zarzuela/sarsuela

Zarzuela, is a Spanish lyric-dramatic genre that alternates between spoken and sung scenes, the latter incorporating operatic and popular song, as well as dance. The name derives from a Royal hunting lodge, the Palacio de la Zarzuela near Madrid, where this type of entertainment was first presented to the court.

There are two main forms of zarzuela: Baroque zarzuela, the earliest style, and Romantic zarzuela, which can be further divided into two. main sub-genres of género grande and género chico although other sub-divisions exist.

Zarzuela spread to the Spanish colonies, and many Hispanic countries - notably Cuba - developed their own traditions. There is also a strong tradition in the Philippines where it is also known as zarzuelta. Other regional and linguistic variants in Iberia include the Basque zartzuela and the Catalan sarsuela.

A masque-like musical theatre had existed in Spain since the time of Juan del Encina. The zarzuela genre was innovative in giving a dramatic function to the musical numbers, which were integrated into the argument of the work. Dances and choruses were incorporated as well as solo and ensemble numbers, all to orchestral accompaniment.

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Source(s): Tanikalang Guinto (Golden Chain) is a drama in three acts, written by Juan Abad in 1902. this was first staged at the Teatro Libertad on 7 July 1902. At the performance in Batangas, Batangas, this was banned as "seditious" on 10 May 1903. Abad was sentenced to two years imprisonment and fined $2,000. After the Supreme Court acquitted him of seditious charges this was published in Amelia Lapeña-Bonifacio, The "Seditions" Tagalog Playwrights: Early American Occupations , Manila: Zarzuela Foundation of the Philippines, 1972, and in Arthur Riggs, The Filipino Drama [1905] , Manila: Intramuros Administration, 1981.

This play is an allegory hidden in the love story of "Liwanag" and "Kaulayaw". This stressed on the rise of the spirit of independence and struggle as defended by the Filipino revolutionist from the American Government.

Not yet, rizal, not yet. Sleep not in peace:
There are a thousand waters to be spanned;
There are a thousand mountains to be crossed;
There are a thousand crosses to be borne.
Our shoulders are not strong; our sinews are
Grown flaccid with dependence, smug with ease
Under another’s wing. Rest not in peace;
Not yet, Rizal, not yet. The land has need
Of young blood-and, what younger than your own,
Forever spilled in the great name of freedom,
Forever oblate on the altar of
The free? Not you alone, Rizal. O souls
And spirits of the martyred brave, arise!
Arise and scour the land! Shed once again
Your willing blood! Infuse the vibrant red
Into our thin anaemic veins; until
We pick up your Promethean tools and, strong,
Out of the depthless matrix of your of your faith
In us, and on the silent cliffs of freedom,
We carve for all time your marmoreal dream!
Until our people, seeing, are become
Like the molave, firm, resilent, staunch,
Rising on the hillside, unafraid,
Strong in its own fibre, yes, like the molave!

My Father Goes to Court is a humorous story by Carlos Bulosan. It is perhaps the most famous one among the stories in his collection The Laughter of my Father, published in New York by Harcourt and Brace 1944, having previously appeared in The New Yorker on 13 November 1943. The story is set in a city in the Philippines. The young narrator begins by describing his large family. Though they are poor they are full of mischief and laughter. The children are all strong and healthy even though they often go hungry. In contrast, their rich neighbor’s children are thin and sickly although they are given plenty of good food, which their impoverished neighbors enjoy smelling over the fence. Consequently, the rich man brings a charge against the narrator's family for stealing the spirit of his family’s food. The absurd case goes to court, and the narrator’s father agrees to pay back the rich neighbor. He does this by collecting coins from all his friends present in his hat, then shaking the hat full of coins. Being charged to pay for the spirit of food which his family supposedly got from its smell, he maintains that the jingling of the coins is a fair equivalent. The judge rules in the poor father’s favor, and the rich man is forced to depart with no other payment than the “spirit” of the money the poor man collected.

This story, along with the others in the collection The Laughter of My Father, has a serious intent behind its humor. In fact, Bulosan was outraged by the focus on his stories’ humor. He said in response to the criticism on the book: “I am mad because when my book 'The Laughter of my Father' was published by Harcourt, Brace & Company, the critics called me ‘the manifestation of the pure Comic Spirit.’ I am not a laughing man. I am an angry man.” Unfortunately, the general consensus about these stories of Bulosan seems to be, as said Avelina Gil, that although they were "[i]ntended to be serious protest against the economic system of his time,” the stories’ “hilarious, even grotesque, situations which Bulosan treats almost like vignettes mask the satire on Filipino poverty and ignorance." L.M. Grow suggest that perhaps what accounts for Bulosan’s anger over the critics’ reaction is his anger over the mistreatment he received as a Filipino living in America, which he might have hoped to communicate through his stories. In particular, “My Father Goes to Court” fails as protest literature because the judge favors the side of the poor father, showing that the system can work for the downtrodden.

Grow observes Bulosan’s stories read like folklore. It was said that Bulosan picked up the plots for these stories from an old man in his hometown. Whether or not this is true, as seen in “My Father Goes to Court” the traditional folkloric plot found in trickster-type tales is present. This kind of plot is found in some of the Juan Tamad stories beloved in the Philippines. And so, like most folklore, it has a subtext that promotes the downtrodden in favor of the rich, but no strong protest is evident.

Zarzuela (Spanish pronunciation: [θarˈθwela]) is a Spanish lyric-dramatic genre that alternates between spoken and sung scenes, the latter incorporating operatic and popular song, as well as dance. The name derives from a Royal hunting lodge, the Palacio de la Zarzuela near Madrid, where this type of entertainment was first presented to the court.
There are two main forms of zarzuela: Baroque zarzuela (c.1630–1750), the earliest style, and Romantic zarzuela (c.1850–1950), which can be further divided into two. main sub-genres of género grande and género chico although other sub-divisions exist.
Zarzuela spread to the Spanish colonies, and many Hispanic countries – notably Cuba – developed their own traditions. There is also a strong tradition in the Philippines where it is also known as zarzuelta.[1] Other regional and linguistic variants in Spain includes the Basque zartzuela and the Catalan sarsuela.
A masque-like musical theatre had existed in Spain since the time of Juan del Encina. The zarzuela genre was innovative in giving a dramatic function to the musical numbers, which were integrated into the argument of the work. Dances and choruses were incorporated as well as solo and ensemble numbers, all to orchestral accompaniment.

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Baroque zarzuela

In 1657 at the Royal Palace of El Pardo, King Philip IV of Spain, Queen Mariana and their court attended the first performance of a new comedy by Pedro Calderón de la Barca, with music by Juan Hidalgo de Polanco. El Laurel de Apolo (The Laurels of Apollo) traditionally symbolises the birth of a new musical genre which had become known as La Zarzuela. The genre was named after the Palacio de la Zarzuela, one of the King's hunting lodges, situated in a remote countryside thick with zarzas or brambles, in what is now El Pardo.
Like Calderón de la Barca's earlier El golfo de las sirenas (The Sirens' Gulf, 1657), El Laurel de Apolo mixed mythological verse drama with operatic solos, popular songs and dances. The characters in these early, baroque zarzuelas were a mixture of gods, mythological creatures and rustic or pastoral comedy characters; Antonio de Literes's popular Acis y Galatea (1708) is yet another example. Unlike some other operatic forms, there were spoken interludes, often
in verse.

Italian influence

In 18th-century Bourbon Spain, Italian artistic style dominated in the arts, including Italian opera. Zarzuela, though still written to Spanish texts, changed to accommodate the Italian vogue. During the reign of King Charles III, political problems provoked a series of revolts against his Italian ministers; these were echoed in theatrical presentations. The older style zarzuela fell out of fashion, but popular Spanish tradition continued to manifest itself in shorter works, such as the single-scene tonadilla (or intermezzo) of which the finest literary exponent was Ramón de la Cruz. Musicians such as Antonio Rodríguez de Hita were proficient in the shorter style of works, though he also wrote a full-scale zarzuela with de la Cruz entitled Las segadoras de Vallecas (The Reapers of Vallecas, 1768). José Castel was one of several composers to write for the Teatro del Príncipe.

[edit] 19th century

In the 1850s and 1860s a group of patriotic writers and composers led by Francisco Barbieri and Joaquín Gaztambide revived the zarzuela form, seeing in it a possible release from French and Italian cultural hegemony. The elements of the work continue to be the same: sung solos and choruses, spiced with spoken scenes, and comedic songs, ensembles and dances. Costume dramas and regional variations abound, and the librettos (though often based on French originals) are rich in Spanish idioms and popular jargon.
The zarzuelas of the day included in their librettos various regionalisms and popular slang, such as that of Madrid castizos. Often, the success of a work was due to one or more songs that the public came to know and love. Despite some modifications the basic structure of the zarzuela remained the same: dialogue scenes, songs, choruses, and comic scenes generally performed by two actor-singers. The culminating masterpieces from this period were Barbieri's Pan y toros and Gaztambide's El juramento. Another notable composer from this period was Emilio Arrieta.

[edit] Romantic zarzuela

After the Glorious Revolution of 1868, the country entered a deep crisis (especially economically), which was reflected in theatre. The public could not afford high-priced theatre tickets for grandiose productions, which led to the rise of the Teatros Variedades ("variety theatres") in Madrid, with cheap tickets for one-act plays (sainetes). This "theatre of an hour" had great success and zarzuela composers took to the new formula with alacrity. Single-act zarzuelas were classified as género chico ("little genre") whilst the longer zarzuelas of three acts, lasting up to four hours, were called género grande ("grand genre"). Zarzuela grande battled on at the Teatro de la Zarzuela de Madrid, founded by Barbieri and his friends in the 1850s. A newer theatre, the Apolo, opened in 1873. At first it attempted to present the género grande, but it soon yielded to the taste and economics of the time, and became the "temple" of the more populist género chico in the late 1870s.
Musical content from this era ranges from full-scale operatic arias (romanzas) through to popular songs, and dialogue from high poetic drama to lowlife comedy characters. There are also many types of zarzuela in between the two named genres, with a variety of musical and dramatic flavours.
Many of the greatest zarzuelas were written in the 1880s and 1890s, but the form continued to adapt to new theatrical stimuli until well into the 20th century. With the onset of the Spanish Civil War, the form rapidly declined, and the last romantic zarzuelas to hold the stage were written in the 1950s.
Whilst Barbieri produced the greatest zarzuela grande in El barberillo de Lavapiés, the classic exponent of the género chico was his pupil Federico Chueca, whose La gran vía (composed with Joaquín Valverde Durán) was a cult success both in Spain and throughout Europe. Valverde's son "Quinito" Valverde was even more famous in his day than his father had been.
The musical heir of Chueca was José Serrano, whose short, one act género chico zarzuelas - notably La canción del olvido, Alma de dios and the much later Los claveles and La dolorosa - form a stylistic bridge to the more musically sophisticated zarzuelas of the 20th Century.

[edit] Zarzuela in Catalonia

While the zarzuela tradition flourished in Madrid and other Spanish cities, Catalonia developed its own zarzuela, with librettos in Catalan. The atmosphere, the plots, and the music were quite different from the model that triumphed in Madrid; the Catalan zarzuela was looking to attract a different public, the bourgeois classes. Catalan zarzuela was turned little by little into what is called, in Catalan, teatre líric català ("Catalan lyric theater"), with a personality of its own, and with modernista lyricists and composers.
In the final years of the 19th century, as modernisme emerged, one of the notable modernistas, and one of Felipe Pedrell's pupils, Amadeo Vives came onto the Barcelona scene. He contributed to the creation of the Orfeó Català in 1891, along with Lluís Millet. In spite of a success sustained over many years, his musical ambition took him to Madrid, where zarzuela had a higher profile. Vives became one of the most important zarzuela composers, with such masterpieces as Doňa Francisquita, La villana (both based on plays by Lope de Vega) and the through-written opera in zarzuela style Maruxa.

[edit] Twentieth century

In the first years of the 20th century, greater quality pieces were composed, such as Doña Francisquita by Amadeo Vives. Zarzuela was supported together with these works that, sometimes, were adapted to the Italian opera musical structure, thanks to the works of Pablo Sorozábal, Federico Moreno Torroba and Jacinto Guerrero. The zarzuela style continued to flourish, thanks to composers of the stature of Pablo Sorozábal – who reinvigorated it as a vehicle for socio-political comment – Federico Moreno Torroba, and Francisco Alonso.
However, the Spanish Civil War brought a decline of the genre, and after the war, its extinction was almost total. There were no new authors in the genre and the compositions are not renovated. There have been no significant new works created since the 1950s; the existing zarzuela repertoire is costly to produce, and many classics have been performed only sporadically in recent years, at least professionally. Furthermore, existing zarzuela is difficult and expensive to play, and is only seen sporadically, by seasons, during a few days.
The name of género ínfimo was given to the emerging form of entertainment known as revistas, a genre rising from the ashes of zarzuela: musical works similar to the zarzuela but lighter and bolder, with many scenes that were described at the time as verdes—"green"—containing sexual themes and racy double entendres. One masterpiece of the género ínfimo ("minimal" or "extremely low genre") is La corte de Faraón, by Vicente Lleó (based on the French operetta Madame Putiphar.) These revistas caught on with the public and the songs are still a part of popular culture.
From 1950, zarzuela was revivified by the invention of LP recordings. A series was released by the Alhambra Company to great success, many directed by the Spanish conductor Ataulfo Argenta. The best voices of the day, world-renowned opera singers such as Teresa Berganza, Manel Ausensi, and Pilar Lorengar, performed the leads, and choirs such as the Orfeón Donostiarra and Coro de Cantores de Madrid provided the chorus. After Argenta's death others such as Indalecio Cisneros and Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos continued in his footsteps. There were also recordings made conducted by the composers themselves, such as Pablo Sorozábal and Federico Moreno Torroba, using such great singers as Alfredo Kraus and Plácido Domingo. (Domingo's parents were themselves zarzuela singers, and he grew up working in their touring company in Mexico; zarzuela inspired him to pursue a singing career.)
In Cuba the afrocubanismo zarzuelas of Ernesto Lecuona (María la O; El cafetal), Eliseo Grenet (La virgen morena) and Gonzalo Roig (Cecilia Valdés, based on Cirilo Villaverde's classic novel) enjoyed a brief golden age of political and cultural fame, highlighting the plight of the mulata woman and other, mainly black, underclasses in Cuban society. The outstanding vedette who sang and acted in many of these productions was Rita Montaner. Mexico and the Philippines likewise had their own, politically conscious, zarzuela traditions. In the Philippines, the zarzuela has become known as sarsuwela. A variety called Zarzuela Ilocana is staged in the Ilocano dialect. [2]
Interest has been further renewed since the late 1970s as zarzuela, after the death of Francisco Franco, again found favor in Spain and elsewhere. Young people, in particular, enjoyed the lyrical music and the theatrical spectacle. Radio and television dedicated program slots to zarzuela, including a popular series of programs offered by TVE entitled Antología de la zarzuela ("Zarzuela Anthology"), based on lip syncs of the classic recordings of the 50s. Some years earlier, impresario Jose Tamayo had created a theatrical show by the same name that popularized zarzuela with several international tours.