Los cantos de ida y vuelta en la ópera y la zarzuela de los siglos XIX y XXla habanera

Abstract

This work aims to make a historical and stylistic approach to the genre of the habanera, as an absolute example of the round trip songs, to specify the real degree of influence on zarzuela and opera of the 19th and 20th centuries. At the same time, consider the motivations and causes that led composers to include the habanera in their compositions, determining to what extent it affected their work as a whole. Study the presence of the habanera in zarzuela and opera, in order to analyze and define the possible stylistic currents of the genre. To determine if the introduction of the habanera in the lyrical theater of the 19th and 20th centuries is directly related to its perpetuation. Specify if the popularity of the genre motivated its inclusion in zarzuela and opera, or on the contrary its popularity was due to its incorporation in the lyrical theater. The use of the qualitative method has been key when it comes to obtaining data, interpreting it and thus managing to gather the stylistic aspects of the genre in question. The search for the bibliographic and documentary corpus is aimed at understanding and analyzing all the historical transcripts between music from one side of the Atlantic and the other, as well as the influence of this music on genres such as zarzuela and later on opera. With the investigation and handling of different primary sources such as the zarzuelas and operas scores themselves contained in the archives of the National Library of Spain, there has been an opportunity to know the features that define this "round trip" music that is made present in the lyrical musical theater of the 19th and 20th centuries. The hemerographic consultation of more than fifty journalistic headlines of the time, offers us press articles, concert reviews and representations that show the reception of the moment. In an exclusively musical field, the consultation of the Archive of the Teresa Pérez Daniel de Mayorga Foundation (Valladolid), deposited in the Joaquín Díaz Foundation from Urueña (Valladolid), as well as that of the researcher herself, also the Library of the Ernest Morató Foundation from Palafrugell (Girona), as well as the Municipal Board of Habaneras from Torrevieja. After a careful analysis of the documentary material contained in the National Library of Spain, it is observed how from its first appearances in the 1940s, the tango or habanera was present in each and every one of the creative stages of the zarzuela Spanish. It must be said that the habanera was the perfect form that the composers of the lyrical theater of the 19th and 20th centuries found to express, on the one hand, the nationalist influence that at that time the music that was practiced in Europe in the middle of the 19th century and on the other, to provide the exoticism with which the composers tried to impregnate their works in order to give identifying touches of certain places. The study of the wide habaneristic corpus inserted in the Spanish zarzuela, reveals among its conclusions the possibility of establishing a classification with four main typologies of habaneras attending to criteria of a stylistic as well as chronological nature. The introduction of the habanera in zarzuela was closely related to its significance. Possibly, if it had not been included, it would have been diluted like so many music of popular origin. The parallelism of the appearance of the first habaneras scores as such, coinciding with the first approaches that were also made from the zarzuela, lead us to think that the Spanish lyrical theater contributed greatly to the popularity of the genre.