Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Vives: Doña Francisquita; Torroba: Luisa Fernanda

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

Zarzuela is the popular musical theater genre of Spain, not unlike our American musical comedy. Amadeo Vives (1871-1937) was one of the most prolific of zarzuela composers. Doña Francisquita (1923) is considered his masterpiece. It was also enormously popular. In the years immediately following its premiere in Madrid, this classic work was performed at least five thousand times throughout the Spanish-speaking world. The nineteenth-century Spanish style of operetta flourished right up to the time in the 1930s of the Franco dictatorship, whose repressive regime seems to have crushed the life out of the genre. So many of the treasures of the zarzuela remained unknown internationally until the release of two musically complete recordings of Doña Francisquita, one for the Audivis Valois label, another for Sony Classical, both coming out in 1994. The Sony Classical recording benefits by the incomparable voice of superstar Mexican tenor, Placido Domingo. All the musical numbers are contained on Sony's two CDs, but next to none of the spoken dialog. This will be the third time I have broadcast Vives's full length, three-act comic opera, what the Spaniards call genero grande. I last aired the Sony Classical discs on Sunday, August 3, 2008.

Luisa Fernanda (1932), by Federico Moreno-Torroba (1891-1982), comes at the end of the zarzuela tradition. This particular work received more than a thousand performances before the Spanish civil war. Torroba's score is filled with lovely melodies and stirring dances. William Jarvis of the Jarvis Conservatory in Napa, California rendered the libretto of Luisa into English for his staged adaptation. It was recorded live in 1997 in the performance space at the Old Lisbon Winery in downtown Napa, with a cast made up of American singers. They sing in the original Spanish, but a bit of the spoken dialog is heard in Jarvis's English translation. This musically complete Luisa Fernanda is accommodated on one very generously timed compact disc. I last broadcast Luisa Fernanda on Sunday, August 9, 1998.