarzuelas in New York" because that is what two-thirds of the book deals with.

In the Big Apple, too, Cubans feature prominently. The producers and directors of the two theater companies studied by Sturman are Cubans and so are the majority of the performers and the plurality of the audience even though Cubans account for only five percent of the city's Hispanic population. This seems to reflect social, racial, and age dynamics. The director of the most avant-garde company, Repertorio Español, remarked, "If people want to show they have bad taste, they tell you they like zarzuela." But this applies only to aesthetes who compare it unfavorably to grand opera. For the AZT (the average zarzuela patron that Sturman constructs from a questionnaire), attending a performance is a sign of refinement rather than of bad taste. And the AZT is considerably older than the average Hispanic in New York, more educated, significantly richer (his/her median income is twice as high as that of whites and three times as high as that of Hispanics in the city), and noticeably whiter--four traits that characterize the Cuban-American population. Tellingly, the other two most numerous national groups among the audience are Colombians and Spaniards rather than Puerto Ricans and Dominicans (who make up, after all, 60 percent and 10 percent, respectively, of the city's Hispanics). Besides this sociological analysis of the audience, the author offers a comparison of the production styles and practices of the two companies, and an examination of their financial backing, advertisement, and institutional and personal networks...