Confluencia: Revista Hispánica de Cultura y Literatura

Perhaps one of the most striking moments in the trajectory of the Golden Age comedia is captured in Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s brief foray into the world of opera, Celos aun del aire matan, his 1660 collaboration with composer Juan Hidalgo. As one of three known Spanish operas of the seventeenth century and the only one with extant music, Celos finds itself in a unique position on the brink between two traditions. As in many opera librettos, links between text and music enrich the language of both arts and supply ample material for analysis. One of the most salient features of Calderón’s text is its use of Greco-Roman mythology and the four classical elements of earth, water, air, and fire. As I will attempt to show, Calderón’s application of the four elements suggests familiarity with seventeenth-century musical theory, thereby reinforcing the symbolic importance of music in the opera.

First, a brief history of music in Golden Age theater will help to contextualize the work’s significance. Louise Stein, in her landmark study Songs of Mortals, Dialogues of the Gods, offers a timely reconception of the genre ambiguity in seventeenth-century Spanish musical drama. Stein enumerates the two conventions that drove the development of musical drama: the Spanish secular song tradition and the comedia nueva (6). Songs had been used since the origins of the comedia, and indeed before, organically placed within works and sung just as actual songs would be sung in life, contributing to the verisimilitude of the genre (27). After 1650, monarchical interest brought the focus of the comedia to court, making use of the comedia particular, masques, and other types of spectacle plays (67). Subsequently, the participation of Calderón began to change the role of music in the comedia, as he became the first dramatist to successfully combine three key elements: 1) “Italianate visual effects,” and 2) the “dramatic intensity of the comedia,” with 3) the “affective and associative potential of contemporary Spanish music” (103).

The incorporation of partially sung dialogue in recitative form sparked the transition to a new genre, which Stein dubs “Calderonian [s]emi-opera” (Songs of Mortals 126). Works such as La fiera, el rayo y la piedra (1652), Fortunas de Andrómeda y Perseo (1653), Fieras afemina amor (1670 or 1672), and La estatua de Prometeo (1670 or 1674) exhibit these transitional characteristics. The evolution of the zarzuela genre also paralleled that [End Page 86] of other musical drama developments, debuting with Calderón’s El laurel de Apolo (1657). Named for the Zarzuela palace in which many of the works were initially staged, the zarzuela was defined by a two-act structure, spoken dialogue, and a light pastoral setting (261), though the genre would continue evolving with Calderón’s literary descendants and on into its nineteenth-century apogee. Distinct from semi-opera and the zarzuela, the only seventeenth-century pieces that can be properly considered opera (with through-sung text without spoken dialogue) are La selva sin amor, a 1627 anomaly by Lope de Vega with heavy Italian influence and no known musical descendants, and two Calderón works, the one-act La púrpura de la rosa (1660) and the text in question, Celos aun del aire matan (1660). In addition to through-sung music, these operas made extensive use of the musical refrain or chorus (estribillo) to reiterate salient points in the text, often sung by an actual chorus, such as the chorus of nymphs and shepherds in Celos.

Stein offers a keen set of conclusions about Spain’s lack of opera development in comparison with France and Italy, citing the strong tradition of the comedia nueva, whose emphasis on verisimilitude made adopting the serious opera tone unlikely and for the mass audiences that formed the heart of the comedia (Songs of Mortals 188). Additionally, she observes that Madrid’s theater market had considerable difficulties in meeting the demands of opera, with private companies losing money from public performances on the whim of the king...