Zarzuela has its roots in the Spanish Baroque, an artistic movement that, like few others, understood the importance of popular culture and the identity of the Spanish people in all their diversity, while remaining deeply connected to the language of memory and its meaning for each individual. Ultimately, its principal composers maintained a precise and powerful balance between the path traveled by the Spanish people at that time and their immediate context.

Since then, the genre has been influenced by a multitude of European and national artistic movements, thus becoming a genre that straddles the musical and the theatrical, capable of embracing universal themes upon which we have built our culture and, therefore, our collective memory. Few artistic movements are as valuable to our history as zarzuela, given its strength in tradition and customs, and its ceremonial nature surrounding the exercise of memory through its performances. We can all recognize ourselves in it, and zarzuela in us.

With the launch of this first edition of the 'The Zarzuela Within Me' Cycle, the aim is to strengthen society's connection to this cultural phenomenon, to implement more contemporary mechanisms that allow society to see itself reflected in a genre that defines us like no other through its deep roots, memory, and popular culture. The goal is to find intrinsic elements of zarzuela in everyday life. The cycle will analyze the answers to two key questions: Why has it become so unappealing to audiences and artists? Why doesn't it offer enough appeal to foster a deeper connection and understanding?

Monday, May 19

They intervene: Cristina Consuegra, Martha Sanz y Remedios Zafra.

In this inaugural session, we aim to lay the groundwork for strengthening society's connection to this cultural phenomenon, implementing more contemporary mechanisms that allow society to see itself reflected in a genre that defines us like no other through its deep roots, memory, and popular culture. We seek to find intrinsic elements of zarzuela in everyday life.

To this end, this first dialogue will explore the universal values ​​of the genre and showcase the unique symbolic capital of zarzuela, which is nothing less than recognizing its popularity and broad appeal through everything we hold within ourselves linked to this genre. Taking as our starting point the third and most contemporary period of zarzuela, we will reflect on the characteristics of this era and connect them to elements that define our daily lives.

Monday, May 26

Political philosophy of zarzuela: The invention of the "people". With Felix Duke,  José Carlos Ruiz y Valerio Rocco Lozano.

In an era of worrying rise in exclusionary nationalisms, of identity politics that look nostalgically to a dreamed-of past because it is unknown, what does it mean to turn our gaze back to zarzuela from the perspective of political philosophy and the philosophy of history?

Modern Spanish zarzuela (following the Italianate proliferation of late Baroque works) is a consequence of the Romantic ideal of the "springtime of the peoples": a valuable sequel on the artistic level that functions sometimes as a substitute for a non-existent national-popular power, sometimes as an ideological sedative and opiate; but which, on the other hand, is inane in the geopolitical sphere of the Europe of the great colonial Empires, in which the old neo-feudal Spain no longer has anything to do.

Therefore, between the distraction maneuver and the "instructive" invention of an anachronistic nationality, the zarzuela moves in a game of stratagems and retreats: between the yoke of the nascent commercial bourgeoisie, the alliance of landowners and military strongmen, and the latent and unsettling murmur of the lower classes. A storm that declares (that both desires and fears) the imminence of a revolution, already crushed in its infancy by our "uncivil" war.

Now, in this invention of "the People" as both objective and subjective genitive, its two meanings ultimately converge on a literally crucial point: establishing the city of Madrid as the true (and perhaps only?) political and cultural center of Spain, reducing the rest to provinces, which are themselves integrated into literally "village-like" districts. The aim is thus to revive a folklore characteristic of the people, or rather, of rural villages, with their ancestral roughness, their folksyness, and their good nature, but always with the zarzuelas (Spanish operettas) exalting the local homeland as the breeding ground for the larger nation, the former always predisposed to homage and sacrifice, as well as to the maintenance and propagation of the customs and morality of "honest people."

Now, if this were represented in all its starkness precisely now (and it should be), it would serve, by contrast, as a wake-up call to highlight Spain's insertion into a European Union tormented by its worrying Hamlet-like indecision, that of a world that claims to desire the green revolution (a democratic reflection of the rural exaltation of zarzuela) and the technological communication revolution (an economic-scientific reflection of the dreamed-of and feared social question, latent in our genre, and especially in the género chico and in the theater by the hour).

In any case, both during the Franco dictatorship, thanks to the efforts of some humble Madrid theaters such as the Proyecciones or the Maravillas, and currently, with the Teatro de la Zarzuela dedicated above all to this, its quintessential genre, it is a fact that zarzuela is experiencing a remarkable boom, despite its disadvantageous position compared to the American musical or traditional opera, which, for its part, tries to alleviate or disguise its decline by modifying and even distorting not only the original librettos, but also by cutting or adding musical fragments ad libitum.

But precisely this extravagant policy of forced aggiornamento in current opera can make a zarzuela faithful to its origins, with a worthy artistic level and a set design that avoids theatrics and attempts at "miraculous fishing" of some unknown "youth," powerfully help the expansion of a genre that, as supposedly said in Don Juan Tenorio, can exclaim, not without pride: "The dead you kill are in good health."