Iberia (58 page)

 

‘I like it that way!’ Don Manolo says. ‘I don’t want some clever
hack to update the jokes or to place the action in modern
Barcelona. The zarzuela is nineteenth-century Madrid and its
charm lies in its authenticity. Leave it alone.’

 

I asked him if he enjoyed zarzuela as much today as when he
first saw it. ‘Of course! It’s engrained in my life. It’s me and I
respond to it.’

 

When I asked him what had arisen to take its place, since it was
so dated, he became angry and said flatly, ‘The zarzuela will never
be replaced by anything. In its day it was Spain, and Spain is not
replaceable.’

 

I pointed out that since zarzuela is not presented much any
more, something must have taken over the theaters which it used
to occupy. What did Don Manolo think of the modern revue?
‘Please don’t ask me even to attempt such a comparison. The real
zarzuela was music, book, setting, a bite of real life. The revue?
Beautiful girls and snappy jokes.’

 

I asked what it had been in the zarzuela that had pleased him
most, the dramatic action or the music, and he said, ‘There you
have the secret. Zarzuela was a perfect blend of each, and any that
were deficient in either have died out. I would, however, grant
that even if they alter the words too much you can still enjoy the
music.’

 

Then came the two questions which I had been wanting to ask
someone for so long: What zarzuelas had he liked as a boy? And
which of the old classics still had most life in them? Of those he
had seen when he was beginning to attend the theater two stood
out,
Molinos de viento
(Windmills) and
Los cadetes de la reina
(The Cadets of the Queen). I had not seen either, but judged from
the titles that they had played in Don Manolo’s growing up the
role that
The Student Prince
had in mine, except that the music
was better.

 

Of the classics, Don Manolo mentioned four which among
them cover the main aspects of zarzuela.
La viejecita
(The Little
Old Lady, 1897) represents about two-thirds of the plays in that
it is merely a frothy entertainment which cannot be taken seriously
except for the lilt of its music. In this case it is Brandon Thomas’
Charley’s Aunt
(1892) set to music, and is a frolic because it calls
for the hero, an infantry officer, to be played by a beautiful
soprano so that later on she can masquerade as the old lady.
Spanish theater has many roles in which actresses appear as men,
to the delight of the audience; since Spain is so essentially a man’s
country and since the honor of manhood is so stressed, audiences
find it refreshing to witness scenes in which mere girls can be
better men than the pompous males. I am sure there must be
something darkly Freudian about this, but when set to music it
is fun.

 

La revoltosa
(The Rebel, 1897) is typical of those zarzuelas which
offer a cross section of life in the Madrid streets; of the dozen best
zarzuelas, I suppose eight or nine deal with such subject matter,
so that the zarzuela could properly be said to be a product of
Madrid. This version deals with a high-spirited girl growing up
in a Madrid semi-slum and with how she defends herself from
the older men who bear down upon her while she tries to decide
what to do with the young man who wants to marry her. Some
of the music, especially the duet between Mari-Pepa and Felipe,
is of high quality.

 

Gigantes y cabezudos
(Giants and Big-headed Dwarfs, 1898)
represents the zarzuelas which were not content to mimic Madrid
life but which went afield to report on the local color of Spain’s
various regions. There are those who feel that when the zarzuela
does so wander it loses quality, but this one is something quite
special and lovely. A good translation of the title, since it refers
to figures who appear during festival, might be something like
Halloween
. The action occurs in the northeastern city of Zaragoza,
where an illiterate girl who works among the vendors in a
marketplace receives letters from her soldier-lover in Cuba. A
rascally sergeant from Andalucía makes believe that he too has
received letters from her soldier and reads them to her, inventing
a series of outrageous lies about the young man—he has married
a girl overseas, he has been killed in battle—intending to win the
girl for himself. The whole thing works out, of course, but what
endeared this zarzuela to the Spanish public was the time and
circumstance of its birth. It was the tragic year of 1898, when
Spain’s military, shot through with corruption, came face to face
with a well-disciplined opponent at Manila Bay and Cuba.
Suddenly the façade of Spanish life broke away to show the
crumbling structure beneath, and the shock would never be
forgotten. Symbolic of the trauma that jolted Spain was the fate
that overtook the hero of the Cuban War, Eloy Gonzalo, whose
statue we saw at the Rastro. After defying Yankee guns with rare
bravado he died senselessly of malaria. In that doleful year the
theatergoers of Madrid trooped out to see one more new zarzuela,
Gigantes y cabezudos
, and the first scene was the light comedy to
which they were accustomed, but then came a brief entr’acte. The
stage was empty save for a painted backdrop depicting the Río
Ebro, behind which could be seen the outline of La Seo, Zaragoza’s
unique Moorish-looking cathedral. Onto a bridge came a group
of soldiers straggling back from defeat in the New World. They
stopped, looked at their beloved cathedral and sang.

 

Their words tore at the hearts of the befuddled audience, for
they spoke of patriotism, love of home, fidelity to old beliefs. The
zarzuela swept over Spain, and choruses everywhere sang this
chant of the repatriated ones. I have seen it only twice, but when
that entr’acte curtain falls, now old and dusty, and when the
defeated soldiers reiterate their faith, something happens.

At last I look upon you, famous Ebro—

 

today you are wider and more beautiful.

 

How I wondered if I would ever see you.

 

After long absence, how happily I look upon you;

 

only on your banks can I really breathe again.

 

Once more I tread the soil of Zaragoza;

 

there is the Seo and there the Pilar.

 

For the fatherland I left you, woe is me,

 

and with longing I always thought of you there.

 

And today, mad with joy, ay madre mía, I am here.
Very bitter waters are those of the sea;

 

I learned the reason when I went away.

 

So many sorrows sail over the sea that

 

they make it bitter from so much weeping.

 

Ay, my Aragonese maid, I have not forgotten you.

 

I return to your side, full of faith,

 

and I shall nevermore leave you.

The strange thing about this chorus is that the music, which
falls into three parts, is as inventive as the words are moving. One
naturally compares it with Gounod’s ‘Soldiers’ Chorus,’ from
which it was probably copied, but the zarzuela is better. One feels
that Gounod and his librettist said, ‘Let’s have a good chorus as
the wooden soldiers come back.’ In the Spanish version a group
of defeated real men have come back to a specific city and the
difference is tremendous.

By common consent, the masterpiece of zarzuela is a work
bearing the curious three-part title

La verbena de la Paloma, o El
boticario y las chulapas y celos mal reprimidos
(The Fiesta of the

Virgin of the Dove, or The Apothecary and the Flashy Dames and
Jealousy Ill-repressed, 1894). I do not find the word

chulapa
in
any of my dictionaries; it is Madrid slang for tarts, hot numbers
or, as I indicate, flashy dames. The genesis of this satisfying work
helps explain why it is so loved by Madrileños.

There was a poet in Madrid who had such bad handwriting
that when he wrote his zarzuelas the print shop sent him, by
means of a young man who worked as type-setter, an extra set of
galleys for his corrections, and on the Eve of the Virgin of the
Dove this young man arrived at the poet’s home in foul humor.
When the latter asked what was wrong, the boy gave a distraught
account of his love affair with a girl who was ‘as precious as an
ounce of gold,’ except that she kept playing around with a dirty
old apothecary who gave her such presents as a lace shawl and a
silk dress. When the poet asked the young man what he proposed
doing about it, the latter said, ‘For one thing, I’m going to tear
the verbena apart in a way they’ll remember forever.’

The poet said later that on this clue alone he visualized a
complete zarzuela, which he dashed off in the space of a few days,
having the additional good luck to find a composer who inclined
toward grand opera. At the first performance the audience realized
that they were seeing the kind of work which comes along once
in a generation. Curtain calls lasted for half an hour, and both
the poet and the musician were carried through the streets till
dawn. The excitement has not even now subsided, for

La verbena
is accidental perfection.

It is hardly what you might expect. The scene opens with a city
character discussing aimlessly with a lecherous apothecary the
merits of various laxatives: ‘Castor oil isn’t bad if you take it in
capsules, but purgative lemonade isn’t worth a damn.’ Slowly,
speaking a wonderful Madrileño argot, the various actors wander
in, an untidy lot, some of whom appear only briefly. There is a
haunting moment as a young singer advises the crowd that since
she has no mother, do not look for her at home; her home is in
the streets. Briefly a night watchman appears, almost too drunk
to negotiate but willing to explain to two policemen the
government’s attitude on the social question. From within a
building a disembodied voice summons the watchman with the
name ‘Francisco!’ to which the latter reacts in a variety of ways,
all to the most delicate night music. Belatedly the main action is
set in motion by the apothecary, who is over seventy but who
finds pleasure in keeping two girls simultaneously, one blonde,
one brunette, and in scandalous song explains the advantages of
doing so. The two girls appear and also Julián, the young man
who loves the brunette. The girls’ aunt is a bawdy old witch with
a voice like a bullfrog which she exercises frequently. In desultory
but enchanting action the zarzuela develops, broken frequently
by songs bordering on opera, until the emotional climax is reached
in an unexpected and natural way. Susana, the brunette, and
Casta, the blonde, are on stage with their apothecary, and Julián,
without looking at Susana, begins to sing softly:

JULIAN
: Where are you going with Manila shawl? Where are
you going with Chinese dress?

 

SUSANA
: To show myself off, to see the fiesta, and afterwards
home to bed.

 

JULIAN
: And why didn’t you come with me when I begged you
to so much?

 

SUSANA
: Because I’m going to assuage in the drug store all that
you’ve made me suffer.

 

JULIAN
: And who is this lad so handsome you’re going to
carouse around with later?

 

SUSANA
: A fellow who has vergüenza, pundonor, and all a fellow
needs to have.

 

JULIAN
: And what if I just took a notion That you shouldn’t go
arm in arm with him?

 

SUSANA
: Why, I’d go with him to the fiesta anyway and then
to the bulls at Carabanchel.

 

JULIAN
: Oh, yeah?

 

SUSANA
: Yeah.

 

JULIAN
: Well, we’ll see about that right now.

The words are sung to the hesitating music of youth; Julián
becomes all young men bewildered by love, Susana is the timeless
flirt, yet there is something typically Madrid about the duet. It is
one of the highlights of the zarzuela, not pyrotechnical in its music
but perfect in its style.

What happens? Nothing much you could put your finger on.
Julián wrecks the verbena, is arrested, released on the pleas of his
neighbors and wrecks the verbena all over again. The closing
words of the zarzuela are uttered by a policeman: ‘Ladies and
gentlemen, please don’t cause any further scenes at the Fiesta of
the Dove.’

If one were to arrange in order of artistic merit the four popular
forms that appeared at the end of the last century, it would be
zarzuela, operetta, music hall and minstrel show, with little
constructive to be said for the American entry. It is strange,
therefore, that in spite of the zarzuela’s excellence it has not
traveled well to other countries. It has been too specifically
Spanish, and sometimes too Madrileño, to be appreciated abroad,
except of course in the Spanish countries of Latin America, where
it still evokes a powerful nostalgia. It is not presented much in
Spain any more, although most large cities will offer a short season
now and then, but modern young Spaniards would no more think
of bothering with zarzuela than American university students
would with a minstrel show. On the other hand, zarzuela seems
to have a vital life on records; from time to time on the
good-music radio stations in America zarzuelas are played late
at night, and if

La verbena
is offered it is worth staying up to hear.

In the years when zarzuela flourished, an attractive custom
grew up in Madrid, which is still observed. In the narrow streets
and alleys clustered throughout the district of the Teatro de la
Zarzuela were small bars specializing in tapas (hors d’oeuvres)
set before the public on long rows of dishes from which one more
or less helped himself. Today on the Calle Echegaray, named after
the dramatist who won the Nobel Prize in 1904 and whose brother
wrote zarzuelas, a taxi can barely pass because of the crowds who
come and go from the dozens of tapa bars.