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The present article draws upon thirty years of recorded evidence (from the first wax cylinders made in the late nineteenth century, to the first electrical recordings of the 1920s and early 1930s) to study two modes of voice production used in Spanish zarzuela: one indebted to operatic singing, characterized by timbral modification and widespread vibrato; and another one more connected to popular forms of entertainment, based on a low-larynx position and clear enunciation. Far from constituting a rigid dichotomy, this article discusses how both modes of voice production coexisted and were combined within the general governing principle of communicating text expressively, confirming—as has been suggested by recent historiographical research—zarzuela’s status as a hybrid genre able to absorb a number of influences. The article also discusses how the former of these two modes of production became more widespread at the end of the period under study, and considers the influence of recording technologies in this process.

The Regordosa-Turull wax cylinder collection, held at the Biblioteca de Catalunya, Barcelona, is unique among early recording collections. It contains 358 cylinders recorded by the textile industrialist Ruperto Regordosa, mostly at his Barcelona home, featuring prominent Spanish and non-Spanish singers of opera and zarzuela, as well as the composer Isaac Albéniz. This article aims to establish the significance of the collection for the study both of the amateur recording culture that existed alongside commercial phonograph recordings and of performance practices in opera and zarzuela. By examining the broader characteristics of the collection and textual sources from the period, and by closely analysing some of the cylinders, this article explores how Regordosa adopted (and in some cases adapted) certain generic conventions employed in commercial recordings of the time, and what the implications of this are when considering these early recordings as documents of performance practice.

Through analysis of the zarzuela El fonógrafo ambulante (1899; music by Ruperto Chapí, libretto by Juan González), this article discusses how the arrival of recording technologies in Spain (1877–1900) was influenced by and in turn influenced discourses concerning modernity, regional difference and interregional mobility. With recent critical accounts of the early history of recording technologies having emerged mostly from the study of technologically advanced countries, this article is also a reminder of the role of cultural context: the study of the arrival of the phonograph in Spain indeed reveals how early users of recording technologies related their experiences to broader discourses of modernity and identity that had often been taken for granted elsewhere. Intended to entertain large contingents of people across a variety of social classes, El fonógrafo ambulante portrayed an aspect of late nineteenth-century life in Spain that its audiences would have been familiar with, that is, the travelling phonographs paraded through Spanish cities, towns and villages during the 1890s. The work also embodies views on sound-recording technologies which would have resonated with its audience – in accordance with zarzuela’s defense of an integrative, progressively industrialized, urban, somewhat relaxed in terms of social mores, yet still ideologically conservative Spain. In fact, whereas the arrival of a phonograph in an Andalusian village at the beginning of the zarzuela is initially presented as a potential danger to social practices, reservations are quickly overcome when it becomes clear that mobile recording technologies can make the Spanish pueblo thrive by encouraging mutual understanding between Spanish regions and ensuring the preservation of gender roles. However, El fonógrafo ambulante shies away from defending transformative uses of phonography that other, more regeneracionista sectors of the population anticipated; in doing so, it ultimately presents a sceptical view of modernity as the path to national regeneration.

This article makes an initial contribution to the largely unexplored field of historical performance practice in zarzuela by examining the earliest surviving recordings of Manuel Fernández Caballero’s Gigantes y cabezudos (1898). One of the greatest successes of the género chico subgenre of zarzuela during the early years of commercial phonography in Spain, it is also the zarzuela of which the most recordings made before 1905 have survived: nineteen, made on wax cylinders by local gabinetes fonográficos and on disc by Gramophone. Both the thriving género chico culture and its singing practices, as well as the technological, commercial, and cultural aspects of the early recording industry in Spain, are discussed to consider how recordings related to live performance in this particular context, what the value is of these recordings as documents of performance practice, and what questions they open up for further study of performance practice in zarzuela.

On 14 November 1946, the composer Manuel de Falla died in Alta Gracia, in the Argentinean province of Cordoba. He had last seen his Spanish homeland in September 1939, only five months after the end of the Spanish Civil War. Ever since his departure, music critics and journalists back in Spain had been engaging in a strategy which aimed to present Falla as sympathetic to the Francoist cause and — most importantly — as an incarnation of those values which the regime considered the very core of national identity. It is the aim of this article to analyse this strategy, which was not only a reflection of the ways in which Francoism shaped Spanishness, but also a continuation of conceptions of national identity which predate Franco. The treatment of Falla across a range of periodical publications (from the music criticism sections of newspapers to specialized music periodicals), from his departure to Argentina in September 1939 to his funeral in Cadiz on 9 January 1947, will be analysed, focusing on th...

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